Science and the Enlightenment is a general history of eighteenth-century science covering both the physical and life sciences. It places the scientific developments of the century in the cultural context of the Enlightenment and reveals the extent to which scientific ideas permeated the thought of the age. The book takes advantage of topical scholarship, which is rapidly changing our understanding of science during the eighteenth century. In particular it describes how science was organized into fields that were quite different from those we know today. Professor Hankins's work is a much...

By focusing on the conceptual issues faced by nineteenth century physicists, this book clarifies the status of field theory, the ether, and thermodynamics in the work of the period. A remarkably synthetic account of a difficult and fragmentary period in scientific development.

Biology was introduced with the nineteenth century. The term 'biology' first appeared in a footnote in an obscure German medical publication of 1800, but a century of activity was needed to create a thriving science. This book offers a concise yet comprehensive examination of essential themes in this development.

To one group of nineteenth-century biologists, largely comprised of anatomists, histologists and embryologists, the appearance and constituent structures of the plant or animal body seemed all-important; they studied organic form and the means by which it was brought into being. A...

This concise introduction to the history of physical science in the Middle Ages begins with a description of the feeble state of early medieval science and its revitalization during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as evidenced by the explosion of knowledge represented by extensive translations of Greek and Arabic treatises. The content and concepts that came to govern science from the late twelfth century onwards were powerfully shaped and dominated by the science and philosophy of Aristotle. It is, therefore, by focussing attention on problems and controversies associated with...

Man and Nature in the Renaissance offers an introduction to science and medicine during the earlier phases of the scientific revolution, from the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century. Renaissance science has frequently been approached in terms of the progress of the exact sciences of mathematics and astronomy, to the neglect of the broader intellectual context of the period. Conversely, those authors who have emphasized the latter frequently play down the importance of the technical scientific developments. In this book, Professor Debus amalgamates these approaches: The exact...

Presents an evolutionary theory of technological change based on recent scholarship in the history of technology and on relevant material drawn from economic history and anthropology. Challenges the popular notion that technological advances arise from the efforts of a few heroic individuals who produce a series of revolutionary inventions that owe little or nothing to the technological past. Therefore, the book's argument is shaped by analogies drawn selectively from the theory of organic evolution, and not from the theory and practice of political revolution. Three themes appear, with...

Contrary to prevailing opinion, the roots of modern science were planted in the ancient and medieval worlds long before the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Indeed, that revolution would have been inconceivable without the cumulative antecedent efforts of three great civilizations: Greek, Islamic, and Latin. With the scientific riches it derived by translation from Greco-Islamic sources in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Christian Latin civilization of Western Europe began the last leg of the intellectual journey that culminated in a scientific revolution that...

This volume is a narrative and interpretive history of the physical and mathematical sciences from the early nineteenth century to the close of the twentieth century. Drawing upon the most recent methods and results in historical studies of science, the authors of over thirty chapters employ strategies from intellectual history, social history, and cultural studies to provide unusually wide-ranging and comprehensive insights into developments in the public culture, disciplinary organization, and cognitive content of the physical and mathematical sciences.

Forty-two essays by authors from five continents and many disciplines provide a synthetic account of the history of the social sciences - including behavioral and economic sciences since the late eighteenth century. The authors emphasize the cultural and intellectual preconditions of social science, and its contested but important role in the history of the modern world. While there are many historical books on particular disciplines, there are very few about the social sciences generally, and none that deal with so much of the world over so long a timespan.

This book explains why Luke said what he did about Jesus in his earthly ministry in the Gospel and about his work from heaven in Acts. Scholars have argued that Luke's christology is haphazard and lacks unity, that it is incompatible with the Gospel of Mark and with Paul's writings, and that Jesus is of subordinate rank to God. Buckwalter shows a unity, a compatibility with Mark and Paul, and for Jesus a divine rank equal to God. Luke's christology is by careful design: he portrays the exalted Jesus as God's co-equal.