Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought

A.C. Crombie

• Publisher: Hambledon Continuum
• Year: 1990
• Print ISBN:
  9781852850678
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780826431622
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The author 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 the work describes.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Further Bibliography of A.C. Crombie
• 1 Designed in the Mind: Western visions of Science, Nature and Humankind
• 2 The Western Experience of Scientific Objectivity
• 3 Historical Perceptions of Medieval Science
• 4 Robert Grosseteste (c. 1168-1253)
• 5 Roger Bacon (c. 1219-1292)
• 6 Infinite Power and the Laws of Nature: A Medieval Speculation
• 7 Experimental Science and the Rational Artist in Early Modern Europe
• 8 Mathematics and Platonism in the Sixteenth-Century Italian Universities and in Jesuit Educational Policy
• 9 Sources of Galileo Galilei’s Early Natural Philosophy
• 10 The Jesuits and Galileo’s Ideas of Science and of Nature
• 11 Galileo and the Art of Rhetoric
• 12 Galileo Galilei: A Philosophical Symbol
• 13 Alexandre Koyré and Great Britain: Galileo and Mersenne
• 14 Marin Mersenne and the Origins of Language
• 15 Le Corps à la Renaissance: Theories of Perceiver and Perceived in Hearing
• 16 Expectation, Modelling and Assent in the History of Optics: i, Alhazen and the Medieval Tradition; ii, Kepler and Descartes
• 17 Contingent Expectation and Uncertain Choice: Historical Contexts of Arguments from Probabilities
• 18 P.-L. Moreau de Maupertuis, F.R.S. (1698-1759): Précurseur du Transformisme
• 19 The Public and Private Faces of Charles Darwin
• 20 The Language of Science
• 21 Some Historical Questions about Disease
• 22 Historians and the Scientific Revolution
• 23 The Origins of Western Science
• Appendix to Chapter 10:
• Corrections to Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought (1990)
• Index