Selected Philosophical, Scientific, and Autobiographical Writings PDF Download

Author: Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Thiroux D’Arconville
Publisher: Iter Press
ISBN: 9780866985789
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville combined fierce intellectual ambition with the proper demeanor of the wife of a leading magistrate. Bemoaning her lack of a formal education in childhood, as an adult she read widely, studied languages, and sought out mentors among the scientific elite of the day. Always publishing anonymously, her works included moralist philosophy, scientific and literary translations, original scientific research, fiction, and history. Recently, a trove of unpublished essays and autobiographical writings from her final years, long thought to have been lost, has come to light, revealing her as a writer of insight, wit, and feeling. Edited and translated by Julie Candler Hayes The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, volume 58

Author: Emilie Du Châtelet
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226168085
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Though most historians remember her as the mistress of Voltaire, Emilie Du Châtelet (1706–49) was an accomplished writer in her own right, who published multiple editions of her scientific writings during her lifetime, as well as a translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica that is still the standard edition of that work in French. Had she been a man, her reputation as a member of the eighteenth-century French intellectual elite would have been assured. In the 1970s, feminist historians of science began the slow work of recovering Du Châtelet’s writings and her contributions to history and philosophy. For this edition, Judith P. Zinsser has selected key sections from Du Châtelet’s published and unpublished works, as well as related correspondence, part of her little-known critique of the Old and New Testaments, and a treatise on happiness that is a refreshingly uncensored piece of autobiography—making all of them available for the first time in English. The resulting volume will recover Châtelet’s place in the pantheon of French letters and culture.

Author: Bernhard Helmut Kuhn
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754661665
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Bernhard Kuhn's study uncovers a fundamental connection between the autobiographies and scientific writings of Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau that refutes the now entrenched thesis of the 'two cultures.' As he examines these three representative writers, Kuhn reveals the scientific character of autobiographical writing while demonstrating the autobiographical nature of natural science. An unfolding drama emerges, in which Romantic Period writers are seen preserving what modern culture is determined to break apart.

Author: Nicholas Rescher
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 9780761805861
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Nicholas Rescher was born in Germany in 1928 and came to the USA at the age of ten. He attended Queens College in New York City and Princeton University, where he earned his Ph.D. while still twenty-two. Since 1961 he has been University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he has also served as Chairman of the Department of Philosophy and as Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science. The author of more than seventy books in various areas of philosophy, works by Mr. Rescher have been translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Japanese. One of the few contemporary exponents of philosophical idealism, Mr. Rescher has been active in the rehabilitation on the coherence theory of truth and in the reconstruction of philosophical pragmatism in line with the idealistic tradition. He has pioneered the development of inconsistency-tolerant logics and, in the philosophy of science, the exponential retardation theory of scientific progress based on the epistemological principle that knowledge increases merely with the logarithm of the increase in information. Books about Rescher's work have appeared in English, German, and Italian. His contributions to philosophy have been recognized repeatedly by honorary degrees awarded by universities in the U.S.A. and abroad. In 1977 its fellow elected him an honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and in 1983 he received an Alexander von Humboldt Humanities Prize, awarded under the auspices of the Federal Republic of Germany 'in recognition of the research accomplishments of humanistic scholars of international distinction.' In this autobiographical work, Rescher describes his boyhood in Nazi Germany, his family's struggles to make a new life for themselves in the USA of the 1930's, and the vicissitudes attending his own labors as a professional philosopher. The book provides a vivid and humane portrait of the intellectual and personal formation of America's most productive philosophical author.

