William Harvey's natural philosophy

Bibliographic Information

William Harvey's natural philosophy

Roger French

Cambridge University Press, 1994

  • pbk

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Includes index

"This digitally printed first paperback version 2006" -- T.p. verso of pbk

Description and Table of Contents

Description

William Harvey's natural philosophy was a view of the world that he had put together during his education in Cambridge and Padua. It contained ways of structuring knowledge, formulating questions and arriving at answers that directed the programme of work in which he discovered the circulation of the blood. This book, the most extensive discussion of Harvey to be published for over twenty-five years, reports extensively on the views of those who wrote for and against him. It is a study of a major change in natural philosophy and of the forces which acted for and, equally important, against change. In a period traditionally central to historians of science, it is argued here that natural philosophy and particularly Harvey's speciality within it - anatomy - was theocentric. Harvey's contribution was experiment; and the revolution which occurred in the seventeenth century was concerned not with science but with experiment and the status of natural knowledge.

Table of Contents

  • List of figures
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • 1. Natural philosophy and anatomy
  • 2. Harvey's sources in Renaissance anatomy
  • 3. Harvey's research programme
  • 4. The anatomy lectures and the circulation
  • 5. The structure of De motu cordis
  • 6. Early reactions in England
  • 7. Overseas
  • 8. Two natural philosophies
  • 9. Circulation through Europe
  • 10. Back to Cambridge
  • 11. Harvey and experimental philosophy
  • Index.

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