Discipline and Experience
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€106.99
17th century
A01=Peter Dear
astronomy
Author_Peter Dear
blaise pascal
Category=JBCC9
Category=PB
Category=PDX
constructivist experiment
early-modern europe
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
eq_society-politics
experience
experimental
expertise
historical
history
marin mersenne
math
mathematics
mechanics
modern
mythology
natural world
optics
philosophy
physico-mathematics
rene descartes
science
scientific revolution
sir isaac newton
traditions
Product details
- ISBN 9780226139432
- Weight: 652g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 25 Nov 1995
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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."
