This book advocates a radical shift of concern in philosophical, historical, and sociological studies of the sciences, and explores the consequences of such a shift. It is argued that recent studies in the sociology and social history of the sciences pose strong challenges by revealing how appeals to authority, vested interests, and rhetorical and aesthetic sensibilities play substantial roles in scientific practices.

This collection of essays addresses, in specific historical ways and from particular disciplinary standpoints, the problem of knowledge and what used to be called the classification of the sciences. What is, or what passes for, knowledge? What are its divisions, and how should they be related? Who possesses this knowledge, and to what uses has it been put? How is it transmitted, and how can its history be understood and written? Ranging across the epistemological barrier formed by the revolution of modern science, these contributions inquire into the changing disciplinary patterns of the...

Nicholas Jardine offers here an edition and the first translation into English of Johannes Kepler's A Defence of Tycho against Ursus.

This book presents a series of essays which focus on the role of Romantic philosophy and ideology in the sciences.