The Derby Philosophers
The Derby Philosophers

Author: Paul A. Elliott

Publisher:

Published: 2009-10-15

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13:

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This book focuses upon the activities of a group of Midland intellectuals that included the evolutionist and physician Erasmus Darwin, Rev. Thomas Gisborne the evangelical philosopher and poet, Robert Bage the novelist, Charles Sylvester the chemist and engineer, William George and his son Herbert Spencer, the internationally renowned evolutionist philosopher who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest," and members of the Wedgwood and Strutt families. The book explores how, inspired by science and through educational activities, publications and institutions including the famous Derbyshire General Infirmary (1810) and Derby Arboretum (1840), the Derby philosophers strove to promote social, political and urban improvements with national and international consequences. Much more than a parochial history of one intellectual group or town, this book examines science, politics and culture during one of the most turbulent periods of British history, an age of political and industrial revolutions in which the Derby philosophers were closely involved.

The X Club
The X Club

Author: Ruth Barton

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-11-21

Total Pages: 617

ISBN-13: 022655175X

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In 1864, amid headline-grabbing heresy trials, members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science were asked to sign a declaration affirming that science and scripture were in agreement. Many criticized the new test of orthodoxy; nine decided that collaborative action was required. The X Club tells their story. These six ambitious professionals and three wealthy amateurs—J. D. Hooker, T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, John Lubbock, William Spottiswoode, Edward Frankland, George Busk, T. A. Hirst, and Herbert Spencer—wanted to guide the development of science and public opinion on issues where science impinged on daily life, religious belief, and politics. They formed a private dining club, which they named the X Club, to discuss and further their plans. As Ruth Barton shows, they had a clear objective: they wanted to promote “scientific habits of mind,” which they sought to do through lectures, journalism, and science education. They devoted enormous effort to the expansion of science education, with real, but mixed, success. ​For twenty years, the X Club was the most powerful network in Victorian science—the men succeeded each other in the presidency of the Royal Society for a dozen years. Barton’s group biography traces the roots of their success and the lasting effects of their championing of science against those who attempted to limit or control it, along the way shedding light on the social organization of science, the interactions of science and the state, and the places of science and scientific men in elite culture in the Victorian era.

Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution
Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution

Author: Albert Edward Musson

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13: 9782881243820

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Concentrating on the Industrial Revolution as experienced in Great Britain (and, within that sphere, mainly on the early development of the engineering and chemical industries), the authors develop the thesis that the interaction between theorists and men of practical affairs was much closer, more complex and more consequential than some historians of science have held it to be. Deeply researched, gracefully argued and fully documented. First published in 1969, and established now as a "classic" in the field, the present edition has a new foreword by Margaret C. Jacob. (NW) Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The British Arboretum
The British Arboretum

Author: Paul A. Elliott

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2016-09-12

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 082298167X

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This study explores the science and culture of nineteenth-century British arboretums, or tree collections. The development of arboretums was fostered by a variety of factors, each of which is explored in detail: global trade and exploration, the popularity of collecting, the significance to the British economy and society, developments in Enlightenment science, changes in landscape gardening aesthetics and agricultural and horticultural improvement. Arboretums were idealized as microcosms of nature, miniature encapsulations of the globe and as living museums. This book critically examines different kinds of arboretum in order to understand the changing practical, scientific, aesthetic and pedagogical principles that underpinned their design, display and the way in which they were viewed. It is the first study of its kind and fills a gap in the literature on Victorian science and culture.

Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers
Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers

Author: Stuart Brown

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2005-06-01

Total Pages: 1246

ISBN-13: 1441192417

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This is a two-volume work with entries on individuals who made some contribution to philosophy in the period 1900 to 1960 or soon after. The entries deal with the whole philosophical work of an individual or, in the case of philosophers still living, their whole work to date. Typically the individuals included have been born by 1935 and by now have made their main contributions. Contributions to the subject typically take the form of books or journal articles, but influential teachers and people otherwise important in the world of philosophy may also be included. The dictionary includes amateurs as well as professional philosophers and, where appropriate, thinkers whose main discipline was outside philosophy. There are special problems about the term "British" in the twentieth century, partly because of human migration, partly because of decolonialization and the changing denotation of the term. The intention has been to include not only those who were British subjects at least for a significant part of their lives (even if they mostly lived outside what is now the U.K.) but also people who spent a significant part of their lives in Britain itself, irrespective of their nationality or country of origin. In the first category are included, for instance, a number of people who were born and educated in Britain but who subsequently taught in universities abroad. In the second category are included those who were born elsewhere but who came to Britain and contributed to its philosophical culture.

