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The Intelligibility of Nature (Paperback)
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The Intelligibility of Nature (Paperback)
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Throughout the history of the Western world, science has possessed
an extraordinary amount of authority and prestige. Despite numerous
evolutions and revolutions, it maintains its distinction as the
knowing endeavor that explains how the natural world works and
offers insight into the meaning of the universe.
In "The Intelligibility of Nature," Peter Dear considers how
science as such has evolved and positioned itself. His intellectual
journey begins with a crucial observation: that scientific ambition
is, and has been, directed toward two distinct but frequently
conflated ends--doing and knowing. The ancient Greeks articulated
the difference between craft and understanding, and according to
Dear, that separation has survived to shape attitudes toward
science ever since.
Teasing out the tension between doing and knowing during key
episodes in the history of science--mechanical philosophy and
Newtonian gravitation; elective affinities and the chemical
revolution; enlightened natural history and taxonomy; evolutionary
biology; the dynamical theory of electromagnetism; and quantum
theory--Dear reveals how the two principles became formalized into
a single enterprise, science, that would be carried out by a new
kind of person, the scientist.
Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, "The Intelligibility of
Nature" will be essential reading for aficionados and historians of
science alike.
"Just as the body of knowledge evolves over time, so does the way
scientists view the world they are explaining. This interplay
between knowledge and mental model is the subject of Peter Dear's
book. He shows how mechanistic explanations in physics and
chemistry became ever more frequent afterthe industrial revolution,
only to be supplanted by the nihilism of quantum theory in the
social turmoil that followed the first world war. It is full of
insights into how society, culture and people's perception
interweave across biology, chemistry and physics."--Adrian Barnett,
"New Scientist"
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