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Books > Science & Mathematics > Science: general issues > History of science
The subject of Christology has been a struggle for the church
from the very beginning. It has resulted in divisions, crusades,
inquisitions, persecutions, and a wide range of creeds. Each group
claims it possesses the truth-a truth revealed to them, a
particular turn on belief they alone rightly proclaim. In "And
Jacob Digged a Well," author Pastor Theodore M. Snider provides a
commentary on religion-where it's been, where it's headed, and how
it fits in the modern world. He seeks to answer this question: why
do we believe what we believe?
Snider discusses how scientific and technological discoveries
have changed not only our worldviews but also our Godviews and how
consciousness and brain research are altering the way we understand
each other and how beliefs are formed. He compiles a diverse amount
of information on topics relevant to both secular and religious
audiences, including creationism, evolution, intelligent design,
and artificial intelligence through historical, scientific,
cognitive, and psychological avenues.
And Jacob Digged a Well reminds us that "natural" may not be as
clear as we once thought. Faith in the twenty-first century needs
to look quite different from the past century.
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Moltke
(Hardcover)
F E (Frederick Ernest) 18 Whitton
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R975
Discovery Miles 9 750
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Ships in 12 - 19 working days
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The name of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is inscribed in almost every
flora and fauna published from the mid-eighteenth century onwards;
in this respect he is virtually immortal. In this book a group of
specialists argue for the need to re-centre Linnaean science and
de-centre Linnaeus the man by exploring the ideas, practices and
people connected to his taxonomic innovations. Contributors examine
the various techniques, materials and methods that originated
within the 'Linnaean workshop': paper technologies, publication
strategies, and markets for specimens. Fresh analyses of the
reception of Linnaeus's work in Paris, Koenigsberg, Edinburgh and
beyond offer a window on the local contexts of knowledge transfer,
including new perspectives on the history of anthropology and
stadial theory. The global implications and negotiated nature of
these intellectual, social and material developments are further
investigated in chapters tracing the experiences and encounters of
Linnaean travellers in Africa, Latin America and South Asia.
Through focusing on the circulation of Linnaean knowledge and
placing it within the context of eighteenth-century globalization,
authors provide innovative and important contributions to our
understanding of the early modern history of science.
Aristotle's theory of eternal continuous motion and his argument
from everlasting change and motion to the existence of an unmoved
primary cause of motion, provided in book VIII of his Physics, is
one of the most influential and persistent doctrines of ancient
Greek philosophy. Nevertheless, the exact wording of Aristotle's
discourse is doubtful and contentious at many places. The present
critical edition of Ishaq ibn Hunayn's Arabic translation (9th c.)
is supposed to replace the faulty edition by A. Badawi and aims at
contributing to the clarification of these textual difficulties by
means of a detailed collation of the Arabic text with the most
important Greek manuscripts, supported by comprehensive Greek and
Arabic glossaries.
Offering a valuable resource for medical and other historians, this
book explores the processes by which pharmacy in Britain and its
colonies separated from medicine and made the transition from trade
to profession during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When
the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain was founded in 1841,
its founders considered pharmacy to be a branch of medicine.
However, the 1852 Pharmacy Act made the exclusion of pharmacists
from the medical profession inevitable, and in 1864 the General
Medical Council decided that pharmacy legislation was best left to
pharmacists themselves. Yet across the Empire, pharmacy struggled
to establish itself as an autonomous profession, with doctors in
many colonies reluctant to surrender control over pharmacy. In this
book the author traces the professionalization of pharmacy by
exploring issues including collective action by pharmacists, the
role of the state, the passage of legislation, the extension of
education, and its separation from medicine. The author considers
the extent to which the British model of pharmacy shaped pharmacy
in the Empire, exploring the situation in the Divisions of Empire
where the 1914 British Pharmacopoeia applied: Canada, the West
Indies, the Mediterranean colonies, the colonies in West and South
Africa, India and the Eastern colonies, Australia, New Zealand, and
the Western Pacific Islands. This insightful and wide-ranging book
offers a unique history of British pharmaceutical policy and
practice within the colonial world, and provides a firm foundation
for further studies in this under-researched aspect of the history
of medicine.
The scientific work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
represents a style of learning and understanding which is largely
ignored today. The approach of modern science is largely detached,
intellectual and analytical, and it is increasingly recognized that
many of our contemporary problems stem from the resulting divorce
from nature. By contrast, Goethe's way of science pursued
understanding through the experience of the 'authentic wholeness'
of what was observed. Working with the intuitive mode of
consciousness, Goethe aimed at an encounter with the whole
phenomenon in its relationship with the observer. In his way of
seeing, rather than dividing merely in order to categorize, we
should investigate the parts of an object in order to reveal the
true nature of the whole. In this invaluable study, Henri Bortoft
examines the phenomenological and cultural roots of Goethe's ways
of science.
