Product Description: Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman investigate an array of instruments from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century that seem at first to be marginal to science--magnetic clocks that were said to operate by the movements of sunflower seeds, magic lanterns, ocular harpsichords (machines that played different colored lights in harmonious mixtures), Aeolian harps (a form of wind chime), and other instruments of "natural magic" designed to produce wondrous effects...read more

Product Description: Being familiar with Goethe's Faust story, students of Western thought will not be surprised to learn that Goethe was also a scientist, philosopher and historian. This book is about the interdisciplinary activities of his mid-life (1790-1810) when he researched optics, colour theory and plant morphology, and at the same time contributed to the growing literature in the history and philosophy of science...read more

Product Description: George Sarton animated the discipline of history of science (HoS) in America. This vol. traces his youth & educ. in Belgium, & his marriage to Mabel Elwes. It follows the Sarton s in their path from idealistic refugees fleeing the invasion of Belgium in 1914 to destitute intellectuals at Harvard Univ...read more

Product Description: As historians of science increasingly turn to work on recent (post 1945) science, the historiographical and methodological problems associated with the history of contemporary science are debated with growing frequency and urgency...read more

Product Description: As historians of science increasingly turn to work on recent (post 1945) science, the historiographical and methodological problems associated with the history of contemporary science are debated with growing frequency and urgency...read more

Product Description: Relocating Modern Science challenges the belief that modern science was created uniquely in the West and was subsequently diffused elsewhere. Through a detailed analysis of key moments in the history of science, it demonstrates the crucial roles of circulation and intercultural encounter for their emergence...read more

A critical overview of some of the great scientific discoveries of the twentieth century examines the impact of each breakthrough, the personalities and human drama involved, and its meaning in terms of the pattern of scientific discovery, drawing on the original papers of Einstein, Bohr, McClintock, Pauling, and other notable scientists. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

A critical overview of some of the great scientific discoveries of the twentieth century examines the impact of each breakthrough, the personalities and human drama involved, and its meaning in terms of the pattern of scientific discovery, drawing on the original papers of Einstein, Bohr, McClintock, Pauling, and other notable scientists. 50,000 first printing.

Product Description: Arguably the best available introduction to constructivism, a research paradigm that has dominated the history of science for the past forty years, Making Natural Knowledge reflects on the importance of this theory, tells the history of its rise to prominence, and traces its most important tensions...read more

Product Description: Defining Science deals with the major role of the historian and philosopher of science, William Whewell, in early Victorian debates about the nature of science and its moral and cultural value. Richard Yeo also examines the different forms or genres in which science was discussed in the public sphere--most crucially in the Victorian review journals, but also in biographical, historical and educational works...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Elisabeth Crawford's new study departs from the commonly held notion that universalism and internationalism are inherent features of science. Showing how the rise of scientific organizations around the turn of the century had centered on national scientific enterprises, Dr...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In Toward a Dialogue of Understandings, Mary Ellen Pitts examines scientist Loren Eiseley's unique impact as a thinker and writer.

Product Description: In this first book-length historiographical study of the Scientific Revolution, H. Floris Cohen examines the body of work on the intellectual, social, and cultural origins of early modern science. Cohen critically surveys a wide range of scholarship since the nineteenth century, offering new perspectives on how the Scientific Revolution changed forever the way we understand the natural world and our place in it...read more

Product Description: The articles in this volume have been first presented during an international Conference organised by the Greek Society for the History of Science and Technology in June 1990 at Corfu. The Society was founded in 1989 and planned to hold a series of meetings to impress upon an audience comprised mainly by Greek students and scholars, the point that history of science is an autonomous discipline with its own plurality of approaches developed over the years as a result of long discussions and disputes within the community of historians of science...read more

Product Description: Michael Segre's elegant survey of Galileo takes a close look at the myths that have grown up around this figure of genius. Segre assesses Galileo's place in the scientific, cultural, and political communities of post-Renaissance Italy: What role did scientific experiments really play in Galileo's science? What scientific and philosophical questions did he leave unresolved for his followers to grapple with? How did his followers—scientists like Borelli and Torricelli—deal with Galileo's overshadowing presence after his death? How did Galileo's political and religious confrontations affect the course of science?Segre's portrait of Galileo and science in the generation that followed him is accessible and stimulating to the general reader, the student, and the professional historian of science alike...read more

Product Description: This collection focuses on the intellectual development of the sciences, their relationships with technology, and their place in culture in general including a proposed realignment of science, technology, and art.

Product Description: Whether history or anthropology is the most fundamental social science remains still a controversial and undecided issue. For a proper understanding of this instructive controversy, the presuppositions of these two disciplines need to be critically and philosophically reviewed...read more

This book introduces the methodological and philosophical problems with which modern history of science is concerned, offering a comprehensive and critical review through description and evaluation of significant historiographical viewpoints. Incorporating discussion of key problems in general historical writing, with examples drawn from a range of disciplines, this non-elementary introduction bridges the gap between general history and history of science. Following a review of the early development of the history of science, the theory of history as applied to science history is introduced, examining the basic problems which this generates, including problems of periodisation, ideological functions, and the conflict between diachronical and anachronical historiography. Finally, the book considers the critical use, and analysis, of historical sources, and the possibility of the experiemental reconstruction of history. Aimed primarily at students, the book's broad scope and integration of historical, philosophical and scientific matters will interest philosophers, sociologists and general historians, for whom there is no alternative introduction to the subject at this level. (view table of contents)