Author: Michael Davis
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0585080925
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
This is the most important book about the nature of philosophy and of the human soul published this year. In making the condition for its own possibility its deepest concern, philosophy is necessarily about itself_it is autobiographical. The first part of The Autobiography of Philosophy interprets Heidegger's Being and Time, Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, Aristotle's Metaphysics, and Plato's Lysis as examples of the implicitly autobiographical character of philosophy. The second part is a reading of Rousseau's The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Although Rousseau's explicitly autobiographical writings are more often read for the tantalizing details of his rather eccentric life than for their philosophical import, this work is an artful use of Rousseau's exile and isolation_'the strangest position in which a mortal could ever find himself'_as a paradigm for the human soul in its relation to the world. In powerfully articulating the activity that is at the core of all philosophy, The Reveries articulates the nature of the human soul for which this activity is the defining possibility.

Author: Anonymous
Publisher: Legare Street Press
ISBN: 9781021223708
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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A collection of essays and autobiographical writings by Thomas Henry Huxley, the celebrated 19th century biologist and philosopher. The book includes Huxley's reflections on science, religion, and social justice, as well as personal anecdotes about his upbringing and career. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Author: Paul Feyerabend
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226245322
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Killing Time is the story of Paul Feyerabend's life. Trained in physics and astronomy, Feyerabend was best known as a philosopher of science. His fame was in powerful, plain-spoken critiques of "big" science and "big" philosophy.

Author: Hanoch Gutfreund
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691200114
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
New perspectives on the iconic physicist's scientific and philosophical formation At the end of World War II, Albert Einstein was invited to write his intellectual autobiography for the Library of Living Philosophers. The resulting book was his uniquely personal Autobiographical Notes, a classic work in the history of science that explains the development of his ideas with unmatched warmth and clarity. Hanoch Gutfreund and Jürgen Renn introduce Einstein's scientific reflections to today's readers, tracing his intellectual formation from childhood to old age and offering a compelling portrait of the making of a philosopher-scientist. Einstein on Einstein features the full English text of Autobiographical Notes along with incisive essays that place Einstein's reflections in the context of the different stages of his scientific life. Gutfreund and Renn draw on Einstein's writings, personal correspondence, and critical writings by Einstein's contemporaries to provide new perspectives on his greatest discoveries. Also included are Einstein's responses to his critics, which shed additional light on his scientific and philosophical worldview. Gutfreund and Renn quote extensively from Einstein's initial, unpublished attempts to formulate his response, and also look at another brief autobiographical text by Einstein, written a few weeks before his death, which is published here for the first time in English. Complete with evocative drawings by artist Laurent Taudin, Einstein on Einstein illuminates the iconic physicist's journey to general relativity while situating his revolutionary ideas alongside other astonishing scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century.

Author: Thomas S. Kuhn
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226457987
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Divided into three parts, this work is a record of the direction Kuhn was taking during the last two decades of his life. It consists of essays in which he refines the basic concepts set forth in "Structure"--Paradigm shifts, incommensurability, and the nature of scientific progress.

Author: Freeman Dyson
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590178815
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
From Galileo to today’s amateur astronomers, scientists have been rebels, writes Freeman Dyson. Like artists and poets, they are free spirits who resist the restrictions their cultures impose on them. In their pursuit of nature’s truths, they are guided as much by imagination as by reason, and their greatest theories have the uniqueness and beauty of great works of art.Dyson argues that the best way to understand science is by understanding those who practice it. He tells stories of scientists at work, ranging from Isaac Newton’s absorption in physics, alchemy, theology, and politics, to Ernest Rutherford’s discovery of the structure of the atom, to Albert Einstein’s stubborn hostility to the idea of black holes. His descriptions of brilliant physicists like Edward Teller and Richard Feynman are enlivened by his own reminiscences of them. He looks with a skeptical eye at fashionable scientific fads and fantasies, and speculates on the future of climate prediction, genetic engineering, the colonization of space, and the possibility that paranormal phenomena may exist yet not be scientifically verifiable. Dyson also looks beyond particular scientific questions to reflect on broader philosophical issues, such as the limits of reductionism, the morality of strategic bombing and nuclear weapons, the preservation of the environment, and the relationship between science and religion. These essays, by a distinguished physicist who is also a prolific writer, offer informed insights into the history of science and fresh perspectives on contentious current debates about science, ethics, and faith.