Download or read book The Romantic Machine written by John Tresch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-02-06 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years immediately following Napoleon’s defeat, French thinkers in all fields set their minds to the problem of how to recover from the long upheavals that had been set into motion by the French Revolution. Many challenged the Enlightenment’s emphasis on mechanics and questioned the rising power of machines, seeking a return to the organic unity of an earlier age and triggering the artistic and philosophical movement of romanticism. Previous scholars have viewed romanticism and industrialization in opposition, but in this groundbreaking volume John Tresch reveals how thoroughly entwined science and the arts were in early nineteenth-century France and how they worked together to unite a fractured society. Focusing on a set of celebrated technologies, including steam engines, electromagnetic and geophysical instruments, early photography, and mass-scale printing, Tresch looks at how new conceptions of energy, instrumentality, and association fueled such diverse developments as fantastic literature, popular astronomy, grand opera, positivism, utopian socialism, and the Revolution of 1848. He shows that those who attempted to fuse organicism and mechanism in various ways, including Alexander von Humboldt and Auguste Comte, charted a road not taken that resonates today. Essential reading for historians of science, intellectual and cultural historians of Europe, and literary and art historians, The Romantic Machine is poised to profoundly alter our understanding of the scientific and cultural landscape of the early nineteenth century.
Download or read book Stellar Polarimetry written by David Clarke and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-10-30 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by an experienced teacher and author, this must-have source for work with polarimetric equipment and polarimetry in astronomy conveys the knowledge of the technology and techniques needed to measure and interpret polarizations. As such, this monograph offers a brief introduction and refresher, while also covering in detail statistics and data treatment as well as telescope optics. For astronomers, physicists and those working in the optical industry.
Download or read book A Tenth of a Second written by Jimena Canales and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-01-15 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late fifteenth century, clocks acquired minute hands. A century later, second hands appeared. But it wasn’t until the 1850s that instruments could recognize a tenth of a second, and, once they did, the impact on modern science and society was profound. Revealing the history behind this infinitesimal interval, A Tenth of a Second sheds new light on modernity and illuminates the work of important thinkers of the last two centuries. Tracing debates about the nature of time, causality, and free will, as well as the introduction of modern technologies—telegraphy, photography, cinematography—Jimena Canales locates the reverberations of this “perceptual moment” throughout culture. Once scientists associated the tenth of a second with the speed of thought, they developed reaction time experiments with lasting implications for experimental psychology, physiology, and optics. Astronomers and physicists struggled to control the profound consequences of results that were a tenth of a second off. And references to the interval were part of a general inquiry into time, consciousness, and sensory experience that involved rethinking the contributions of Descartes and Kant. Considering its impact on much longer time periods and featuring appearances by Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, and Albert Einstein, among others, A Tenth of a Second is ultimately an important contribution to history and a novel perspective on modernity.
Download or read book Science and Immortality written by Charles B. Paul and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-07-19 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Science and Polity in France written by Charles Coulston Gillispie and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the end of the eighteenth century, the French dominated the world of science. And although science and politics had little to do with each other directly, there were increasingly frequent intersections. This is a study of those transactions between science and state, knowledge and power--on the eve of the French Revolution. Charles Gillispie explores how the links between science and polity in France were related to governmental reform, modernization of the economy, and professionalization of science and engineering.
Download or read book The Skeptical Tradition Around 1800 written by J. van der Zande and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1980s the late Charles B. Schmitt and I discussed the fact that so much new research and new interpretations were taking place concerning various areas of modem skepticism that we, as pioneers, ought to organize a conference where these new findings and outlooks could be presented and discussed. Charles and I had both visited the great library at Wolfenbiittel, and were most happy when the Herzog August Bibliothek agreed to host the first conference on the history of skepticism, in 1984 (published as Skepticism from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. R. H. Popkin and Charles B. Schmitt [Wiesbaden, 1987, Wolfenbiitteler For schungen, vol. 35]) Charles and I projected a series of later conferences, the first of which would deal with skepticism and irreligion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unfortunately, however, Charles died suddenly in 1986, while lecturing in Padua. Subsequent to his death Constance Blackwell, his companion of many years, established the Foundation for Intellectual History to support research and publica tion on topics in the history of ideas that continued Schmitt's interests. One of the first ventures was to arrange and fund the already planned conference on skepticism and irreligion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After many difficulties and problems, the conference was sponsored and funded by the Foundation for Intel lectual History, one of its first public activities. It was held at the lovely facilities of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Wassenaar in 1990.
