Author: Thomas L. Hankins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521286190
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This book is a general history of eighteenth-century developments in physical and life sciences.

Author: Thomas L. Hankins
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781316285022
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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 recent scholarship, which is rapidly changing our understanding of science was organized into fields that were quite different from those we know today. Professor Hankins's work is a much needed addition to the literature on eighteenth-century science. His study is not technical; it will be of interest to all students of the Enlightenment and the history of science, as well as to the general reader with some background in science. -- from back cover.

Author: Nicholas Maxwell
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 178735041X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Here is an idea that just might save the world. It is that science, properly understood, provides us with the methodological key to the salvation of humanity. A version of this idea can be found in the works of Karl Popper. Famously, Popper argued that science cannot verify theories but can only refute them, and this is how science makes progress. Scientists are forced to think up something better, and it is this, according to Popper, that drives science forward.But Nicholas Maxwell finds a flaw in this line of argument. Physicists only ever accept theories that are unified – theories that depict the same laws applying to the range of phenomena to which the theory applies – even though many other empirically more successful disunified theories are always available. This means that science makes a questionable assumption about the universe, namely that all disunified theories are false. Without some such presupposition as this, the whole empirical method of science breaks down.By proposing a new conception of scientific methodology, which can be applied to all worthwhile human endeavours with problematic aims, Maxwell argues for a revolution in academic inquiry to help humanity make progress towards a better, more civilized and enlightened world.

Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525427570
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.

Author: Michael C. Carhart
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674026179
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
In the late 1770s, as a wave of revolution and republican unrest swept across Europe, scholars looked with urgency on the progress of European civilization. Carhart examines their approaches to understanding human development by investigating the invention of a new analytic category, "culture."

Author: Barbara Maria Stafford
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262691819
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Reveals the "magic" of learning in the 18th century. This text draws on historical sources and popular imagery to make the case for the pedagogical opportunities - suggesting ways of putting intelligence, enjoyment and communicative power back into thinking with images.

Author: Shinzen Young
Publisher: Sounds True
ISBN: 9781683642121
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Enlightenment—is it a myth or is it real? Across time and culture, inner explorers have discovered that the liberated state is a natural experience, as real as the sensations you are having right now. Few teachers achieve clarity with the application of scientific inquiry to these states of consciousness like Shinzen Young. Now in paperback, The Science of Enlightenment makes Young’s essential insights available to readers everywhere. The Science of Enlightenment merges scientific precision, Young’s grasp of the source-language teachings of many spiritual traditions, and his rare gift for sparking insight upon insight through original analogies and illustrations. The result: an uncommonly lucid "Aha, now I get it!" guide to mindfulness meditation—how it works and how to use it to enhance our cognitive capacities, compassion, and experience of happiness independent of conditions. For meditators of all levels and lineages, this multifaceted wisdom gem will be sure to surprise, provoke, illuminate, and inspire.

Author: William E. Burns
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1576078876
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
The first introductory A–Z resource on the dynamic achievements in science from the late 1600s to 1820, including the great minds behind the developments and science's new cultural role. Though the Enlightenment was a time of amazing scientific change, science is an often-neglected facet of that time. Now, Science in the Enlightenment redresses the balance by covering all the major scientific developments in the period between Newton's discoveries in the late 1600s to the early 1800s of Michael Faraday and Georges Cuvier. Over 200 A-Z entries explore a range of disciplines, including astronomy and medicine, scientists such as Sir Humphry Davy and Benjamin Franklin, and instruments such as the telescope and calorimeter. Emphasis is placed on the role of women, and proper attention is given to the shifts in the worldview brought about by Newtonian physics, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier's "chemical revolution," and universal systems of botanical and zoological classification. Moreover, the social impact of science is explored, as well as the ways in which the work of scientists influenced the thinking of philosophers such as Voltaire and Denis Diderot and the writers and artists of the romantic movement.

Author: Ann Thomson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199236194
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
`The church in danger' : latitudinarians, socinians, and hobbists -- Animal spirits and living fibres -- Mortalists and materialists -- Journalism, exile, and clandestinity -- Mid-eighteenth-century materialism -- Epilogue: Some consequences.

Author: William Clark
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226109404
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
Radically reorienting our understanding of the Enlightenment, this book explores the complex relations between "englightened" values and the making of scientific knowledge. Here monsters and automata, barometers and botanical gardens, polite academics and boisterous clubs, plans for violent wars and for universal peace, are all relocated in the landscape of enlightened Europe. The contributors show how changing forms of discipline, machinery, and instrumentation affected the emergence of new kinds of knowledge; consider how institutions of public rate taste and conversation helped provide a common frame for the study of human and nonhuman natures; and explore the regional operations of scientific culture at the geographical fringes of Europe. Covering a wide range of scientific disciplines, both in the principal European countries and in areas peripheral to Europe, the book also includes ample illustrations and an extensive bibliography. Implicated in the rise of both fascism and liberal secularism, the moral and political values that shaped the Enlightenment remain controversial today. Through careful scrutiny of how these values influenced and were influenced by the concrete practices of its sciences, this book gives us an entirely new sense of the Enlightenment. -- from back cover.