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Science in Culture (Paperback)
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Science in Culture (Paperback)
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Twenty-five years ago, Gerald Holton's Thematic Origins of
Scientific Thought introduced a wide audience to his ideas. Holton
argued that from ancient times to the modern period, an astonishing
feature of innovative scientific work was its ability to hold,
simultaneously, deep and opposite commitments of the most
fundamental sort. Over the course of Holton's career, he embraced
both the humanities and the sciences. Given this background, it is
fitting that the explorations assembled in this volume reflect both
individually and collectively Holton's dual roots.
In the opening essay, Holton sums up his long engagement with
Einstein and his thematic commitment to unity. The next two essays
address this concern. In historicized form, Lorraine Daston returns
the question of the scientific imagination to the Enlightenment
period when both sciences and art feared imagination. Daston argues
that the split whereby imagination was valued in the arts and
loathed in the sciences is a nineteenth-century divide. James
Ackerman on Leonardo da Vinci meshes perfectly with Daston's
account, showing a form of imaginative intervention where it is
irrelevant to draw analogies between art and science. Historians of
religion Wendy Doniger and Gregory Spinner pursue the imagination
into the bedroom with literary-theological representations.
Science, culture, and the imagination also intersect with biologist
Edward Wilson and physicist Steven Weinberg. Both tackle the big
question of the unity of knowledge and worldviews from a scientific
perspective while art historian Ernst Gombrich does the same from
the perspective of art history. To emphasize the nitty-gritty of
scientific practice, chemists Bretislav Fredrich and Dudley
Herschback provide a remarkable historical tour at the boundary of
chemistry and physics. In the concluding essay, historian of
education Patricia Albjerg Graham addresses pedagogy head-on.
In these various reflections on science, art, literature,
philosophy, and education, this volume gives us a view in common: a
deep and abiding respect for Gerald Holton's contribution to our
understanding of science in culture.
Peter Galison is Mallinckrodt Professor of History of Science and
of physics at Harvard University. Stephen R. Graubard is editor of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and its journal,
Daedalus, and professor of history emeritus at Brown University.
Everett Mendelsohn is director of the History of Science Program at
Harvard University.
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