Kategoria BISAC: Science >> History

Change in human understanding of the natural world during the early modern period marks one of the most important episodes in intellectual history. This era is often referred to as the scientific revolution, but recent scholarship has challenged traditional accounts. Here, in Reconfiguring the World, Margaret J. Osler treats the development of the sciences in Europe from the early sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries as a complex and multifaceted process.

The worldview embedded in modern science is a relatively recent development. Osler aims to convey a nuanced...

Commonly translated as -The Self-Taught Philosopher- or -The Improvement of Human Reason, - Ibn-Tufayl's story Hayy Ibn-Yaqzān inspired debates about autodidacticism in a range of historical fields from classical Islamic philosophy through Renaissance humanism and the European Enlightenment. Avner Ben-Zaken's account of how the text traveled demonstrates the intricate ways in which autodidacticism was contested in and adapted to diverse cultural settings.

In tracing the circulation of the Hayy Ibn-Yaqzān, Ben-Zaken highlights its key place in four far-removed...

Observation is the most pervasive and fundamental practice of all the modern sciences, both natural and human. Its instruments include not only the naked senses but also tools such as the telescope and microscope, the questionnaire, the photographic plate, the notebook, the glassed-in beehive, and myriad other ingenious inventions designed to make the invisible visible, the evanescent permanent, the abstract concrete. Yet observation has almost never been considered as an object of historical inquiry in itself. This wide-ranging collection offers the first examination of the history of...

After Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, his second declaration, after socialism, was that Cuba would become a leader in international science. In biotechnology he would be proven right and, today, Cuba counts a meningitis B vaccine and cutting-edge cancer therapies to its name. But how did this politically and geographically isolated country make such impressive advances? Drawing on a unique ethnography, and blending the insights of anthropology, sociology, and geography, "The Cuban Cure" shows how Cuba came to compete with U. S. pharmaceutical giants despite a trade embargo and...

Who are scientists? What kind of people are they? What capacities and virtues are thought to stand behind their considerable authority? "The Scientific Life" is historian Steven Shapin s story about who scientists are, who we think they are, and why our sensibilities about such things matter. From the early twentieth-century origins of corporate research laboratories to the high-flying scientific entrepreneurship of the present, Shapin argues that the radical uncertainties of much contemporary science have made personal virtues" more" central to its practice than ever before, and he also...

Both metaphor and framework, the systems concept as articulated by its earliest proponents highlights...