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Presents chemistry as a science in search of an identity, or rather as a science whose identity has changed in response to its relation to society and other disciplines. This book discusses the conceptual, experimental, and technological challenges with wh
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As an historiographic monograph, this book offers a detailed survey of the professional evolution and significance of an entire discipline devoted to the history of science. It provides both an intellectual and a social history of the development of the subject from the first such effort written by the ancient Greek author Eudemus in the Fourth Century BC, to the founding of the international journal, Historia Mathematica, by Kenneth O. May in the early 1970s.
From 1770 to 1789 a succession of highly publicized cases riveted the attention of the French public. Maza argues that the reporting of these private scandals had a decisive effect on the way in which the French public came to understand public issues in the years before the Revolution.
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Our ancestors, the Mesopotamians, invented writing and with it a new way of looking at the world. In this collection of essays, the French scholar Jean Bottero attempts to go back to the moment which marks the very beginning of history. To give the reader some sense of how Mesopotamian civilization has been mediated and interpreted in its transmission through time, Bottero begins with an account of Assyriology, the discipline devoted to the ancient culture. This transmission, compounded with countless discoveries, would not have been possible without the surprising decipherment of the cuneiform writing system. Bottero also focuses on divination in the ancient world, contending that certain modes of worship in Mesopotamia, in their application of causality and proof, prefigure the "scientific mind."
This Element deals with stories told about substances and ways to analyse them through an Environmental Humanitie's perspective. It then takes up rubber as an example and its many stories. It is shown that the common notions of rubber history, which assume that rubber only became a useful material through a miraculous operation called vulcanization, that is attributed to the US-American Charles Goodyear, are false. In contrast, it is shown that rubber and many important rubber products are inventions of Indigenous peoples of South America, made durable by a process that can be called organic vulcanization. It is with that invention, that the story of rubber starts. Without it, rubber would not exist, neither in the Americas nor elsewhere. Finally, it is shown that Indigenous rubber products also offer some ecological advantages over industrially manufactured ones.
This book introduces the methodological and philosophical problems with which modern history of science is concerned, offering a comprehensive and critical review through description and evaluation of significant historiographical viewpoints. Incorporating discussion of key problems in general historical writing, with examples drawn from a range of disciplines, this non-elementary introduction bridges the gap between general history and history of science. Following a review of the early development of the history of science, the theory of history as applied to science history is introduced, examining the basic problems which this generates, including problems of periodisation, ideological functions, and the conflict between diachronical and anachronical historiography. Finally, the book considers the critical use, and analysis, of historical sources, and the possibility of the experiemental reconstruction of history. Aimed primarily at students, the book's broad scope and integration of historical, philosophical and scientific matters will interest philosophers, sociologists and general historians, for whom there is no alternative introduction to the subject at this level.