The Singular and the Making of Knowledge at the Royal Society of London in the Eighteenth Century PDF Download

Author: Palmira Fontes da Costa
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443804096
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

View

Book Description
The central subject of this book is the status of singular experiences in the making of natural knowledge at the Royal Society of London in the eighteenth century. It makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the importance of the reporting and display of extraordinary phenomena at the Royal Society in this period, and shows that the success of these practices was largely based on their multiple roles within the Society, where singular experiences not only promoted natural historical and medical knowledge but also played a social and epistemological role. However, singular experiences were problematic in terms of authentication and the book reveals how eighteenth-century literary satires made the Royal Society an easy and favoured target for their interest in them. The book demonstrates the variety and intricacy of elements involved in the making and circulation of natural knowledge in the period. It provides an interdisciplinary and innovative approach to the place of the singular in one of the oldest and most import scientific institutions in the world.

Author: Anna Marie Roos
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192565656
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 592

View

Book Description
Martin Folkes (1690-1754): Newtonian, Antiquary, Connoisseur is a cultural and intellectual biography of the only President of both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. Sir Isaac Newton's protégé, astronomer, mathematician, freemason, art connoisseur, Voltaire's friend and Hogarth's patron, his was an intellectually vibrant world. Folkes was possibly the best-connected natural philosopher and antiquary of his age, an epitome of Enlightenment sociability, and yet he was a surprisingly neglected figure, the long shadow of Newton eclipsing his brilliant disciple. A complex figure, Folkes edited Newton's posthumous works in biblical chronology, yet was a religious skeptic and one of the first members of the gentry to marry an actress. His interests were multidisciplinary, from his authorship of the first complete history of the English coinage, to works concerning ancient architecture, statistical probability, and astronomy. Rich archival material, including Folkes's travel diary, correspondence, and his library and art collections permit reconstruction through Folkes's eyes of what it was like to be a collector and patron, a Masonic freethinker, and antiquarian and virtuoso in the days before 'science' became sub-specialised. Folkes's virtuosic sensibility and possible role in the unification of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society tells against the historiographical assumption that this was the age in which the 'two cultures' of the humanities and sciences split apart, never to be reunited. In Georgian England, antiquarianism and 'science' were considered largely part of the same endeavour.

Author: Aileen Fyfe
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1800082320
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 666

View

Book Description
Modern scientific research has changed so much since Isaac Newton’s day: it is more professional, collaborative and international, with more complicated equipment and a more diverse community of researchers. Yet the use of scientific journals to report, share and store results is a thread that runs through the history of science from Newton’s day to ours. Scientific journals are now central to academic research and careers. Their editorial and peer-review processes act as a check on new claims and findings, and researchers build their careers on the list of journal articles they have published. The journal that reported Newton’s optical experiments still exists. First published in 1665, and now fully digital, the Philosophical Transactions has carried papers by Charles Darwin, Dorothy Hodgkin and Stephen Hawking. It is now one of eleven journals published by the Royal Society of London. Unrivalled insights from the Royal Society’s comprehensive archives have enabled the authors to investigate more than 350 years of scientific journal publishing. The editorial management, business practices and financial difficulties of the Philosophical Transactions and its sibling Proceedings reveal the meaning and purpose of journals in a changing scientific community. At a time when we are surrounded by calls to reform the academic publishing system, it has never been more urgent that we understand its history.

Author: Brian P. Cooper
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317698010
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

View

Book Description
The book draws on the history of economics, literary theory, and the history of science to explore how European travelers like Alexander von Humboldt and their readers, circa 1750–1850, adapted the work of British political economists, such as Adam Smith, to help organize their observations, and, in turn, how political economists used travelers’ observations in their own analyses. Cooper examines journals, letters, books, art, and critical reviews to cast in sharp relief questions raised about political economy by contemporaries over the status of facts and evidence, whether its principles admitted of universal application, and the determination of wealth, value, and happiness in different societies. Travelers citing T.R. Malthus’s population principle blurred the gendered boundaries between domestic economy and British political economy, as embodied in the idealized subjects: domestic woman and economic man. The book opens new realms in the histories of science in its analyses of debates about gender in social scientific observation: Maria Edgeworth, Maria Graham, and Harriet Martineau observe a role associated with women and methodically interpret what they observe, an act reserved, in theory, by men.

Author: Helen P Bruder
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317321162
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 272

View

Book Description
Blake's combination of verse and design invites interdisciplinary study. The essays in this collection approach his work from a variety of perspectives including masculinity, performance, plant biology, empire, politics and sexuality.

Author: Asa Simon Mittman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351894315
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 626

View

Book Description
The field of monster studies has grown significantly over the past few years and this companion provides a comprehensive guide to the study of monsters and the monstrous from historical, regional and thematic perspectives. The collection reflects the truly multi-disciplinary nature of monster studies, bringing in scholars from literature, art history, religious studies, history, classics, and cultural and media studies. The companion will offer scholars and graduate students the first comprehensive and authoritative review of this emergent field.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004324305
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

View

Book Description
A collection of essays by an international team of scholars, Archival Afterlives explores the posthumous fortunes of scientific and medical archives in early modern Britain. It demonstrates the sustaining importance of archival institutions in the growth of the “New Sciences.”

Author: Tessa Morrison
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476625131
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 198

View

Book Description
Isaac Newton published little but wrote hundreds of manuscripts, the bulk of them on alchemy, prophecy and theology. His writings on the Temple of Solomon have widely been thought to have been written in old age or possibly after a nervous breakdown in 1693. In fact, his study of the Temple spanned more than fifty years. This book examines Newton's work in the context of his times, when the Temple was a popular subject for academics, and models were displayed to the general public. The author provides insight into Newton's writings in Latin on Solomon's Temple, along with a model reconstructed from his interpretation of its structure, symmetry and proportional elegance.

Author: Maria Böhmer
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004353607
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 313

View

Book Description
The Man Who Crucified Himself is the story of Mattio Lovat’s self-crucifixion in Venice in 1805. It shows how the narrative of this sensational medical case was popularised in nineteenth-century Europe and appropriated by readers in debates on madness, suicide and religion.

Author: Michael Rembis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190234962
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 640

View

Book Description
Disability history exists outside of the institutions, healers, and treatments it often brings to mind. It is a history where disabled people live not just as patients or cure-seekers, but rather as people living differently in the world--and it is also a history that helps define the fundamental concepts of identity, community, citizenship, and normality. The Oxford Handbook of Disability History is the first volume of its kind to represent this history and its global scale, from ancient Greece to British West Africa. The twenty-seven articles, written by thirty experts from across the field, capture the diversity and liveliness of this emerging scholarship. Whether discussing disability in modern Chinese cinema or on the American antebellum stage, this collection provides new and valuable insights into the rich and varied lives of disabled people across time and place.