Download or read book The Rise of the Wave Theory of Light written by Jed Z. Buchwald and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1989-03-15 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "No one interested in the history of optics, the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century physics, or the general phenomenon of theory change in science can afford to ignore Jed Buchwald's well-structured, highly detailed, and scrupulously researched book. . . . Buchwald's analysis will surely constitute the essential starting point for further work on this important and hitherto relatively neglected episode of theory change."—John Worrall, Isis
Download or read book Conspiracy in the French Revolution written by Peter R. Campbell and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-04 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conspiratorial views of events abound even in our modern, rational world. Often such theories serve to explain the inexplicable. Sometimes they are developed for motives of political expediency: it is simpler to see political opponents as conspirators and terrorists, putting them into one convenient basket, than to seek to understand and disentangle the complex motivations of opponents. So it is not surprising to see that just when the French Revolution was creating the modern political world, a constant obsession with conspiracies lay at the heart of the revolutionary conception of politics. The book considers the nature and development of the conspiracy obsession from the end of the old regime to the Directory. Chapters focus on conspiracy and fears of conspiracy in the old regime; in the Constituent Assembly; by the king and Marie Antoinette; amongst the people of Paris; on attitudes towards the peasantry and conspiracy; on Jacobin politics of the Year II and the ‘foreign plot’; on counter-revolutionary plots and imaginary plots; on Babeuf and the ‘conspiracy of equals’; and finally on fear of conspiracy as an intellectual impasse in the revolutionary mentality. Inspired by recent debates, this book is a comprehensive survey of the nature of conspiracy in the French Revolution, with each chapter written by a leading historian on the question. Each chapter is an original contribution to the topic, written however to include the wider issues for the area concerned. There is an emphasis throughout on clarity and accessibility, making the volume suitable for a wide readership as well as undergraduates and advanced researchers
Download or read book Popular Astronomy written by and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 814 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The History of the Discovery of the Solar Spots written by Walter M. Mitchell and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Popular Astronomy written by William Wallace Payne and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Woman Question in France 1400 1870 written by Karen Offen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a revolutionary reinterpretation of the French past from the early fifteenth century to the establishment of the Third Republic, focused on public challenges and defenses of masculine hierarchy in relations between women and men. Karen Offen surveys heated exchanges around women's 'influence'; their exclusion from 'authority'; the increasing prominence of biomedical thinking and population issues; concerns about education, intellect, and the sexual politics of knowledge; and the politics of women's work. Initially, the majority of commentators were literate and influential men. However, as more and more women attained literacy, they too began to analyze their situation in print and to contest men's claims about who women were and should be, and what they should be restrained from doing, and why. As urban print culture exploded and revolutionary ideas of 'equality' fuelled women's claims for emancipation, this question resonated throughout francophone Europe and, ultimately, across the seas.
Download or read book Williams Norgate s Foreign Catalogues Etc written by Williams and Norgate and published by . This book was released on 1856 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Shadow of Enlightenment written by Theresa Levitt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-08 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines the intersection of science and politics in the work of Francois Arago and Jean-Baptiste Biot, the principle architects of the optical revolution of early 19th-century France. Their disagreement over the optical accessibility of the world played out across a wide range of French culture.
Download or read book How to Speak French written by Achille Albites and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-09-23 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprint of the original, first published in 1873.
Download or read book Landscapes of Memory and Experience written by Jan Birksted and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been argued that the history of landscape and of gardens has been marginalized from the mainstream of art history and visual studies because of a lack of engagement with the theories, methods and concepts of these disciplines. This book explores possible ways out of this impasse in such a way that landscape studies would become pivotal through its theoretical advances, since landscape studies would challenge the underlying assumptions of traditional phenomenological theory. Thus the history and theory of twentieth-century landscape might not only once again share concepts and methods with contemporary art and design history, but might in turn influence them. A complementary sequel to Relating Architecture to Landscape, this volume of essays explores further areas of interest and discussion in the landscape/architecture debate and offers contributions from a team of well-known researchers, teachers and writers. The choice of topics is wide-ranging and features case studies of modern and contemporary schemes from the USA, Far East and Australasia.