The Genius of Erasmus Darwin
The Genius of Erasmus Darwin

Author: Christopher Upham Murray Smith

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9780754636717

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The Genius of Erasmus Darwin provides insight into the full extent of Erasmus Darwin's exceptional intellect. He is shown to be a major creative thinker and innovator, one of the minds behind the late eighteenth-century industrial revolution, and one of the first, if not the first, to perceive the living world (including humans) as part of a unified evolutionary scenario. The contributions here provide contextual understandings of Erasmus Darwin's thought, as well as studies of particular works and accounts of the later reception of his writings. In this way it is possible to see why the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge was moved to describe Darwin as 'the first literary character in Europe, and the most original-minded man'.Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather, was one of the leading intellectuals of eighteenth-century England. He was a man with an extraordinary range of interests and activities: he was a doctor, biologist, inventor, poet, linguist and botanist. He was also a founding member of the Lunar Society, an intellectual community that included such eminent men as James Watt and Josiah Wedgwood.

Political Descent
Political Descent

Author: Piers J. Hale

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-08-05

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 022610852X

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Historians of science have long noted the influence of the nineteenth-century political economist Thomas Robert Malthus on Charles Darwin. In a bold move, Piers J. Hale contends that this focus on Malthus and his effect on Darwin’s evolutionary thought neglects a strong anti-Malthusian tradition in English intellectual life, one that not only predated the 1859 publication of the Origin of Species but also persisted throughout the Victorian period until World War I. Political Descent reveals that two evolutionary and political traditions developed in England in the wake of the 1832 Reform Act: one Malthusian, the other decidedly anti-Malthusian and owing much to the ideas of the French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck. These two traditions, Hale shows, developed in a context of mutual hostility, debate, and refutation. Participants disagreed not only about evolutionary processes but also on broader questions regarding the kind of creature our evolution had made us and in what kind of society we ought therefore to live. Significantly, and in spite of Darwin’s acknowledgement that natural selection was “the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms,” both sides of the debate claimed to be the more correctly “Darwinian.” By exploring the full spectrum of scientific and political issues at stake, Political Descent offers a novel approach to the relationship between evolution and political thought in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

The Imagined Empire
The Imagined Empire

Author: Mi Gyung Kim

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2016-12-23

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 0822981955

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The hot-air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, launched for the second time just days before the Treaty of Paris would end the American Revolutionary War. The ascent in Paris—a technological marvel witnessed by a diverse crowd that included Benjamin Franklin—highlighted celebrations of French military victory against Britain and ignited a balloon mania that swept across Europe at the end of the Enlightenment. This popular frenzy for balloon experiments, which attracted hundreds of thousands of spectators, fundamentally altered the once elite audience for science by bringing aristocrats and commoners together. The Imagined Empire explores how this material artifact, the flying machine, not only expanded the public for science and spectacle but inspired utopian dreams of a republican monarchy that would obliterate social boundaries. The balloon, Mi Gyung Kim argues, was a people-machine, a cultural performance that unified and mobilized the people of France, who imagined an aerial empire that would bring glory to the French nation. This critical history of ballooning considers how a relatively simple mechanical gadget became an explosive cultural and political phenomenon on the eve of the French Revolution.

Beyond the Learned Academy
Beyond the Learned Academy

Author: Philip Beeley

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-01-05

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 0198863950

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Comprising fifteen essays by leading authorities in the history of mathematics, this volume aims to exemplify the richness, diversity, and breadth of mathematical practice from the seventeenth century through to the middle of the nineteenth century.