A01=Peter Dear
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Author_Peter Dear
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Product details
- ISBN 9780226139494
- Weight: 284g
- Dimensions: 14 x 20mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jan 2008
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Throughout the history of the Western world, science has possessed an extraordinary amount of authority and prestige. Despite numerous evolutions and revolutions, it maintains its distinction as the knowing endeavor that explains how the natural world works and offers insight into the meaning of the universe. In "The Intelligibility of Nature", Peter Dear considers how science as such has evolved and positioned itself. His intellectual journey begins with a crucial observation: that scientific ambition is, and has been, directed toward two distinct but frequently conflated ends - doing and knowing. The ancient Greeks articulated the difference between craft and understanding, and according to Dear, that separation has survived to shape attitudes toward science ever since. Teasing out the tension between doing and knowing during key episodes in the history of science, Dear reveals how the two principles became formalized into a single enterprise, science, that would be carried out by a new kind of person, the scientist. Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, "The Intelligibility of Nature" will be essential reading for aficionados and historians of science alike.
Peter Dear is professor of science and technology studies and history at Cornell University. He is the author of Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700 and Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.
