Author : William Whewell
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 449 pages
File Size : 45,6 MB
Release : 2011-11-08
Category : Science
ISBN : 1108038549
This 1876 biography of one of Trinity College's most distinguished masters reflects a typically nineteenth-century fusion of religion and science.
Author : Isaac Todhunter
Publisher :
Page : 456 pages
File Size : 43,33 MB
Release : 1876
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Page : 452 pages
File Size : 50,38 MB
Release : 1876
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Author : Lukas M. Verburgt
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 563 pages
File Size : 22,67 MB
Release : 2024-10-08
Category : Science
ISBN : 0822991527
William Whewell, the famous master of Trinity College in Cambridge, was a central figure in nineteenth-century British scientific culture and one of the last great polymaths. His influential work ranged from history and philosophy of science, education, architecture, mineralogy, and political economy to mathematics, engineering, natural theology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy. Among his many gifts to science was his role as cofounder and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and his wordsmithing; he coined the terms scientist, physicist, linguistics, and electrode. While he was himself an opponent of evolution through natural selection, Whewell’s most famous works, including his Bridgewater Treatise (1833) and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), played a formative role in Charles Darwin’s creation of the theory of evolution. William Whewell: Victorian Polymath reexamines the whole of Whewell’s oeuvre, as well as the wide range and internal unity of his many polymathic endeavors, placing him within the early Victorian intellectual landscape and highlighting his exchanges with other important figures of the period, such as John Herschel, Charles Lyell, and Robert Peel. Bringing together a group of eminent and emergent scholars, the volume explores all major aspects of Whewell’s reform project and its legacy, both in the sciences and the humanities, in the Victorian era and beyond.
Author : Howard Carlton
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 10,12 MB
Release : 2022-08-03
Category : History
ISBN : 3031052803
This book argues that while the historiography of the development of scientific ideas has for some time acknowledged the important influences of socio-cultural and material contexts, the significant impact of traumatic events, life threatening illnesses and other psychotropic stimuli on the development of scientific thought may not have been fully recognised. Howard Carlton examines the available primary sources which provide insight into the lives of a number of nineteenth-century astronomers, theologians and physicists to study the complex interactions within their ‘biocultural’ brain-body systems which drove parallel changes of perspective in theology, metaphysics, and cosmology. In doing so, he also explores three topics of great scientific interest during this period: the question of the possible existence of life on other planets; the deployment of the nebular hypothesis as a theory of cosmogony; and the religiously charged debates about the ages of the earth and sun. From this body of evidence we gain a greater understanding of the underlying phenomena which actuated intellectual developments in the past and which are still relevant to today’s knowledge-making processes.
Author : William J. Ashworth
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 383 pages
File Size : 48,11 MB
Release : 2021-08-17
Category : Science
ISBN : 0822988453
The Trinity Circle explores the creation of knowledge in nineteenth-century England, when any notion of a recognizably modern science was still nearly a century off, religion still infused all ways of elite knowing, and even those who denied its relevance had to work extremely hard to do so. The rise of capitalism during this period—embodied by secular faith, political radicalism, science, commerce, and industry—was, according to Anglican critics, undermining this spiritual world and challenging it with a superficial material one: a human-centric rationalist society hell-bent on measurable betterment via profit, consumption, and a prevalent notion of progress. Here, William J. Ashworth places the politics of science within a far more contested context. By focusing on the Trinity College circle, spearheaded from Cambridge by the polymath William Whewell, he details an ongoing struggle between the Established Church and a quest for change to the prevailing social hierarchy. His study presents a far from unified view of science and religion at a time when new ways of thinking threatened to divide England and even the Trinity College itself.
Author : Raymond Flood
Publisher : CRC Press
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 46,7 MB
Release : 2019-11-11
Category : Mathematics
ISBN : 1351253891
Greenwich has been a centre for scientific computing since the foundation of the Royal Observatory in 1675. Early Astronomers Royal gathered astronomical data with the purpose of enabling navigators to compute their longitude at sea. Nevil Maskelyne in the 18th century organised the work of computing tables for the Nautical Almanac, anticipating later methods used in safety-critical computing systems. The 19th century saw influential critiques of Charles Babbage’s mechanical calculating engines, and in the 20th century Leslie Comrie and others pioneered the automation of computation. The arrival of the Royal Naval College in 1873 and the University of Greenwich in 1999 has brought more mathematicians and different kinds of mathematics to Greenwich. In the 21st century computational mathematics has found many new applications. This book presents an account of the mathematicians who worked at Greenwich and their achievements. Features A scholarly but accessible history of mathematics at Greenwich, from the seventeenth century to the present day, with each chapter written by an expert in the field The book will appeal to astronomical and naval historians as well as historians of mathematics and scientific computing.
Author : John Richard Gibbins
Publisher : Andrews UK Limited
Page : 749 pages
File Size : 26,89 MB
Release : 2013-10-07
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1845407350
John Grote struggled to construct an intelligible account of philosophy at a time when radical change and sectarian conflict made understanding and clarity a rarity. This book answers three questions: * How did John Grote develop and contribute to modern Cambridge and British philosophy? * What is the significance of these contributions to modern philosophy in general and British Idealism and language philosophy in particular? * How were his ideas and his idealism incorporated into the modern philosophical tradition? Grote influenced his contemporaries, such as his students Henry Sidgwick and John Venn, in both style and content; he forged a brilliantly original philosophy of knowledge, ethics, politics and language, from a synthesis of the major British and European philosophies of his day; his social and political theory provide the origins of the 'new liberal' ideas later to reach their zenith in the writings of Green, Sidgwick, and Collingwood; he founded the 'Cambridge style' associated with Moore, Russell, Broad, McTaggart and Wittgenstein; and he was also a major influence on Oakeshott.
Author : Jonathan R. Topham
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 590 pages
File Size : 18,65 MB
Release : 2022-10-12
Category : History
ISBN : 0226815765
"When Darwin returned to Britain from the Beagle voyage in 1836, the most talked-about scientific books were the Bridgewater Treatises. This series of eight books was funded by a bequest of the last Earl of Bridgewater, and they were authored by leading men of science, appointed by the President of the Royal Society, and intended to explore "the power, wisdom, and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation." Securing public attention beyond all expectations, the series gave Darwin's generation a range of approaches to one of the great questions of the age: how to incorporate the newly emerging disciplinary sciences into Britain's overwhelmingly Christian culture. Drawing on a wealth of archival and published sources, including many unexplored by historians, Jonathan R. Topham examines how and to what extent the series contributed to a sense of congruence between Christianity and the sciences in the generation before the infamous Victorian "conflict between science and religion." He does so by drawing on the distinctive insights of book history, using close attention to the production, circulation, and use of the books to open up new perspectives not only on aspects of early Victorian science but also on the whole subject of science and religion. Its innovative focus on practices of authorship, publishing, and reading helps us to understand the everyday considerations and activities through which the religious culture of early Victorian science was fashioned. And in doing so, Reading the Book of Nature powerfully reimagines the world in which a young Charles Darwin learned how to think about the implications of his theory"--
Author : Mark Francis
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 482 pages
File Size : 26,76 MB
Release : 2014-12-23
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1317493451
The English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903) was a colossus of the Victorian age. His works ranked alongside those of Darwin and Marx in the development of disciplines as wide ranging as sociology, anthropology, political theory, philosophy and psychology. In this acclaimed study of Spencer, the first for over thirty years and now available in paperback, Mark Francis provides an authoritative and meticulously researched intellectual biography of this remarkable man that dispels the plethora of misinformation surrounding Spencer and shines new light on the broader cultural history of the nineteenth century. In this major study of Spencer, the first for over thirty years, Mark Francis provides an authoritative and meticulously researched intellectual biography of this remarkable man. Using archival material and contemporary printed sources, Francis creates a fascinating portrait of a human being whose philosophical and scientific system was a unique attempt to explain modern life in all its biological, psychological and sociological forms. Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life fills what is perhaps the last big biographical gap in Victorian history. An exceptional work of scholarship it not only dispels the plethora of misinformation surrounding Spencer but shines new light on the broader cultural history of the nineteenth century. Elegantly written, provocative and rich in insight it will be required reading for all students of the period.
