Scientific Practices in European History, 1200-1800 presents and situates a collection of extracts from both widely known texts by such figures as Copernicus, Newton, and Lavoisier, and lesser known but significant items, all chosen to provide a perspective on topics in social, cultural and intellectual history and to illuminate the concerns of the early modern period. The selection of extracts highlights the emerging technical preoccupations of this period, while the accompanying introductions and annotations make these occasionally complex works accessible to students and non-specialists. The book follows a largely chronological sequence and helps to locate scientific ideas and practices within broader European history. The primary source materials in this collection stand alone as texts in themselves, but in illustrating the scientific components of early modern societies they also make this book ideal for teachers and students of European history.

Scientific Practices in European History, 1200-1800 presents and situates a collection of extracts from both widely known texts by such figures as Copernicus, Newton, and Lavoisier, and lesser known but significant items, all chosen to provide a perspective on topics in social, cultural and intellectual history and to illuminate the concerns of the early modern period. The selection of extracts highlights the emerging technical preoccupations of this period, while the accompanying introductions and annotations make these occasionally complex works accessible to students and non-specialists. The book follows a largely chronological sequence and helps to locate scientific ideas and practices within broader European history. The primary source materials in this collection stand alone as texts in themselves, but in illustrating the scientific components of early modern societies they also make this book ideal for teachers and students of European history.

Although the Scientific Revolution has long been regarded as the beginning of modern science, there has been little consensus about its true character. While the application of mathematics to the study of the natural world has always been recognized as an important factor, the role of experiment has been less clearly understood.
Peter Dear investigates the nature of the change that occurred during this period, focusing particular attention on evolving notions of experience and how these developed into the experimental work that is at the center of modern science. He examines seventeenth-century mathematical sciences--astronomy, optics, and mechanics--not as abstract ideas, but as vital enterprises that involved practices related to both experience and experiment. Dear illuminates how mathematicians and natural philosophers of the period--Mersenne, Descartes, Pascal, Barrow, Newton, Boyle, and the Jesuits--used experience in their argumentation, and how and why these approaches changed over the course of a century. Drawing on mathematical texts and works of natural philosophy from all over Europe, he describes a process of change that was gradual, halting, sometimes contradictory--far from the sharp break with intellectual tradition implied by the term "revolution."

In this volume, seven historians of science examine the historical creation and meaning of a range of scientific textual forms from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. They consider examples from the fields of chemistry, medicine, physics, zoology, physiology, and mathematics, exposing the rich possibilities for a new, historically rooted approach to our scientific cultural heritage. Peter Dear presents the case for "taking texts seriously"-asking historians of science to confront issues and techniques moving to the forefront in a number of disciplines, and asking literary scholars and literary-minded intellectual historians not to "put science quietly to one side," or treat it as a mere source of cultural metaphors, but to understand it in terms of historically specific textual construction. The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument will interest historians, philosophers, and sociologists, as well as literary scholars concerned with science.

This heavily revised third edition of an award-winning text offers a keen insight into the development of scientific thought in early modern Europe. Including coverage of the central scientific figures of the time, including Copernicus, Kelper, Galileo, Newton and Bacon, this book provides a comprehensive overview of how the Scientific Revolution happened and why. Highlighting Europe's colonial and trade expansion in the sixteenth and 17th centuries, Peter Dear traces the revolution in scientific thought that changed the natural world from something to be contemplated into something to be used. This book is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Early Modern history, European history, history of medicine, history of science and technology and the history and philosophy of science. The first edition was the winner of the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize of the History of Science Society. New to this Edition: - Greater treatment of alchemy and associated craft activities, to reflect ongoing new scholarship - More focus on geographical issues, especially relating to Spain and its New World territories, as well as Eastern Europe, but also further afield in Islamic territories including the Ottoman Empire, and South and East Asia - New material on the themes of 'science and religion', gender and class - More extensive treatment of the relationship in this period of medicine to the various sciences and especially to new natural philosophies - Incorporation of new scholarship throughout - A whole chapter dedicated to Francis Bacon - Further discussion of the gendered elements of natural philosophy - A brand new historiographical essay

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"

This heavily revised third edition of an award-winning text offers a keen insight into the development of scientific thought in early modern Europe. Including coverage of the central scientific figures of the time, including Copernicus, Kelper, Galileo, Newton and Bacon, this book provides a comprehensive overview of how the Scientific Revolution happened and why. Highlighting Europe's colonial and trade expansion in the sixteenth and 17th centuries, Peter Dear traces the revolution in scientific thought that changed the natural world from something to be contemplated into something to be used. This book is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Early Modern history, European history, history of medicine, history of science and technology and the history and philosophy of science. The first edition was the winner of the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize of the History of Science Society. New to this Edition: - Greater treatment of alchemy and associated craft activities, to reflect ongoing new scholarship - More focus on geographical issues, especially relating to Spain and its New World territories, as well as Eastern Europe, but also further afield in Islamic territories including the Ottoman Empire, and South and East Asia - New material on the themes of 'science and religion', gender and class - More extensive treatment of the relationship in this period of medicine to the various sciences and especially to new natural philosophies - Incorporation of new scholarship throughout - A whole chapter dedicated to Francis Bacon - Further discussion of the gendered elements of natural philosophy - A brand new historiographical essay