Each of the essays in this collection, written by the most respected academics in their fields, provides both an insightful and valuable understanding on the different views of the passions in the Seventeenth Century.

The most comprehensive collection of essays on Descartes' scientific writings ever published, this volume offers a detailed reassessment of Descartes' scientific work and its bearing on his philosophy. The 35 essays, written by some of the world's leading scholars, cover topics as diverse as optics, cosmology and medicine, and will be of vital interest to all historians of philosophy or science.

Why did science emerge in the West and how did scientific values come to be regarded as the yardstick for all other forms of knowledge? Stephen Gaukroger shows just how bitterly the cognitive and cultural standing of science was contested in its early development. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often...

Understanding the emergence of a scientific culture - one in which cognitive values generally are modelled on, or subordinated to, scientific ones - is one of the foremost historical and philosophical problems with which we are now confronted. The significance of the emergence of such scientific values lies above all in their ability to provide the criteria by which we come to appraise cognitive enquiry, and which shape our understanding of what it can achieve.
The period between the 1680s and the middle of the eighteenth century is a very distinctive one in this development. It is then...

Is objectivity possible? Can there be objectivity in matters of morals? What would a truly objective account of the world be like? Is everything subjective, or relative? Are moral judgments objective or culturally relative? This Very Short Introduction demonstrates that there are a number of common misunderstandings about what objectivity is, and explores the theoretical and practical problems of objectivity by assessing the basic questions raised by it. In addition to considering the core philosophical issues, Stephen Gaukroger also deals with the way in which particular understandings of...

Understanding the emergence of a scientific culture -- one in which cognitive values generally are modelled on, or subordinated to, scientific ones -- is one of the foremost historical and philosophical problems with which we are now confronted. The significance of the emergence of such scientific values lies above all in their ability to provide the criteria by which we come to appraise cognitive enquiry, and which shape our understanding of what it can achieve.
The period between the 1680s and the middle of the eighteenth century is a very distinctive one in this development. It is then...