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Science in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Istanbul, Harun Küçük argues, was without leisure, a phenomenon spurred by the hyperinflation a century earlier when scientific texts all but disappeared from the college curriculum and inflation reduced the wages of professors to one-tenth of what they were in the sixteenth century. It was during this tumultuous period that philosophy and theory, the more leisurely aspects of naturalism—and the pursuit of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake”—vanished altogether from the city. But rather than put an end to science in Istanbul, this economic crisis was transformative, turning science into a practical matter, into something one learned th...
Eighteen expert researchers have come together to provide original articles and new perspectives on transformation throughout Ottoman history, in order to honor the life’s work of Metin Kunt. Kunt’s work revolutionized our understanding of change in Ottoman political, social and cultural history in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. This new collection focuses on the contributions of key players in these fields and includes chapters on Ottoman artisans in a changing political context, Ottoman chief scribes and the rhetorics of political survival in the 17th century, and empiricism in the Ottoman Empire. Contributors are Antonis Anastasopoulos, Iris Agmon, Tülay Artan, Karl K. Barbir, Fatih Bayram, Suraiya Faroqhi, Cornell H. Fleischer, Pál Fodor, Mehmet Kalpaklı, Cemil Koçak, B. Harun Küçük, Aslı Niyazioğlu, Mehmet Öz, Kaya Şahin, Derin Terzioğlu, Ekin Tuşalp-Atiyas, Christine Woodhead, N. Zeynep Yelçe, Elizabeth A. Zachariadou.
Translating Early Modern Science explores the essential role translators played in a time when the scientific community used Latin and vernacular European languages side-by-side. This interdisciplinary volume illustrates how translators were mediators, agents, and interpreters of scientific knowledge.
The debate between science and religion is never out of the news: emotions run high, fuelled by polemical bestsellers like The God Delusion and, at the other end of the spectrum, high-profile campaigns to teach "Intelligent Design" in schools. Yet there is much more to the debate than the clash of these extremes. As Thomas Dixon shows in this balanced and thought-provoking introduction, a whole range of views, subtle arguments, and fascinating perspectives can be found on this complex and centuries-old subject. He explores the key philosophical questions that underlie the debate, but also highlights the social, political, and ethical contexts that have made the tensions between science and r...
In A History of Ottoman Political Thought up to the Early Nineteenth Century, Marinos Sariyannis offers a survey of Ottoman political texts, examined in a book-length study for the first time. From the last glimpses of gazi ideology and the first instances of Persian political philosophy in the fifteenth century until the apologists of Western-style military reform in the early nineteenth century, the author studies a multitude of theories and views, focusing on an identification of ideological trends rather than a simple enumeration of texts and authors. At the same time, the book offers analytical summaries of texts otherwise difficult to find in English.
"For almost 300 years, an organisation has quietly tried to change almost every aspect of life in Britain. That organisation is the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, often known simply as the Royal Society of Arts. It has acted as Britain's private national improvement agency, in every way imaginable - essentially, a society for the improvement of everything and anything. This book is its history. From its beginnings in a coffee house in the mid-eighteenth century, the Society has tried to change Britain's art, industry, laws, music, environment, education, and even culture. It has sometimes even succeeded. It has been a prize-fund for innovations, a pla...
A detailed study of seventeenth century farming practices and their relevance for today We are today grappling with the consequences of disastrous changes in our farming and food systems. While the problems we face have reached a crisis point, their roots are deep. Even in the seventeenth century, Frances E. Dolan contends, some writers and thinkers voiced their reservations, both moral and environmental, about a philosophy of improvement that rationalized massive changes in land use, farming methods, and food production. Despite these reservations, the seventeenth century was a watershed in the formation of practices that would lead toward the industrialization of agriculture. But it was al...
This multi-disciplinary volume reflects the wealth of recent scholarship devoted to early modern Istanbul. It embraces manifold perspectives on the city through new subjects and questions, while offering fresh approaches to older debates, crisscrossing the socioeconomic, political, cultural, environmental, and spatial.
In Reading Darwin in Arabic, Marwa Elshakry questions current ideas about Islam, science, and secularism by exploring the ways in which Darwin was read in Arabic from the late 1860s to the mid-twentieth century. Borrowing from translation and reading studies and weaving together the history of science with intellectual history, she explores Darwin’s global appeal from the perspective of several generations of Arabic readers and shows how Darwin’s writings helped alter the social and epistemological landscape of the Arab learned classes. Providing a close textual, political, and institutional analysis of the tremendous interest in Darwin’s ideas and other works on evolution, Elshakry sh...
This book is a groundbreaking history of balance, exploring how a new model of equilibrium emerged during the medieval period.