Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought

by A. C. Crombie

Overview

A.C. Crombie sees the history of Western Science as the history of a vision and an argument, initiated by the ancient Greeks in their search for principles at once of nature and of argument itself. This scientific vision explored and controlled by argument, and the diversification of both vision and argument by scientific experience and by interaction with the wider contexts of intellectual culture, constitute the long history of European scientific thought. Underlying that development have been specific commitments to conceptions of nature and of Science and its intellectual and moral assumptions, accompanied by a recurrent critique; their diversification has generated a series of different styles of scientific thinking and of making theoretical and practical decisions which he describes and analyses.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781852850678
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/02/2003
Pages:	450
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.08(d)

About the Author

Author deceased.

Table of Contents

Designed in the mind - Western visions of science, nature and humankind
the Western experience of scientific objectivity
historical perspective of medieval science
Robert Grosseteste (c1168-1253)
Roger Bacon (c1219-1292)
infinite power and the laws of nature - a medieval speculation
experimental science and the rational artist in early modern Europe
mathematics and Platonism in the 16th-century Italian universities and in Jesuit educational policy
sources of Galileo Galilei's early natural philosophy
the Jesuits and Galileo's ideas of sceicne and of nature
Galileo and the art of rhetoric
Galileo Galilei - a philosophical symbol
Alexandre Koyre and Great Britain - Galileo and Mersenns
Marin Mersenne and the origins of language
le corps a la Renaissance - theories of perceiver and perceived in hearing
expectation, modelling and assent in the history of optics - i, Alhazen and the medieval tradition, ii, Kepler and Descartes
contingent expectation and uncertain choice - historical contexts of arguments from probabilities
P.-L. Moreau de Maupertuis, F.R.S. (1698-1759) - precurser du transformisme
the public and private faces of Charles Darwin
the language of science
some historical questions about disease
historians and the scientific revolution
the origins of western science.

Editorial Reviews

Deals with scientific objectivity, the historiography of medieval science, the medieval conception of the law of nature, and the historical relation between rational design in scientific experimentation and in perspective painting and other arts. The 23 essays were originally published between 1956 and 1995, and comprise a companion to Crombie's 1990 collection "Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought". Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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