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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 argu...
Radically reorienting our understanding of the Enlightenment, this book explores the complex relations between "englightened" values and the making of scientific knowledge. Here monsters and automata, barometers and botanical gardens, polite academics and boisterous clubs, plans for violent wars and for universal peace, are all relocated in the landscape of enlightened Europe. The contributors show how changing forms of discipline, machinery, and instrumentation affected the emergence of new kinds of knowledge; consider how institutions of public rate taste and conversation helped provide a common frame for the study of human and nonhuman natures; and explore the regional operations of scien...
Text by Simon Schaffer, Adam Lowe, Anish Kapoor.
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 ...
Dmitrii Mendeleev (1834–1907) is a name we recognize, but perhaps only as the creator of the periodic table of elements. Generally, little else has been known about him. A Well-Ordered Thing is an authoritative biography of Mendeleev that draws a multifaceted portrait of his life for the first time. As Michael Gordin reveals, Mendeleev was not only a luminary in the history of science, he was also an astonishingly wide-ranging political and cultural figure. From his attack on Spiritualism to his failed voyage to the Arctic and his near-mythical hot-air balloon trip, this is the story of an extraordinary maverick. The ideals that shaped his work outside science also led Mendeleev to order the elements and, eventually, to engineer one of the most fascinating scientific developments of the nineteenth century. A Well-Ordered Thing is a classic work that tells the story of one of the world’s most important minds.
Collection of essays focusing on the roles of intermediaries such as brokers and spies, messengers and translators, missionaries and entrepreneurs, in linking different parts of the ever more densely entangled systems of knowledge production and circulation at a key moment in the development of global scientific, commercial and political systems. The period 1770-1820 was decisive for the reformation of imperial projects in the wake of military catastrophe and politico-economic crisis, both in the Atlantic and the Asian/Pacific spheres -- economic and political worlds dominated by complex trade systems and violent contest. This conjuncture also saw the overhaul of networks and institutions of natural knowledge, whether commercial, voluntary or organs of state. Both the industrial and the second scientific revolutions have been dated to this moment. New and decisive relations were forged between different cultures' knowledge carriers. The authors consider knowledge movements of the epoch that escape simple models of metropolitan centre and remote colonial periphery. They question the immutable character of mediators and agents in knowledge communication.
First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
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.
Science and Culture: Lisa Jardine, Jean Michel Massing and Simon Schaffer is a collection of interviews that are being published as a book for the first time. These interviews have been conducted by one of England’s leading social anthropologists and historians, Professor Alan Macfarlane. Filmed over a period of several years, the three conversations in this volume are part of the series Creative Lives and Works. These transcriptions form a part of a larger set of interviews that cut across various disciplines, from the social sciences and the sciences to the performing and visual arts. The current volume is on three foremost historians of science. All civilizations throughout history have...
Dimensions of Creativity brings together original articles that draw on a range of discipline--from the history and sociology of science, psychology, philosophy, and artificial intelligence--to ask how creative ideas arise, and whether creativity can be objectively defined and measured. Dimensions of Creativity brings together original articles that draw on a range of disciplines--from the history and sociology of science, psychology, philosophy, and artificial intelligence--to ask how creative ideas arise, and whether creativity can be objectively defined and measured. Margaret Boden and her colleagues Simon Schaffer, Gerd Gigerenzer, David N. Perkins, Howard Gardner, Colin Martindale, and ...