Download or read book The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th Century written by Tore Frängsmyr and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century written by Tore Frangsmyr and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 621 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Eighteenth Century Europe 1700 1789 written by Jeremy Black and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1999-10-04 with total page 619 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition of this highly successful and influential work includes two entirely new chapters - on Europe and the wider world and on the Revolutionary crisis - and is extensively revised throughout. It offers a wide-ranging thematic account of the century, that explores social, cultural and economic topics, as well as giving a clear analysis of the political events. Filled with fascinating detail and unusual examples, this absorbing history of eighteenth-century Europe will bring the period alive to students and teachers alike.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Eighteenth century Philosophy written by Knud Haakonssen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This two-volume set presents a comprehensive and up-to-date history of eighteenth-century philosophy. The subject is treated systematically by topic, not by individual thinker, school, or movement, thus enabling a much more historically nuanced picture of the period to be painted.
Download or read book The Quantification of Life and Health from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century written by Simone Guidi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume explores the intersection of medicine and philosophy throughout history, calling attention to the role of quantification in understanding the medical body. Retracing current trends and debates to examine the quantification of the body throughout the early modern, modern and early contemporary age, the authors contextualise important issues of both medical and philosophical significance, with chapters focusing on the quantification of temperaments and fluids, complexions, functions of the living body, embryology, and the impact of quantified reasoning on the concepts of health and illness. With insights spanning from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century, this book provides a wide-ranging overview of attempts to ‘quantify’ the human body at various points. Arguing that medicine and philosophy have been constantly in dialogue with each other, the authors discuss how this provided a strategic opportunity both for medical thought and philosophy to refine and further develop. Given today’s fascination with the quantification of the body, represented by the growing profusion of self-tracking devices logging one’s sleep, diet or mood, this collection offers an important and timely contribution to an emerging and interdisciplinary field of study.
Download or read book Calculated Values written by William Deringer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-19 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern political culture features a deep-seated faith in the power of numbers to find answers, settle disputes, and explain how the world works. Whether evaluating economic trends, measuring the success of institutions, or divining public opinion, we are told that numbers don’t lie. But numbers have not always been so revered. Calculated Values traces how numbers first gained widespread public authority in one nation, Great Britain. Into the seventeenth century, numerical reasoning bore no special weight in political life. Complex calculations were often regarded with suspicion, seen as the narrow province of navigators, bookkeepers, and astrologers, not gentlemen. This changed in the decades following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Though Britons’ new quantitative enthusiasm coincided with major advances in natural science, financial capitalism, and the power of the British state, it was no automatic consequence of those developments, William Deringer argues. Rather, it was a product of politics—ugly, antagonistic, partisan politics. From Parliamentary debates to cheap pamphlets, disputes over taxes, trade, and national debt were increasingly conducted through calculations. Some of the era’s most pivotal political moments, like the 1707 Union of England and Scotland and the 1720 South Sea Bubble, turned upon calculative conflicts. As Britons learned to fight by the numbers, they came to believe, as one calculator wrote in 1727, that “facts and figures are the most stubborn evidences.” Yet the authority of numbers arose not from efforts to find objective truths that transcended politics, but from the turmoil of politics itself.
Download or read book Beyond the Learned Academy written by Philip Beeley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-05 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Doctor of Society written by Roy Porter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1992, this book explores how we come to hold our present attitudes towards health, sickness and the medical profession. Roy Porter argues that the outlook of the age of Enlightenment was crucially important in the creation of modern thinking about disease, doctors and society. To illustrate this viewpoint, he focuses on Thomas Beddoes, a prominent doctor of the eighteenth century and examines his challenging, pugnacious, radical and often amusing views on a wide range of issues concerning the place of illness and medicine in society. Many modern debates in medicine continue to echo the topics which Beddoes himself discussed in his ever-trenchant and provocative manner. This book will be of interest to those studying the history of medicine, social history and the Enlightenment.
Download or read book When Information Came of Age written by Daniel R. Headrick and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2000-12-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book provides a concise and readable survey of the many conceptual developments between 1700 and 1850 and draws connections to leading technologies of today. It documents three breakthroughs in information systems that date to the period: the classification and nomenclature of Linneaus, the chemical system devised by Lavoisier, and the metric system. It shows how eighteenth-century political arithmeticians and demographers pioneered statistics and graphs as a means for presenting data succinctly and visually. It describes the transformation of cartography from art to science as it incorporated new methods for determining longitude at sea and new data on the measure of the arc of the meridian on land. Finally, it looks at the early steps in codifying and transmitting information, including the development of dictionaries, the invention of semaphore telegraphs and naval flag signaling, and the conceptual changes in the use and purpose of postal services.".
Download or read book Prometheus Tamed written by Cornel Zwierlein and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-01-11 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Large city fires were a huge threat in premodern Central European every-day life; only quite late, institutional forms of fire insurances emerged as a post-disaster instrument of damage recovery. During the nineteenth century, insurance agencies spread through the World forming a plurality of modernities, safe or unsafe.
Download or read book The History of Medicine and Healthcare written by Lesley Bolton and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-24 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together such topics as the history of psychiatry, biomedical ethics in history, military medicine, children, women and changing gender roles in modern medicine, public health history, and a special communication on the history of Canadian hospital workers. Of special note is a paper by internationally renowned historian, Dr Peter L. Twohig, Canadian Research Chair in the History of the Atlantic World at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is well-illustrated with images and diagrams pertaining to the history of medicine.
