1600s
17th century
A01=Ofer Gal
A01=Raz Chen-Morris
anxiety
Author_Ofer Gal
Author_Raz Chen-Morris
Category=NHD
Category=PDX
compromise
discovery
divine
epistemology
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
ethics
galileo
hooke
intellectual
interdisciplinary
laws
legal issues
litigation
mathematical
mathematics
mediation
medieval
natural world
paradox
philosophical
philosophy
physics
rationality
reason
renaissance
science
scientific revolution
scientist
theory
Product details
- ISBN 9780226923987
- Weight: 680g
- Dimensions: 17 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 18 Mar 2013
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In "Baroque Science", Ofer Gal and Raz D. Chen-Morris present a radically new perspective on the study of early modern science. Instead of the triumph of reason and rationality and the celebration of the discoveries and breakthroughs of the period, they examine science in the context of the baroque, analyzing the tensions, paradoxes, and compromises that shaped the New Science of the seventeenth century and enabled its spectacular success. Gal and Chen-Morris show how scientists during the seventeenth century turned away from the trust in the acquisition of knowledge through the senses toward a growing reliance on the mediation of artificial instruments, such as lenses and mirrors for observation and mechanical and pneumatic devices for experimentation. Likewise, the mathematical techniques and procedures that allowed the success of mathematical natural philosophy turned increasingly obscure and artificial, and in place of divine harmonies they revealed an assemblage of isolated, contingent laws and constants.
In its attempts to enforce order in the face of threatening chaos, blur the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, and mobilize passions in the service of objective knowledge, Gal and Chen-Morris reveal, the New Science is a baroque phenomenon.
Ofer Gal is associate professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney. Raz D. Chen-Morris is a lecturer in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Bar-Ilan University.
