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Engineering the Human
The volume is collection of articles treating the topic of human improvement/enhancement from a variety of perspectives – philosophical, literary, medical, genetic, sociological, legal etc. The chapters in this volume treat not only those aspects that most immediately come to mind when one thinks of ‘human enhancement’, such as genetic engineering, cloning, artificial implants and artificial intelligence etc. Somewhat less obvious aspects include evolutionary perspectives in connection with the prolongation of the human lifespan, plastic surgery since its beginnings, and questions such as whether the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ can really be drawn at all and ...
Malleable Anatomies
An account of the practice of anatomical modelling in mid-eighteenth-century Italy, showing how anatomical models became an authoritative source of medical knowledge, but also informed social, cultural, and political developments at the crossroads of medical learning, religious ritual, antiquarian and artistic cultures, and Grand Tour spectacle.
Fate and Fortune in European Thought, ca. 1400–1650
If the universe were conceived to fulfill a certain divine plan or to manifest God’s will and glory, what would the place of an individual be within this plan? What is more, if, from the very beginning of its existence and through divine providence, it were predestined to be driven toward a certain end, how could people adjust their individual lives to the incognizable universal design and react to the obscure future fraught with both luck and failure? These questions, which have occupied humanity for centuries, formed a remarkable element of early modern European thought. This collection of essays presents new insights into what shaped and constituted reflections on fate and fortune between, roughly, 1400 and 1650, both in word and image. This volume argues that these ideas were emblematic of a more fundamental argument about the self, society, and the universe and shows that their influence was more widespread, geographically and thematically, than hitherto assumed. Contributors: Damiano Acciarino, Ovanes Akopyan, Elisabeth Blum, Paul Richard Blum, Jo Coture, Guido Giglioni, Dalia Judovitz, Sophie Raux, Orlando Reade, and John Sellars.
The Random Factor
Upending notions of predictability and rugged individualism to reveal how truly random the world is. It’s comforting to think that we can be successful because we work hard, climb ladders, and get what we deserve, but each of us has been profoundly touched by randomness. Chance is shown to play a crucial role in shaping outcomes across history, throughout the natural world, and in our everyday lives. In The Random Factor, Mark Robert Rank draws from a wealth of evidence, including interviews and research, to explain how luck and chance play out and reveals how we can use these lessons to guide our personal lives and public policies. The Random Factor traverses luck from macro to micro, from events like the Cuban Missile Crisis to our personal encounters and relationships. From his perspective as a scholar of poverty, Rank also delves into the class and race dynamics of chance, emphasizing the stark disparities it brings to light. This transformative book prompts a new understanding of the twists and turns in our daily lives and encourages readers to fully appreciate the surprising world of randomness in which we live.
The New Science and Jesuit Science
This volume makes an important contribution toward a nuanced appreciation of the Jesuits' interaction with "modernity", and a greater recognition of their contribution to the mathematization of natural philosophy and experimental science. The six essays provide a cross-section of the complex Jesuit encounter with the mathematical sciences during the 17th century.
Eye for Detail
Image-transforming techniques such as close-up, time lapse, and layering are generally associated with the age of photography, but as Florike Egmond shows in this book, they were already being used half a millennium ago. Exploring the world of natural history drawings from the Renaissance, Eye for Detail shows how the function of identification led to image manipulation techniques that will look uncannily familiar to the modern viewer. Egmond shows how the format of images in nature studies changed dramatically during the Renaissance period, as high-definition naturalistic representation became the rule during a robust output of plant and animal drawings. She examines what visual techniques like magnification can tell us about how early modern Europeans studied and ordered living nature, and she focuses on how attention to visual detail was motivated by an overriding question: the secret of the origins of life. Beautifully and precisely illustrated throughout, this volume serves as an arresting guide to the massive European collections of nature drawings and an absorbing study of natural history art of the sixteenth century.
Reading Galileo
How did early modern scientists interpret Galileo’s influential Two New Sciences? In 1638, Galileo was over seventy years old, blind, and confined to house arrest outside of Florence. With the help of friends and family, he managed to complete and smuggle to the Netherlands a manuscript that became his final published work, Two New Sciences. Treating diverse subjects that became the foundations of mechanical engineering and physics, this book is often depicted as the definitive expression of Galileo’s purportedly modern scientific agenda. In Reading Galileo, Renée Raphael offers a new interpretation of Two New Sciences which argues instead that the work embodied no such coherent canonic...
The Cambridge History of Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution
A collection of cutting-edge scholarship on the close interaction of philosophy with science at the birth of the modern age.
Observing the World through Images
The well-illustrated articles in Observing the World through Images offer insights into the uses of images in astronomy, mathematics, instrument-making, medicine and alchemy, highlighting shared forms as well as those peculiar to individual disciplines. Themes addressed include: the processes of image production and communication; the transformation of images through copying and adaptation for new purposes; genres and traditions of imagery in particular scientific disciplines; the mnemonic and pedagogical value of diagrams; the relationship between text and image; and the roles of diagrams as tools to think with. Contributors include: Isabelle Pantin, Jennifer Rampling, Samuel Gessner, Renee Raphael, Karin Ekholm, Hester Higton, and Katie Taylor.
Heirs of Flesh and Paper
"Heirs of Flesh and Paper" tells the story of early modern dynastic politics through subjects’ practical responses to royal illness, failing princely reproduction, and heirs’ premature deaths. It treats connected dynastic crises between 1699 and 1716 as illustrative for early modern European political regimes in which the rulers’ corporeality defined politics. This political order grappled with the endemic uncertainties induced by dynastic bodies. By following the day-to-day practices of knowledge making in response to the unpredictability of royal health, the book shows how the ruling family’s mortal coils regularly threatened to destabilize the institutionalized legal fiction of kingship. Dynastic politics was not only as a transitory stage of state formation, part of elite cooperation, or a cultural construct. It needs to be approached through everyday practices that put ailing dynastic bodies front and center. In a period of intensifying political planning, it constituted one of the most important sites for changing the political itself.