Download or read book The Values of Precision written by M. Norton Wise and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Values of Precision examines how exactitude has come to occupy such a prominent place in Western culture. What has been the value of numerical values? Beginning with the late eighteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, the essays in this volume support the view that centralizing states--with their increasingly widespread bureaucracies for managing trade, taxation, and armies--and large-scale commercial enterprises--with their requirements for standardization and mass production--have been the major promoters of numerical precision. Taking advantage of the resources available, scientists and engineers have entered a symbiotic relationship with state and industry, which in turn has led to increasingly refined measures in ever-widening domains of the natural and social world. At the heart of this book, therefore, is an inquiry into the capacity of numbers and instruments to travel across boundaries of culture and materials. Many of the papers focus attention on disagreements about the significance and the credibility of particular sorts of measurements deployed to support particular claims, as in the measures of the population of France, the electrical resistance of copper, or the solvency of insurance companies. At the same time they display the deeply cultural character of precision values. Contributors to the volume include Ken Alder, Graeme J. N. Gooday, Jan Golinski, Frederic L. Holmes, Kathryn M. Olesko, Theodore M. Porter, Andrea Rusnock, Simon Schaffer, George Sweetnam, Andrew Warwick, and M. Norton Wise.
Download or read book A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment written by Anne C. Vila and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-23 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the varied ways in which the senses were perceived afresh during the Enlightenment. In addition to introducing new philosophical and scientific models which sometimes upended the classic hierarchy of the senses, this period witnessed major changes in living and working habits, including urbanization, travel and exploration, the invention of new sonic and visual media, and the rise of comfort and pleasure as values that cut across a range of social classes. As this volume shows, those developments inspired a wealth of sensorially stimulating styles of design, art, music, poetry, foodstuffs, material goods and modes of worship and entertainment. The volume also demonstrates the period's countervailing concern with managing the senses, evident in fields like natural philosophy, medicine, education, religion, and public hygiene. Finally, it explores some of the Enlightenment's desensualizing tendencies, like the separation of sensuous body from discerning mind in certain arenas of science and manufacturing, and the late 18th-century shift away from a politics of publicity, or intense visual and aural scrutiny, toward the secret ballot. A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment presents essays on the following topics: the social life of the senses; urban sensations; the senses in the marketplace; the senses in religion; the senses in philosophy and science; medicine and the senses; the senses in literature; art and the senses; and sensory media.
Download or read book The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science written by John L. Heilbron and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-02-14 with total page 994 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing 609 encyclopedic articles written by more than 200 prominent scholars, The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science presents an unparalleled history of the field invaluable to anyone with an interest in the technology, ideas, discoveries, and learned institutions that have shaped our world over the past five centuries. Focusing on the period from the Renaissance to the early twenty-first century, the articles cover all disciplines (Biology, Alchemy, Behaviorism), historical periods (the Scientific Revolution, World War II, the Cold War), concepts (Hypothesis, Space and Time, Ether), and methodologies and philosophies (Observation and Experiment, Darwinism). Coverage is international, tracing the spread of science from its traditional centers and explaining how the prevailing knowledge of non-Western societies has modified or contributed to the dominant global science as it is currently understood. Revealing the interplay between science and the wider culture, the Companion includes entries on topics such as minority groups, art, religion, and science's practical applications. One hundred biographies of the most iconic historic figures, chosen for their contributions to science and the interest of their lives, are also included. Above all The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science is a companion to world history: modern in coverage, generous in breadth, and cosmopolitan in scope. The volume's utility is enhanced by a thematic outline of the entire contents, a thorough system of cross-referencing, and a detailed index that enables the reader to follow a specific line of inquiry along various threads from multiple starting points. Each essay has numerous suggestions for further reading, all of which favor literature that is accessible to the general reader, and a bibliographical essay provides a general overview of the scholarship in the field. Lastly, as a contribution to the visual appeal of the Companion, over 100 black-and-white illustrations and an eight-page color section capture the eye and spark the imagination.
Download or read book Literary Infinities written by Baylee Brits and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, we have forgotten that mathematics was once aligned with the arts, rather than with the sciences. Literary Infinities analyses the connection between the late 19th-century revolution in the mathematics of the infinite and the literature of 20th-century modernism, opening up a novel path of influence and inquiry in modernist literature. Baylee Brits considers the role of numbers and the concept of the infinite in key modernists, including James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee. She begins by recuperating the difficult and rebellious German mathematician, Georg Cantor, for the broader artistic, cultural and philosophical project of modernism. Cantor revolutionized the mathematics of the infinite, creating reverberations across the numerical sciences, philosophy, religion and literary modernism. This 'modernist' infinity is shown to undergird and shape key innovations in narrative form, creating a bridge between the mathematical and the literary, presentation and representation, formalism and the tactile imagination.
Download or read book The Creation of the Modern World written by Roy Porter and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2000 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engagingly written new work highlights Britain's long-underestimated and pivotal role in disseminating the ideas and culture of the Enlightenment. Moving beyond the numerous histories centered on France and Germany, the acclaimed social historian Roy Porter explains how monumental changes in thinking in Britain influenced worldwide developments. Here is a "splendidly imaginative" work that "propels the debate forward ... and makes a valuable point" (New York Times Book Review).
Download or read book Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment written by Peter H. Reill and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-06-06 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This far-reaching study redraws the intellectual map of the Enlightenment and boldly reassesses the legacy of that highly influential period for us today. Peter Hanns Reill argues that in the middle of the eighteenth century, a major shift occurred in the way Enlightenment thinkers conceived of nature that caused many of them to reject the prevailing doctrine of mechanism and turn to a vitalistic model to account for phenomena in natural history, the life sciences, and chemistry. As he traces the ramifications of this new way of thinking through time and across disciplines, Reill provocatively complicates our understanding of the way key Enlightenment thinkers viewed nature. His sophisticated analysis ultimately questions postmodern narratives that have assumed a monolithic Enlightenment—characterized by the dominance of instrumental reason—that has led to many of the disasters of modern life.
