Radically reorienting our understanding of the Enlightenment, this book explores the complex relations between -enlightened- values and the making of scientific knowledge. Here monsters and automata, barometers and botanical gardens, polite academies and boisterous clubs are all given their due place in the landscape of enlightened Europe. The contributors examine the production of new disciplines through work with instruments and techniques; consider how institutions of public taste and conversation helped provide a common frame for the study of human and nonhuman natures; and explore...
Radically reorienting our understanding of the Enlightenment, this book explores the complex relations between -enlightened- values and the making of ...
Arguably the best available introduction to constructivism, a research paradigm that has dominated the history of science for the past forty years, Making Natural Knowledge reflects on the importance of this theory, tells the history of its rise to prominence, and traces its most important tensions. Viewing scientific knowledge as a product of human culture, Jan Golinski challenges the traditional trajectory of the history of science as steady and autonomous progress. In exploring topics such as the social identity of the scientist, the significance of places where science is...
Arguably the best available introduction to constructivism, a research paradigm that has dominated the history of science for the past forty years,
Enlightenment inquiries into the weather sought to impose order on a force that had the power to alter human life and social conditions. "British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment "reveals how a new sense of the national climate emerged in the eighteenth century from the systematic recording of the weather, and how it was deployed in discussions of the health and welfare of the population. Enlightened intellectuals hailed climate s role in the development of civilization but acknowledged that human existence depended on natural forces that would never submit to rational control....
Enlightenment inquiries into the weather sought to impose order on a force that had the power to alter human life and social conditions. "British W...
What did it mean to be a scientist before the profession itself existed? Jan Golinski finds an answer in the remarkable career of Humphry Davy, the foremost chemist of his day and one of the most distinguished British men of science of the nineteenth century. Originally a country boy from a modest background, Davy was propelled by his scientific accomplishments to a knighthood and the presidency of the Royal Society. An enigmatic figure to his contemporaries, Davy has continued to elude the efforts of biographers to classify him: poet, friend to Coleridge and Wordsworth, author of travel...
What did it mean to be a scientist before the profession itself existed? Jan Golinski finds an answer in the remarkable career of Humphry Davy, the fo...