This book presents quantum theory as a theory based on new
relationships among matter, thought, and experimental technology,
as against those previously found in physics, relationships that
also redefine those between mathematics and physics in quantum
theory. The argument of the book is based on its title concept,
reality without realism (RWR), and in the corresponding view, the
RWR view, of quantum theory. The book considers, from this
perspective, the thinking of Bohr, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, and
Dirac, with the aim of bringing together the philosophy and history
of quantum theory. With quantum theory, the book argues, the
architecture of thought in theoretical physics was radically
changed by the irreducible role of experimental technology in the
constitution of physical phenomena, accordingly, no longer defined
independently by matter alone, as they were in classical physics or
relativity. Or so it appeared. For, quantum theory, the book
further argues, made us realize that experimental technology,
beginning with that of our bodies, irreducibly shapes all physical
phenomena, and thus makes us rethink the relationships among
matter, thought, and technology in all of physics.
This book offers the first in-depth enquiry into the origins of 135
Indigenous Australian objects acquired by the Royal Navy between
1795 and 1855 and held now by the British Museum. In response to
increasing calls for the 'decolonisation' of museums and the
restitution of ethnographic collections, the book seeks to return
knowledge of the moments, methods, and motivations whereby
Indigenous Australian objects were first collected and sent to
Britain. By structuring its discussion in terms of three key
'stages' of a typical naval voyage to Australia-departure from
British shores, arrival on the continent's coasts, and eventual
return to port-the book offers a nuanced and multifaceted
understanding of the pathways followed by these 135 objects into
the British Museum. The book offers important new understandings of
Indigenous Australian peoples' reactions to naval visitors, and
contains a wealth of original research on the provenance and
meaning of some of the world's oldest extant Indigenous Australian
object collections.
This is an original and wide-ranging account of the careers of a
close-knit group of highly influential ecologists working in
Britain from the late 1960s onwards. The book can also be read as a
history of some recent developments in ecology. One of the group,
Robert May, is a past president of the Royal Society, and the
author of what many see as the most important treatise in
theoretical ecology of the later twentieth century. That the group
flourished was due not only to May's intellectual leadership, but
also to the guiding hand of T. R. E. Southwood. Southwood ended his
career as Linacre Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford,
where he also served a term as Vice-Chancellor. Earlier, as a
professor and director of the Silwood Park campus of Imperial
College London, he brought the group together. Since it began to
coalesce at Silwood it has been named here the Silwood Circle.
Southwood promoted the interests of its members with the larger aim
of raising the profile of ecological and environmental science in
Britain. Given public anxiety over the environment and the loss of
ecosystems, his actions were well-timed.Ecology, which had been on
the scientific margins in the first half of the twentieth century,
came to be viewed as a science central to modern existence. The
book illustrates its importance to many areas. Members of the
Silwood Circle have acted as government advisors in the areas of
conservation and biodiversity, resource management, pest control,
food policy, genetically modified crops, sustainable agriculture,
international development, defence against biological weapons, and
epidemiology and infectious disease control. In recounting the
science they carried out, and how they made their careers, the book
reflects also on the role of the group, and the nature of
scientific success.
A standard view of elementary particles and forces is that they
determine everything else in the rest of physics, the whole of
chemistry, biology, geology, physiology and perhaps even human
behavior.This reductive view of physics is popular among some
physicists. Yet, there are other physicists who argue this is an
oversimplified and that the relationship of elementary particle
physics to these other domains is one of emergence. Several
objections have been raised from physics against proposals for
emergence (e.g., that genuinely emergent phenomena would violate
the standard model of elementary particle physics, or that genuine
emergence would disrupt the lawlike order physics has revealed).
Many of these objections rightly call into question typical
conceptions of emergence found in the philosophy literature. This
book explores whether physics points to a reductive or an emergent
structure of the world and proposes a physics-motivated conception
of emergence that leaves behind many of the problematic intuitions
shaping the philosophical conceptions. Examining several detailed
case studies reveal that the structure of physics and the practice
of physics research are both more interesting than is captured in
this reduction/emergence debate. The results point to stability
conditions playing a crucial though underappreciated role in the
physics of emergence. This contextual emergence has
thought-provoking consequences for physics and beyond, and will be
of interest to physics students, researchers, as well as those
interested in physics.
This volume is distinctive for its extraordinarily
interdisciplinary investigations into a little discussed topic, the
spatial imagination. It probes the exercise of the spatial
imagination in pre-modern China across five general areas:
pictorial representation, literary description, cartographic
mappings, and the intertwining of heavenly and earthly space. It
recommends that the spatial imagination in the pre-modern world
cannot adequately be captured using a linear, militarily framed
conceptualization. The scope and varying perspectives on the
spatial imagination analyzed in the volume's essays reveal a
complex range of aspects that informs how space was designed and
utilized. Due to the complexity and advanced scholarly level of the
papers, the primary readership will be other scholars and advanced
graduate students in history, history of science, geography, art
history, religious studies, literature, and, broadly, sinology.
Philoponus has been identified as the founder in dynamics of the
theory of impetus, an inner force impressed from without, which, in
its later recurrence, has been hailed as a scientific revolution.
His commentary is translated here without the previously translated
excursus, the "Corollary""on Void, "also available in this series.
Philoponus rejects Aristotle's attack on the very idea of void and
of the possibility of motion in it, even though he thinks that void
never occurs in fact. Philoponus' argument was later to be praised
by Galileo.This volume contains the first English translation of
Philoponus' commentary, as well as a detailed introduction,
extensive explanatory notes and a bibliography.
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