Download or read book Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest written by D. Graham Burnett and published by American Philosophical Society. This book was released on 2005 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1629, the natural philosopher René Descartes enticed a young artisan to undertake a secretive project, one that promised to revolutionize early modern astronomy. Descartes believed he had conceived a new kind of telescope lens, shaped by the light of reason itself, & surpassing anything ever to come from the hands of the glass-working craftsmen of the era. These novel lenses would never be touched by human hands -- they would be cut by an elaborate machine, a self-regulating & automatic device. This study traces the inception, development, & finally the collapse of this ambitious enterprise, which absorbed the energies & attentions of a broad range of 17th-century savants, including Huygens, Wren, Hevelius, Hooke, & even Newton. Illus.
Download or read book Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest written by D. Graham Burnett and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest written by David Graham Burnett and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Descartes and the Ingenium written by Raphaële Garrod and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historically-informed account of the lasting importance of embodied thought in the intellectual trajectory of René Descartes, still remembered today as the founding father of dualism.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy written by Roger Ariew and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-09-09 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Historical Dictionary of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy, Third Edition, centers on Descartes’ philosophy (considered broadly to include his science and mathematics) in the context of 17th-century thought, with attention being paid to its reception. This is done through a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 400 cross-referenced entries on various concepts in Descartes’ philosophy, science, and mathematics, as well as biographical entries about the intellectual setting for Descartes’ philosophy and its reception, both with Cartesians and anti-Cartesians. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Descartes philosophy.
Download or read book Descartes s Secret Notebook written by Amir D. Aczel and published by Crown. This book was released on 2006-10-10 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: René Descartes (1596–1650) is one of the towering and central figures in Western philosophy and mathematics. His apothegm “Cogito, ergo sum” marked the birth of the mind-body problem, while his creation of so-called Cartesian coordinates have made our physical and intellectual conquest of physical space possible. But Descartes had a mysterious and mystical side, as well. Almost certainly a member of the occult brotherhood of the Rosicrucians, he kept a secret notebook, now lost, most of which was written in code. After Descartes’s death, Gottfried Leibniz, inventor of calculus and one of the greatest mathematicians in history, moved to Paris in search of this notebook—and eventually found it in the possession of Claude Clerselier, a friend of Descartes. Leibniz called on Clerselier and was allowed to copy only a couple of pages—which, though written in code, he amazingly deciphered there on the spot. Leibniz’s hastily scribbled notes are all we have today of Descartes’s notebook, which has disappeared. Why did Descartes keep a secret notebook, and what were its contents? The answers to these questions lead Amir Aczel and the reader on an exciting, swashbuckling journey, and offer a fascinating look at one of the great figures of Western culture.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism written by Steven Nadler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism comprises fifty specially written chapters on René Descartes (1596-1650) and Cartesianism, the dominant paradigm for philosophy and science in the seventeenth century, written by an international group of leading scholars of early modern philosophy. The first part focuses on the various aspects of Descartes's biography (including his background, intellectual contexts, writings, and correspondence) and philosophy, with chapters on his epistemology, method, metaphysics, physics, mathematics, moral philosophy, political thought, medical thought, and aesthetics. The chapters of the second part are devoted to the defense, development and modification of Descartes's ideas by later generations of Cartesian philosophers in France, the Netherlands, Italy, and elsewhere. The third and final part considers the opposition to Cartesian philosophy by other philosophers, as well as by civil, ecclesiastic, and academic authorities. This handbook provides an extensive overview of Cartesianism - its doctrines, its legacies and its fortunes - in the period based on the latest research.
Download or read book Discourse on Method written by René Descartes and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 2012-07-01 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an English translation of Descartes' seminal discourse, with an original essay by Richard Kennington. This text is designed to provide the student with a close translation, notes, and a glossary of key terms, facilitating access to ideas as they originally were presented and helping to make the translator's work transparent. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Decartes' immediate audience. The Focus Philosophical Library publishes clear, faithful editions enabling access for modern students to the essential ideas and wisdom of the world’s greatest thinkers.
