Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and James Madison

Posted by admin on November 12, 2011 Comments Off

General readers, students of American history, and professional historians alike will profit from reading this engaging presentation of an aspect of American history conspicuously absent from the usual textbooks and popular presentations of the political thought of this crucial period.

Thomas Jefferson was the only president who could read and understand Newton’s Principia. Benjamin Franklin is credited with establishing the science of electricity. John Adams had the finest education in science that the new country could provide, including “Pnewmaticks, Hydrostaticks, Mechanicks, Staticks, Opticks.” James Madison, chief architect of the Constitution, peppered his Federalist Papers with reference to physics, chemistry, and the life sciences.

For these men science was an integral part of life–including political life. This is the story of their scientific education and of how they employed that knowledge in shaping the political issues of the day, incorporating scientific reasoning into the Constitution.

CHECK PRICE NOW!
Read Full Review >>

Best review for Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and James Madison

SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION.: An entry from Charles Scribner’s Sons’ <i>New Dictionary of the History of Ideas</i>

Posted by admin on November 10, 2011 Comments Off

This digital document is an article from New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses. The length of the article is 2775 words. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser. The publication of the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas marks the return of a reference work that is an essential tool to make the often complex history of what we think accessible to students and general readers. The original 1974 Dictionary of the History of Ideas has long been admired as a landmark document encapsulating the thinking of an era. This thoroughly re-envisioned New Dictionary of the History of Ideas brings fresh intelligence and a global perspective to bear on timeless questions about the individual and society. A distinguished team of international scholars explore new thinking in areas previously covered (communism, linguistics, physics) and present cross-cultural perspectives on more recent topics such as postmodernism, deconstruction and post-colonialism
CHECK PRICE NOW!
Read Full Review >>

Best review for SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION.: An entry from Charles Scribner’s Sons’ New Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Revolution in Science

Posted by admin on November 8, 2011 Comments Off

Only a scholar as rich in learning as I. Bernard Cohen could do justice to a theme so subtle and yet so grand. Spanning five centuries and virtually all of scientific endeavor, Revolution in Science traces the nuances that differentiate both scientific revolutions and human perceptions of them, weaving threads of detail from physics, mathematics, behaviorism, Freud, atomic physics, and even plate tectonics and molecular biology, into the larger fabric of intellectual history.

How did “revolution,” a term from the physical sciences, meaning a turning again and implying permanence and recurrence–the cyclical succession of the seasons, the ‘revolutions’ of the planets in their orbits–become transformed into an expression for radical change in political and socioeconomic affairs, then become appropriated once again to the sciences?

How have political revolutions–French, American, Bolshevik–and such intellectual forces as Darwinism further modified the concept, from revolution in science as a dramatic break with the past to the idea that science progresses by the slow accumulation of knowledge? And what does each transformation in each historical period tell us about the deep conceptual changes in our image of the scientist and scientific activity?

Cohen’s exploration seeks to uncover nothing less than the nature of all scientific revolutions, the stages by which they occur, their time scale, specific criteria for determining whether or not there has been a revolution, and the creative factors in producing a revolutionary new idea. His book is a probing analysis of the history of an idea and one of the most impressive surveys of the history of science ever undertaken.

CHECK PRICE NOW!
Read Full Review >>

Best review for Revolution in Science

Quantifying Music: The Science of Music at the First Stage of Scientific Revolution 1580-1650 (The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science)

Posted by admin on November 6, 2011 Comments Off

CHECK PRICE NOW!
Read Full Review >>

Best review for Quantifying Music: The Science of Music at the First Stage of Scientific Revolution 1580-1650 (The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science)

The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry

Posted by admin on November 4, 2011 Comments Off


In this first book-length historiographical study of the Scientific Revolution, H. Floris Cohen examines the body of work on the intellectual, social, and cultural origins of early modern science. Cohen critically surveys a wide range of scholarship since the nineteenth century, offering new perspectives on how the Scientific Revolution changed forever the way we understand the natural world and our place in it.

Cohen’s discussions range from scholarly interpretations of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, to the question of why the Scientific Revolution took place in seventeenth-century Western Europe, rather than in ancient Greece, China, or the Islamic world. Cohen contends that the emergence of early modern science was essential to the rise of the modern world, in the way it fostered advances in technology.

A valuable entrée to the literature on the Scientific Revolution, this book assesses both a controversial body of scholarship, and contributes to understanding how modern science came into the world.

CHECK PRICE NOW!
Read Full Review >>

Best review for The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry