Discipline and Experience
Discipline and Experience

Author: Peter Dear

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-05-13

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0226139522

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Although the Scientific Revolution has long been regarded as the beginning of modern science, there has been little consensus about its true character. While the application of mathematics to the study of the natural world has always been recognized as an important factor, the role of experiment has been less clearly understood. Peter Dear investigates the nature of the change that occurred during this period, focusing particular attention on evolving notions of experience and how these developed into the experimental work that is at the center of modern science. He examines seventeenth-century mathematical sciences—astronomy, optics, and mechanics—not as abstract ideas, but as vital enterprises that involved practices related to both experience and experiment. Dear illuminates how mathematicians and natural philosophers of the period—Mersenne, Descartes, Pascal, Barrow, Newton, Boyle, and the Jesuits—used experience in their argumentation, and how and why these approaches changed over the course of a century. Drawing on mathematical texts and works of natural philosophy from all over Europe, he describes a process of change that was gradual, halting, sometimes contradictory—far from the sharp break with intellectual tradition implied by the term "revolution."

Theophrastean Studies
Theophrastean Studies

Author: William W. Fortenbaugh

Publisher: Franz Steiner Verlag

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9783515078085

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Theophrastus of Eresus was Aristotle's successor as head of the Peripatetic School. He is best known for a humorous collection of character sketches, but his importance in antiquity and for the history of thought in general is much greater. He was the founder of systematic botany, and his work on logic went well beyond that of Aristotle, as did his interest in rhetoric and poetics. He was the first to collect the laws of different city-states, and in ethics he emphasized manners as well as moral virtue. In recent years, his importance has been more fully appreciated through the efforts of Professor William Fortenbaugh, who founded Project Theophrastus, an international undertaking whose goal has been to collect, edit and comment on the fragments of Theophrastus. While leading this project, Professor Fortenbaugh has been writing on Theophrastus, highlighting his achievements and making connections between areas like logic and rhetoric, psychology and religion, ethics and politics. The present volume brings together for the first time twenty-two of his essays.