Science and Society in Restoration England

Science and Society in Restoration England

Author: Michael Hunter

Publisher: CUP Archive

Published: 1981-03-26

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780521228664

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This book, first published in 1981, provides a systematic assessment of the social relations of Restoration science. On the basis of a detailed analysis of the early history of the Royal Society, Professor Hunter examines the key issues concerning the role of science in late seventeenth-century England.


Wicked Intelligence

Wicked Intelligence

Author: Matthew C. Hunter

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 022601732X

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In late seventeenth-century London, the most provocative images were produced not by artists, but by scientists. Magnified fly-eyes drawn with the aid of microscopes, apparitions cast on laboratory walls by projection machines, cut-paper figures revealing the “exact proportions” of sea monsters—all were created by members of the Royal Society of London, the leading institutional platform of the early Scientific Revolution. Wicked Intelligence reveals that these natural philosophers shaped Restoration London’s emergent artistic cultures by forging collaborations with court painters, penning art theory, and designing triumphs of baroque architecture such as St Paul’s Cathedral. Matthew C. Hunter brings to life this archive of experimental-philosophical visualization and the deft cunning that was required to manage such difficult research. Offering an innovative approach to the scientific image-making of the time, he demonstrates how the Restoration project of synthesizing experimental images into scientific knowledge, as practiced by Royal Society leaders Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren, might be called “wicked intelligence.” Hunter uses episodes involving specific visual practices—for instance, concocting a lethal amalgam of wax, steel, and sulfuric acid to produce an active model of a comet—to explore how Hooke, Wren, and their colleagues devised representational modes that aided their experiments. Ultimately, Hunter argues, the craft and craftiness of experimental visual practice both promoted and menaced the artistic traditions on which they drew, turning the Royal Society projects into objects of suspicion in Enlightenment England. The first book to use the physical evidence of Royal Society experiments to produce forensic evaluations of how scientific knowledge was generated, Wicked Intelligence rethinks the parameters of visual art, experimental philosophy, and architecture at the cusp of Britain’s imperial power and artistic efflorescence.


Science, Religion, and Politics in Restoration England

Science, Religion, and Politics in Restoration England

Author: Jonathan Bruce Parkin

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9780861932412

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A new perspective on the interaction of science, religion and politics in Restoration England, based on discussion of Cumberland's De legibus naturae. Richard Cumberland is one of the seventeenth century's most interesting political theorists. His masterpiece, the De legibus naturae(1672), has rarely been examined on its own terms, but by tracing the political, religiousand intellectual circumstances of the composition of this puzzling work, and showing its importance as a critique of Thomas Hobbes, author of the Leviathan, Dr Parkin demonstrates how Cumberland created a new political andethical theory which absorbed and neutralised many of Hobbes's insights. He also examines the science of the Royal Society as a basis for Cumberland's natural law theory and its influence on such thinkers as Samuel Pufendorf and John Locke. Overall, the book provides an important new perspective on the interaction of science, religion and politics in Restoration England. Dr JON PARKIN teaches in the Department of History at King's College, London.


Establishing the New Science

Establishing the New Science

Author: Michael Cyril William Hunter

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 9780851155067

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For anyone interested in the scientific revolution these essays are compulsory reading. HISTORY A fresh view of the formative years of the Royal Society. `Hunter's reputation as one of the foremost students of Restoration science in England can only be further enhanced by this volume.' NATURE `For anyone interested in the scientific revolution these essays are compulsory reading. Elegantly written and carefully researched, they are a welcome addition to the already extensive literature on the early years of the Royal Society.'HISTORY In a series of detailed case studies, Michael Hunterpresents a fresh view of the formative years of Britain's oldest scientific institution; The Royal Society of London, founded in 1660.


A Social History of Truth

A Social History of Truth

Author: Steven Shapin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2011-11-18

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 022614884X

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How do we come to trust our knowledge of the world? What are the means by which we distinguish true from false accounts? Why do we credit one observational statement over another? In A Social History of Truth, Shapin engages these universal questions through an elegant recreation of a crucial period in the history of early modern science: the social world of gentlemen-philosophers in seventeenth-century England. Steven Shapin paints a vivid picture of the relations between gentlemanly culture and scientific practice. He argues that problems of credibility in science were practically solved through the codes and conventions of genteel conduct: trust, civility, honor, and integrity. These codes formed, and arguably still form, an important basis for securing reliable knowledge about the natural world. Shapin uses detailed historical narrative to argue about the establishment of factual knowledge both in science and in everyday practice. Accounts of the mores and manners of gentlemen-philosophers are used to illustrate Shapin's broad claim that trust is imperative for constituting every kind of knowledge. Knowledge-making is always a collective enterprise: people have to know whom to trust in order to know something about the natural world.


Semantics and Cultural Change in the British Enlightenment: New Words and Old

Semantics and Cultural Change in the British Enlightenment: New Words and Old

Author: Carey McIntosh

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-05-18

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 9004430636

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A study of English semantics during the Enlightenment. New words 1650–1800 reflect the new middle-class culture of sociability, commerce, and science. Old mostly obsolete words illuminate the realities of working-class life, exhausting labor, dirt, outrageous sexism, magic, horses, bizarre food.


Science and Society

Science and Society

Author: A. Rupert Hall

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-10-28

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1040235662

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This is the second selection of articles by Rupert Hall to be published by Variorum. Whereas the first volume focused on Newton and his work, the present one ranges more widely over the interactions between ’pure’ science, ’applied’ science, and craftsmanship, but with an emphasis on the period from the 17th century to the Industrial Revolution. The second and third sections look in particular at the relations between science and warfare, and science and medicine, and the position of the Royal Society forms the focus of several papers. Throughout Professor Hall argues for the need to keep in mind that the distinction between the practical or professional and the intellectual was not then valid in the same way as now; that the problems of the interaction and interdependence between ’knowing’ and ’doing’ are not invariant, but rather historically determined and with defined historical contexts.


Rethinking the Scientific Revolution

Rethinking the Scientific Revolution

Author: Margaret J. Osler

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-03-13

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 9780521667906

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This book challenges the traditional historiography of the Scientific Revolution, probably the single most important unifying concept in the history of science. Usually referring to the period from Copernicus to Newton (roughly 1500 to 1700), the Scientific Revolution is considered to be the central episode in the history of science, the historical moment at which that unique way of looking at the world that we call 'modern science' and its attendant institutions emerged. It has been taken as the terminus a quo of all that followed. Starting with a dialogue between Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Richard S. Westfall, whose understanding of the Scientific Revolution differed in important ways, the papers in this volume reconsider canonical figures, their areas of study, and the formation of disciplinary boundaries during this seminal period of European intellectual history.