William Whewell, a Composite Portrait PDF Download

Author: Menachem Fisch
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
This collection of essays examines the life of William Whewell, a widely influential figure in Victorian intellectual culture. The contributors, all recognized authorities in the fields of history, history of science, and philosophy, examine Whewell's contributions to such diverse areas as moral philosophy, mineralogy, architecture, the politics of education, physics, engineering, and theology. A wide-ranging study, the volume makes an important contribution to our understanding of Victorian intellectual life and its aftermath.

Author: Michael S. Reidy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226709337
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the British sought to master the physical properties of the oceans; in the second half, they lorded over large portions of the oceans’ outer rim. The dominance of Her Majesty’s navy was due in no small part to collaboration between the British Admiralty, the maritime community, and the scientific elite. Together, they transformed the vast emptiness of the ocean into an ordered and bounded grid. In the process, the modern scientist emerged. Science itself expanded from a limited and local undertaking receiving parsimonious state support to worldwide and relatively well financed research involving a hierarchy of practitioners. Analyzing the economic, political, social, and scientific changes on which the British sailed to power, Tides of History shows how the British Admiralty collaborated closely not only with scholars, such as William Whewell, but also with the maritime community —sailors, local tide table makers, dockyard officials, and harbormasters—in order to systematize knowledge of the world’s oceans, coasts, ports, and estuaries. As Michael S. Reidy points out, Britain’s security and prosperity as a maritime nation depended on its ability to maneuver through the oceans and dominate coasts and channels. The practice of science and the rise of the scientist became inextricably linked to the process of European expansion.

Author: Lukas M. Verburgt
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822991527
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 563

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Book Description
William Whewell, the famous master of Trinity College in Cambridge, was a central figure in nineteenth-century British scientific culture and one of the last great polymaths. His influential work ranged from history and philosophy of science, education, architecture, mineralogy, and political economy to mathematics, engineering, natural theology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy. Among his many gifts to science was his role as cofounder and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and his wordsmithing; he coined the terms scientist, physicist, linguistics, and electrode. While he was himself an opponent of evolution through natural selection, Whewell’s most famous works, including his Bridgewater Treatise (1833) and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), played a formative role in Charles Darwin’s creation of the theory of evolution. William Whewell: Victorian Polymath reexamines the whole of Whewell’s oeuvre, as well as the wide range and internal unity of his many polymathic endeavors, placing him within the early Victorian intellectual landscape and highlighting his exchanges with other important figures of the period, such as John Herschel, Charles Lyell, and Robert Peel. Bringing together a group of eminent and emergent scholars, the volume explores all major aspects of Whewell’s reform project and its legacy, both in the sciences and the humanities, in the Victorian era and beyond.

Author: Max Saunders
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191614734
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description
I am aware that, once my pen intervenes, I can make whatever I like out of what I was.' Paul Valéry, Moi. Modernism is often characterized as a movement of impersonality; a rejection of auto/biography. But most of the major works of European modernism and postmodernism engage in very profound and central ways with questions about life-writing. Max Saunders explores the ways in which modern writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life-writing - biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal - increasingly for the purposes of fiction. He identifies a wave of new hybrid forms from the late nineteenth century and uses the term 'autobiografiction' - discovered in a surprisingly early essay of 1906 - to provide a fresh perspective on turn-of-the-century literature, and to propose a radically new literary history of Modernism. Saunders offers a taxonomy of the extraordinary variety of experiments with life-writing, demonstrating how they arose in the nineteenth century as the pressures of secularization and psychological theory disturbed the categories of biography and autobiography, in works by authors such as Pater, Ruskin, Proust, 'Mark Rutherford', George Gissing, and A. C. Benson. He goes on to look at writers experimenting further with autobiografiction as Impressionism turns into Modernism, juxtaposing detailed and vivacious readings of key Modernist texts by Joyce, Stein, Pound, and Woolf, with explorations of the work of other authors - including H. G. Wells, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and Wyndham Lewis - whose experiments with life-writing forms are no less striking. The book concludes with a consideration of the afterlife of these fascinating experiments in the postmodern literature of Nabokov, Lessing, and Byatt. Self Impression sheds light on a number of significant but under-theorized issues; the meanings of 'autobiographical', the generic implications of literary autobiography, and the intriguing relation between autobiography and fiction in the period.

