Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700 - Softcover

Dear, Peter Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691088608 ISBN 13: 9780691088600

Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr, 2001

Synopsis

From Copernicus, who put the earth in orbit around the sun, to Isaac Newton, who gave the world universal gravitation, the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries transformed the way that Europeans understood their world. In this book, Peter Dear offers an accessible introduction to the origins of modern science for both students and general readers.

Beginning with "what was worth knowing in 1500," Dear takes the reader through natural philosophy, humanism, mathematics, and experimentalism until he can describe "what was worth knowing by the eighteenth century." Along the way, he discusses the key ideas, individuals, and social changes that constituted the Scientific Revolution.

For all of its economy and broad appeal, Revolutionizing the Sciences never sacrifices sophistication of treatment. Dear questions triumphal ideas of scientific progress, unravels the connections between scientific knowledge and power over nature, and distinguishes between the scientific renaissance that characterized the sixteenth century and the more fundamental revolution that occurred in the seventeenth.

This is an ideal textbook on the Scientific Revolution for courses on the history of science or the history of early modern Europe. The text is chronologically arranged and fully covers both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, standing alone as an up-to-date, complete general introduction to the origins of modern science in Europe.

Revolutionizing the Sciences is the best available choice for teaching or learning about the developments that came to be called the Scientific Revolution.

About this title

Review

Where did science come from? Historian of science Peter Dear examines the transitional period in detail in the slim Revolutionizing the Sciences. Designed as a textbook, its organisation should appeal to general readers as well. Dense but accessible, Dear's prose encourages the reader to abandon preconceptions about medieval and Renaissance scientific understanding and investigation. Dear hopes to show that the Scientific Revolution, though vitally important, was actually a natural development from preceding philosophical thinking, and his arguments are compelling.

... the picture of a superstitious and credulous Europe in 1500 giving way, by 1700, to a cool, rationalistic, scientific Europe continues to have a strong hold on our views of the past. The astrology, demonology, and so forth of fifteenth-century figures [...] were ingredients of the intellectual ferment of the next couple of centuries; they were not philosophical negatives of a new rationality that would sweep them away.

Though the book focuses more on physical sciences than biology and medicine, this serves the author well as the metascientific advances of the period were concentrated within astronomy, physics, and mathematics. Even those readers without grade pressure will find that careful scrutiny pays off well; Dear includes a huge list of resources to follow up after finishing this work of necessarily limited scope. Revolutionizing the Sciences offers a broad perspective on how modern--and even postmodern--science came to be, and for that it deserves wide attention. --Rob Lightner

Review

Winner of the Watson Davis And Helen Miles Davis Prize
[Dear] throws interesting light on the changing criteria used to evaluate natural knowledge, especially the increasing emphasis on experiment. . . . As a full and accurate account of such matters, this book is the best available, and I would recommend it to anyone."--Michael Hunter, Nature

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0691088608
• ISBN 13: 9780691088600
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208