Product Description: Throughout the history of the Western world, science has possessed an extraordinary amount of authority and prestige. And while its pedestal has been jostled by numerous evolutions and revolutions, science has always managed to maintain its stronghold as the knowing enterprise that explains how the natural world works: we treat such legendary scientists as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein with admiration and reverence because they offer profound and sustaining insight into the meaning of the universe...read more

From Copernicus, who put the earth in orbit around the sun, to Isaac Newton, who gave the world universal gravitation, the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries transformed the way that Europeans understood their world. In this book, Peter Dear offers an accessible introduction to the origins of modern science for both students and general readers. Beginning with "what was worth knowing in 1500," Dear takes the reader through natural philosophy, humanism, mathematics, and experimentalism until he can describe "what was worth knowing by the eighteenth century." Along the way, he discusses the key ideas, individuals, and social changes that constituted the Scientific Revolution. For all of its economy and broad appeal, Revolutionizing the Sciences never sacrifices sophistication of treatment. Dear questions triumphal ideas of scientific progress, unravels the connections between scientific knowledge and power over nature, and distinguishes between the scientific renaissance that characterized the sixteenth century and the more fundamental revolution that occurred in the seventeenth. This is an ideal textbook on the Scientific Revolution for courses on the history of science or the history of early modern Europe. The text is chronologically arranged and fully covers both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, standing alone as an up-to-date, complete general introduction to the origins of modern science in Europe. Revolutionizing the Sciences is the best available choice for teaching or learning about the developments that came to be called the Scientific Revolution. (view table of contents)

The European expansion around the globe, which began in the sixteenth century, carried with it new conceptions of knowledge itself. This book attempts to analyse the shaping of new perceptions of natural knowledge in this period, covering key figures such as Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and Newton.

Product Description: This collection brings together thirteen articles on early modern Western science, each representing an important contribution to the ways in which the scientific revolution is regarded today.The anthology features classic and prize-winning articles by renowned scholars, including "Totius in verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society," by Peter Dear; "The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg Interpretation of the Copernican Theory," by Robert S...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)