The Scottish Enlightenment was a vital moment in the history of
Western civilization. As one modern admirer of Scotland cogently
wrote: "No small nation--except Greece--has ever achieved an
intellectual and cultural breakthrough of this magnitude." Placing
Isaac Newton's natural philosophy within a broad conceptual
context, Seeking Nature's Logic takes that science from Galileo to
the early nineteenth century, concentrating on Scotland during the
120 years from 1690 to 1810--a period defined by the publication of
Newton's Principia in 1687 and the death of John Robison in 1805.
Newton's work changed the course of natural philosophy, and Robison
was the most significant natural philosopher of the Scottish
Enlightenment.
As professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh University from
1774 to 1805, John Robison taught the premier science of the day at
the premier science university of the time. He discovered
experimentally that electrical and magnetic forces were, like
gravity, inverse square forces, and he wrote influential treatises
on electricity, magnetism, mechanics, and astronomy. By
articulating a particularly Scottish approach to physics, he was
the main conceptual link between Newton and those Scottish geniuses
of Victorian physics, Lord Kelvin and James Clerk Maxwell. Seeking
Nature's Logic explains the background of Robison's natural
philosophy, analyzes his own sharply shifting ideas, and places
those ideas in the context of early nineteenth-century Scottish
thought.
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