Download or read book The Magic Lantern at Work written by Martyn Jolly and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, various new media technologies have provided individuals with a set of powerful tools to affect their audiences. Among these the magic lantern show was perhaps the most pervasive, and persuasive. Around the world audiences gathered together in darkened rooms to see a sequence of projected images transition one into another as they listened to personal stories or scripted narrations. Through the power of the magic lantern audiences, for the first time, became the direct witnesses to distant, often traumatic, political events; they visually learned new scientific and medical knowledge, virtually experienced distant places, and collectively experienced strange, often uncanny, phenomena. Although relatively neglected until recently, the apparatus of the magic lantern is now receiving the attention it deserves from historians, curators and artists. Through a set of case studies focusing on the use of the magic lantern by very different, but equally fascinating individuals, a team of international scholars analyses the emerging power of the lantern show in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries within politics, religion, travel, science, health, marketing and entertainment. The magic lantern’s connections to today’s multimedia environments are explored through the intertwined themes of connecting, experiencing, witnessing and persuading.
Download or read book Dutch Light written by Hugh Aldersey-Williams and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Enchanting to the point of escapism.' – Simon Ings, Spectator 'Hugh Aldersey-Williams rescues his subject from Newton's shadow, where he was been unjustly confined for over three hundred years.' – Literary Review Filled with incident, discovery, and revelation, Dutch Light is a vivid account of Christiaan Huygens’s remarkable life and career, but it is also nothing less than the story of the birth of modern science as we know it. Europe’s greatest scientist during the latter half of the seventeenth century, Christiaan Huygens was a true polymath. A towering figure in the fields of astronomy, optics, mechanics, and mathematics, many of his innovations in methodology, optics and timekeeping remain in use to this day. Among his many achievements, he developed the theory of light travelling as a wave, invented the mechanism for the pendulum clock, and discovered the rings of Saturn – via a telescope that he had also invented. A man of fashion and culture, Christiaan came from a family of multi-talented individuals whose circle included not only leading figures of Dutch society, but also artists and philosophers such as Rembrandt, Locke and Descartes. The Huygens family and their contemporaries would become key actors in the Dutch Golden Age, a time of unprecedented intellectual expansion within the Netherlands. Set against a backdrop of worldwide religious and political turmoil, this febrile period was defined by danger, luxury and leisure, but also curiosity, purpose, and tremendous possibility. Following in Huygens’s footsteps as he navigates this era while shuttling opportunistically between countries and scientific disciplines, Hugh Aldersey-Williams builds a compelling case to reclaim Huygens from the margins of history and acknowledge him as one of our most important and influential scientific figures.
Download or read book The Origins of the Telescope written by Albert Van Helden and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origins of the telescope have been discussed and debated since shortly after the instrument's appearance in The Hague in 1608. Civic and national pride have led local dignitaries, popular writers, and numerous scholars to search the archives and to construct sharply divergent histories. Did the honor of the invention belong to the Dutch, to the Italians, to the English, or to the Spanish? And if the city of Middelburg in the Netherlands was, in fact, the cradle of the instrument, was the "true inventor" Hans Lipperhey or his rival Zacharias Jansen? Or was the instrument there before anyone knew it? Over the past several decades, a group of historians and scientists have sought out new documents, re-examined familiar ones, and tested early lenses and telescopes. This volume contains the proceedings of a symposium held in Middelburg in September 2008 to mark 400 years of the telescope. The essays in it, taken as a whole, present a new and convincing account of the origins of the instrument that changed mankind's vision of the universe.