Author: A.S. Weber
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 9781551111650
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
Nineteenth-Century Science is a science anthology which provides over 30 selections from original 19th-century scientific monographs, textbooks and articles written by such authors as Charles Darwin, Mary Somerville, J.W. Goethe, John Dalton, Charles Lyell and Hermann von Helmholtz. The volume surveys scientific discovery and thought from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of evolution of 1809 to the isolation of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898. Each selection opens with a biographical introduction, situating each scientist and discovery within the context of history and culture of the period. Each entry is also followed by a list of further suggested reading on the topic. A broad range of technical and popular material has been included, from Mendeleev’s detailed description of the periodic table to Faraday’s highly accessible lecture for young people on the chemistry of a burning candle. The anthology will be of interest to the general reader who would like to explore in detail the scientific, cultural, and intellectual development of the nineteenth-century, as well as to students and teachers who specialize in the science, literature, history, or sociology of the period. The book provides examples from all the disciplines of western science-chemistry, physics, medicine, astronomy, biology, evolutionary theory, etc. The majority of the entries consist of complete, unabridged journal articles or book chapters from original 19th-century scientific texts.

Author: Joseph Packer
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498513026
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Alien Life and Human Purpose: A Rhetorical Examination through History provides a rhetorical examination of the way major historical figures connect their arguments for the absence of alien life, or “unity,” to their philosophical, religious, and ethical agendas. Although the unity myth has often existed in the background of society, shaping institutions and values, during periods where relativism gained prominence, its opponents actively wielded the unity myth as a response; Plato used the unity myth against the sophists, Anglican theologian and philosopher William Whewell against the utilitarians, co-discoverer of evolution Alfred Russell Wallace against the social Darwinists, university professors Frank J. Tipler and John D. Barrow against the postmodernists, etc. These individuals presented scientific defenses of unity and then used the “fact” of unity to claim the universe is teleological, knowable, and ordered, rather than chaotic and relativistic. This book argues that unity and its complimentary mythic function have played an important role in shaping values throughout history and more importantly continue to do so today.

Author: Kai Erikson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847685097
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
All of the essays are by authors whose sociological vision has had a profound impact on our culture.

Author: Amy Woodson-Boulton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135153758X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
Providing a comprehensive interdisciplinary assessment, and with a particular focus on expressions of tension and anxiety about modernity, this collection examines visual culture in nineteenth-century Europe as it attempted to redefine itself in the face of social change and new technologies. Contributing scholars from the fields of history, art, literature and the history of science investigate the role of visual representation and the dominance of the image by looking at changing ideas expressed in representations of science, technology, politics, and culture in advertising, art, periodicals, and novels. They investigate how, during the period, new emphasis was placed on the visual with emerging forms of mass communication?photography, lithography, newspapers, advertising, and cinema?while older forms as varied as poetry, the novel, painting, interior decoration, and architecture became transformed. The volume includes investigations into new innovations and scientific development such as the steam engine, transportation and engineering, the microscope, "spirit photography," and the orrery, as well as how this new technology is reproduced in illustrated periodicals. The essays also look at more traditional forms of creative expression to show that the same concerns and anxieties about science, technology and the changing perceptions of the natural world can be seen in the art of Armand Guillaumin, Auguste Rodin, Gustave Caillebotte, and Camille Pissarro, in colonial nineteenth-century novels, in design manuals, in museums, and in the decorations of domestic interior spaces. Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830-1914 offers a thorough exploration of both the nature of modernity, and the nature of the visual.

Author: M. Heidelberger
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401717850
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 635

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Book Description
This volume includes recent contributions to the philosophy of science from a historical point of view and of the highest topicality: the range of the topics covers all fields in the philosophy of the science provided by authors from around the world focusing on ancient, modern and contemporary periods in the development of the science philosophy. This proceedings is for the scientific community and students at graduate level as well as postdocs in this interdisciplinary field of research.

Author: Iwan Rhys Morus
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691059525
Category : Electricity
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Londoners were enthralled by a strange fluid called electricity. In examining this period, Iwan Morus moves beyond the conventional focus on the celebrated Michael Faraday to discuss other electrical experimenters, who aspired to spectacular public displays of their discoveries. Revealing connections among such diverse fields as scientific lecturing, laboratory research, telegraphic communication, industrial electroplating, patent conventions, and innovative medical therapies, Morus also shows how electrical culture was integrated into a new machine-dominated, consumer society. He sees the history of science as part of the history of production, and emphasizes the labor and material resources needed to make electricity work. Frankenstein's Children explains that Faraday, with his colleagues at the Royal Society and the Royal Institution, looked at science as the province of a highly trained elite, who presented their abstract picture of nature only to select groups. The book contrasts Faraday's views with those of other practitioners, to whom science was a practical, skill-based activity open to all. In venues such as the Galleries of Practical Science, electrical phenomena were presented to a public less distinguished but no less enthusiastic and curious than Faraday's audiences. William Sturgeon, for instance, emphasized building apparatus and exhibiting electrical phenomena, while chemists, instrument-makers, and popular lecturers supported the London Electrical Society. These previously little studied "electricians" contributed much to the birth of "Frankenstein's children"--the not completely benign effects of electricity on a new consumer world. Originally published in 1998. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.