Discipline & experience : the mathematical way in the scientific revolution
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Discipline & experience : the mathematical way in the scientific revolution
（Science and its conceptual foundations）
University of Chicago Press, c1995
- : cloth
- : pbk
- Other Title
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Discipline and experience
Available at / 19 libraries
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International Research Center for Japanese Studies Library
: pbk., alk. paperQ||127||De00122613
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Note
Bibliography: p. 251-279
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
-
: cloth ISBN 9780226139432
Description
Although the scientific revolution has long been regarded as the beginning of modern science, there has been little consensus about its true character. While the application of mathematics to the study of the natural world has always been recognized as an important factor, the role of experiment has been less clearly understood. Peter Dear investigates the nature of the change that occurred during this period, focusing particular attention on evolving notions of experience and how these developed into the experimental work that is at the centre of modern science. He examines 17th-century mathematical sciences - astronomy, optics and mechanics - not as abstract ideas, but as vital enterprises that involved practices related to both experience and experiment. Dear illuminates how mathematicians and natural philosophers of the period - Mersenne, Descartes, Pascal, Barrow, Newton, Boyle and the Jesuits - used experience in their argumentation, and how and why these approaches changed over the course of a century.
Drawing on mathematical texts and works of natural philosophy from all over Europe, he describes a process of change that was gradual, halting, sometimes contradictory - far from the sharp break with intellectual tradition implied by the term "revolution."
Table of Contents
List of Figures Acknowledgments Note on Citations and Translations Introduction: The Measure of All Things 1: Induction in Early-Modern Europe 2: Experience and Jesuit Mathematical Science: The Practical Importance of Methodology 3: Expertise, Novel Claims, and Experimental Events 4: Apostolic Succession, Astronomical Knowledge, and Scientific Traditions 5: The Uses of Experience 6: Art, Nature, Metaphor: The Growth of Physico-Mathematics 7: Pascal's Void, Natural Philosophers, and Mathematical Experience 8: Barrow, Newton, and Constructivist Experiment Conclusion: A Mathematical Natural Philosophy? Bibliography Index
- Volume
-
: pbk ISBN 9780226139449
Description
Although the scientific revolution has long been regarded as the beginning of modern science, there has been little consensus about its true character. While the application of mathematics to the study of the natural world has always been recognized as an important factor, the role of experiment has been less clearly understood. Peter Dear investigates the nature of the change that occurred during this period, focusing particular attention on evolving notions of experience and how these developed into the experimental work that is at the centre of modern science. He examines 17th-century mathematical sciences - astronomy, optics and mechanics - not as abstract ideas, but as vital enterprises that involved practices related to both experience and experiment. Dear illuminates how mathematicians and natural philosophers of the period - Mersenne, Descartes, Pascal, Barrow, Newton, Boyle and the Jesuits - used experience in their argumentation, and how and why these approaches changed over the course of a century.
Drawing on mathematical texts and works of natural philosophy from all over Europe, he describes a process of change that was gradual, halting, sometimes contradictory - far from the sharp break with intellectual tradition implied by the term "revolution."
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