History of Science

With insight and wit, Robert J. Richards focuses on the development of evolutionary theories of mind and behavior from their first distinct appeara...

Self-styled adventurer, literary wit, and statesman of science, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698 - 1759) stood at the center of Enlightenmen...

In this extraordinary work, Donald J. Wilcox seeks to discover an approach to narrative and history consistent with the discontinuous, relative tim...

"Warmly recommended. It is that rare achievement, a lively book which at the same time takes the fullest possible advantage of scholarly knowledge....

How have our conceptions of primate behaviour and society changed since primatology came into its own after World War II? What kind of science is p...

"A discussion of the historical development of our ideas of time as they relate to nature, human nature and society. . . . The excellence of The Di...

How do we come to trust our knowledge of the world? What are the means by which we distinguish true from false accounts? Why do we credit one obser...

Originally published in 1979, The Darwinian Revolution was the first comprehensive and readable synthesis of the history of evolutionary thought. T...

Recounts the history of the post-war conceptual development of elementary-particle physics. Inviting a reappraisal of the status of scientific know...

Empiricism today implies the dispassionate scrutiny of facts. But Jessica Riskin finds that in the French Enlightenment, empiricism was inimately b...

Empiricism today implies the dispassionate scrutiny of facts. But Jessica Riskin finds that in the French Enlightenment, empiricism was inimately b...

"In the gallery of what might be called the martyrs of thought, the image of Galileo recanting before the Italian Inquisition stirs the minds of ed...

Conceived as three companion volumes that form an introduction to the central ideas of the modern natural sciences, these books--intelligent, infor...

This study argues that morphology was integral to the life sciences of the 19th century. It traces the development of morphological research in Ger...

In this reassessment of one of the figures of early modern science, Rose-Mary Sargent explores Robert Boyle's philosophy of experiment, a central a...