|
Showing 1 - 9 of
9 matches in All Departments
Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value
and propriety of experimental methods between two major
seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the
political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic
experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical
philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at
stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the
air-pump to the intellectual integrity of the knowledge it might
yield. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing
knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political
division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that
facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that
gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that
everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and
viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an
exclusive guild. The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the
Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of
science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific
revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts,
interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new
political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their
ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits,
rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they
argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather
than what they said. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the
confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding
what was at stake in the early history of scientific
experimentation. They describe the protagonists' divergent views of
natural knowledge, and situate the Hobbes-Boyle disputes within
contemporary debates over the role of intellectuals in public life
and the problems of social order and assent in Restoration England.
In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its
social context were understood when this book was first published,
and how the study of the history of science has changed since then.
Experiment is widely regarded as the most distinctive feature of
natural science and essential to the way scientists find out about
the world. Yet there has been little study of the way scientists
actually make and use experiments. The Uses of Experiment fills
this gap in our knowledge about how science is practised.
Presenting 14 original case studies of important and often famous
experiments, the book asks the questions: What tools do
experimenters use? How do scientists argue from experiments? What
happens when an experiment is challenged? How do scientists check
that their experiments are working? Are there differences between
experiments in the physical sciences and technology? Leading
scholars in the fields of history, sociology and philosophy of
science consider topics such as the interaction of experiment;
instruments and theory; accuracy and reliability as hallmarks of
experiment in science and technology; realising new phenomena; the
believability of experiments and the sort of knowledge they
produce; and the wider contexts on which experimentalists draw to
develop and win support for their work. Drawing on examples as
diverse as Galilean mechanics, Victorian experiments on
electricity, experiments on cloud formation, and testing of nuclear
missiles, a new view of experiment emerges. This view emphasises
that experiments always involve choice, tactics and strategy in
persuading audiences that Nature resembles the picture
experimenters create.
Individually excellent and scholarly essays... most illuminating
and thought-provoking. A conspicuous feature of the collection is
the heterogeneity of the scientific topics discussed.' ENGLISH
HISTORICAL REVIEW Essential reading for all students of Hooke and
of the context of Restoration science.' Stephen Pumfrey BRITISH JNL
FOR HISTORY OF SCIENCERobert Hooke (1635--1703) is best known for
his Micrographia, which combined an exposition of the findings of
the microscopewith speculations on a variety of scientific topics.
He also made major contributions to an astonishing range of
subjects, from pneumatics to geology. Equally important was his
ingenuity and skill in inventing and refining scientific
instruments, clocks and other technological devices.
Born out of a major international dialogue held at the Fondazione
Giorgio Cini in Venice, Italy, this collection of essays presents
innovative and provocative arguments about the claims of universal
knowledge schemes and the different aesthetic and material forms in
which such claims have been made and executed. Contributors take a
close look at everything from religious pilgrimages, museums, and
maps of the world, to search engines and automated GPS. Current
obsessions in information technology, communications theory, and
digital culture often concern the value and possibility of a grand
accumulation of universally accessible forms of knowledge: total
libraries, open data bases, ubiquitous computing, and 'smart'
technologies. These obsessions have important social and
philosophical origins, and they raise profound questions about the
very nature of knowledge and its organization. This volume's
contributors draw on the histories of maps and of encyclopedias,
worldviews and visionary collections, to make sense of the crucial
relation between the way the world is known and how it might be
displayed and transformed.
Born out of a major international dialogue held at the Fondazione
Giorgio Cini in Venice, Italy, this collection of essays presents
innovative and provocative arguments about the claims of universal
knowledge schemes and the different aesthetic and material forms in
which such claims have been made and executed. Contributors take a
close look at everything from religious pilgrimages, museums, and
maps of the world, to search engines and automated GPS. Current
obsessions in information technology, communications theory, and
digital culture often concern the value and possibility of a grand
accumulation of universally accessible forms of knowledge: total
libraries, open data bases, ubiquitous computing, and 'smart'
technologies. These obsessions have important social and
philosophical origins, and they raise profound questions about the
very nature of knowledge and its organization. This volume's
contributors draw on the histories of maps and of encyclopedias,
worldviews and visionary collections, to make sense of the crucial
relation between the way the world is known and how it might be
displayed and transformed.
In this book the eighteenth century Enlightenment receives an
important reassessment, using an astonishing range of materials and
objects drawn from Europe and beyond, including artefacts from
India and China, West Africa and Polynesia. A series of
authoritative essays written by experts in the field explores the
full range of material culture in the long eighteenth century,
raising crucial questions about notions of property and invention,
homely and commercial lives. The book also includes a series of
well-illustrated exhibits, a startling and provocative assemblage
of objects from the Enlightenment world, each accompanied by expert
commentaries. The collection of essays and exhibits is the result
of collaborative debate by scholars from Europe and north America,
who have together worked on the cross-disciplinary importance of
material history in making sense of how past society was
fundamentally transformed through the world of goods.
Radically reorienting our understanding of the Enlightenment, this
book explores the complex relations between "enlightened" values
and the making of scientific knowledge. Here monsters and automata,
barometers and botanical gardens, polite academies and boisterous
clubs are all given their due place in the landscape of enlightened
Europe.
The contributors examine the production of new disciplines through
work with instruments and techniques; consider how institutions of
public taste and conversation helped provide a common frame for the
study of human and nonhuman natures; and explore the regional
operations of scientific culture at the geographical fringes of
Europe.
Implicated in the rise of both fascism and liberal secularism, the
moral and political values that shaped the Enlightenment remain
controversial today. Through careful scrutiny of how these values
influenced and were influenced by the concrete practices of its
sciences, this book gives us an entirely new sense of the
Enlightenment.
|
You may like...
Aladdin
Robin Williams, Scott Weinger, …
Blu-ray disc
R206
Discovery Miles 2 060
|