A01=Stephen Gaukroger
Author_Stephen Gaukroger
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=JBCC9
Category=JM
Category=NL-HP
Category=NL-JF
Category=NL-JM
Category=NL-PD
Category=PDA
Category=QDH
COP=United Kingdom
Discount=15
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
eq_society-politics
Format=BB
Format_Hardback
HMM=240
IMPN=Oxford University Press
ISBN13=9780198757634
Language_English
PA=Available
PD=20160204
POP=Oxford
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
PUB=Oxford University Press
SMM=28
SN=Science and the Shaping of Modernity
Subject=Philosophy
Subject=Psychology
Subject=Science: General Issues
Subject=Society & Culture : General
WG=742
WMM=162
Product details
- ISBN 9780198757634
- Format: Hardback
- Weight: 742g
- Dimensions: 162 x 240 x 28mm
- Publication Date: 21 Jan 2016
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication City/Country: Oxford, GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Stephen Gaukroger presents an original account of the development of empirical science and the understanding of human behaviour from the mid-eighteenth century. Since the seventeenth century, science in the west has undergone a unique form of cumulative development in which it has been consolidated through integration into and shaping of a culture. But in the eighteenth century, science was cut loose from the legitimating culture in which it had had a public rationale as a fruitful and worthwhile form of enquiry. What kept it afloat between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries, when its legitimacy began to hinge on an intimate link with technology? The answer lies in large part in an abrupt but fundamental shift in how the tasks of scientific enquiry were conceived, from the natural realm to the human realm.
At the core of this development lies the naturalization of the human, that is, attempts to understand human behaviour and motivations no longer in theological and metaphysical terms, but in empirical terms. One of the most striking feature of this development is the variety of forms it took, and the book explores anthropological medicine, philosophical anthropology, the 'natural history of man', and social arithmetic. Each of these disciplines re-formulated basic questions so that empirical investigation could be drawn upon in answering them, but the empirical dimension was conceived very differently in each case, with the result that the naturalization of the human took the form of competing, and in some respects mutually exclusive, projects.
Stephen Gaukroger, who was educated at London and Cambridge Universities, is Emeritus Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney. He is author of nine books in the history of science and history of philosophy, including an intellectual biography of Descartes, as well as translations of the works of Descartes and Arnauld. The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1685, was published in 2006, and The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680-1760, was published in 2010. His work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Serbian.