Download or read book Light written by Bruce Watson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-02-02 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Light begins at Stonehenge, where crowds cheer a solstice sunrise. After sampling myths explaining First Light, the story moves on to early philosophers' queries, then through the centuries, from Buddhist temples to Biblical scripture, when light was the soul of the divine. Battling darkness and despair, Gothic architects crafted radiant cathedrals while Dante dreamed a "heaven of pure light." Later, following Leonardo's advice, Renaissance artists learned to capture light on canvas. During the Scientific Revolution, Galileo gathered light in his telescope, Descartes measured the rainbow, and Newton used prisms to solidify the science of optics. But even after Newton, light was an enigma. Particle or wave? Did it flow through an invisible "ether"? Through the age of Edison and into the age of lasers, Light reveals how light sparked new wonders--relativity, quantum electrodynamics, fiber optics, and more. Although lasers now perform everyday miracles, light retains its eternal allure. "For the rest of my life," Einstein said, "I will reflect on what light is." Light explores and celebrates such curiosity.
Download or read book Eye Chart written by William Germano and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Desert nomads tested their vision by distinguishing a pair of stars. But we have since created more disquieting ways to test the strength of the eyes. Reading the eye chart is an exercise in failure, since it only gets interesting when you cannot read any further. It is the opposite of interpretative reading, like one does with literature. When you have finished reading an eye chart, what exactly have you even read? From a Spanish cleric's Renaissance guide to testing vision, to a Dutch ophthalmologist's innovation in optical tech, to the witty subversion of the eye chart in advertising and popular culture, William Germano's Eye Chart lets people see the eye chart at last. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Download or read book The Embodied Imagination in Antebellum American Art and Culture written by Catherine Holochwost and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-05 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reveals a new history of the imagination told through its engagement with the body. Even as they denounced the imagination’s potential for inviting luxury, vice, and corruption, American audiences avidly consumed a transatlantic visual culture of touring paintings, dioramas, gift books, and theatrical performances that pictured a preindustrial—and largely imaginary—European past. By examining the visual, material, and rhetorical strategies artists like Washington Allston, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, and others used to navigate this treacherous ground, Catherine Holochwost uncovers a hidden tension in antebellum aesthetics. The book will be of interest to scholars of art history, literary and cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, and media studies.
Download or read book The Letterbooks of John Evelyn written by Douglas D.C. Chambers and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 1303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Letterbooks of John Evelyn, a collection of more than eight hundred letters selected by Evelyn himself, constitutes an essential new resource for scholars of seventeenth-century England.
Download or read book Eye of the Beholder Johannes Vermeer Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and the Reinvention of Seeing written by Laura J. Snyder and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-03-16 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The remarkable story of how an artist and a scientist in seventeenth-century Holland transformed the way we see the world. On a summer day in 1674, in the small Dutch city of Delft, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek—a cloth salesman, local bureaucrat, and self-taught natural philosopher—gazed through a tiny lens set into a brass holder and discovered a never-before imagined world of microscopic life. At the same time, in a nearby attic, the painter Johannes Vermeer was using another optical device, a camera obscura, to experiment with light and create the most luminous pictures ever beheld. “See for yourself!” was the clarion call of the 1600s. Scientists peered at nature through microscopes and telescopes, making the discoveries in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and anatomy that ignited the Scientific Revolution. Artists investigated nature with lenses, mirrors, and camera obscuras, creating extraordinarily detailed paintings of flowers and insects, and scenes filled with realistic effects of light, shadow, and color. By extending the reach of sight the new optical instruments prompted the realization that there is more than meets the eye. But they also raised questions about how we see and what it means to see. In answering these questions, scientists and artists in Delft changed how we perceive the world. In Eye of the Beholder, Laura J. Snyder transports us to the streets, inns, and guildhalls of seventeenth-century Holland, where artists and scientists gathered, and to their studios and laboratories, where they mixed paints and prepared canvases, ground and polished lenses, examined and dissected insects and other animals, and invented the modern notion of seeing. With charm and narrative flair Snyder brings Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek—and the men and women around them—vividly to life. The story of these two geniuses and the transformation they engendered shows us why we see the world—and our place within it—as we do today. Eye of the Beholder was named "A Best Art Book of the Year" by Christie's and "A Best Read of the Year" by New Scientist in 2015.
