Browse results

You are looking at 1 - 10 of 90 items for :

  • History of Science x
  • Upcoming Publications x
  • Just Published x
  • Search level: Titles x
Clear All
Volume Editors: , , and
The Andalusian Muslim philosopher Averroes (1126–1198) is known for his authoritative commentaries on Aristotle and for his challenging ideas about the relationship between philosophy and religion, and the place of religion in society. Among Jewish authors, he found many admirers and just as many harsh critics. This volume brings together, for the first time, essays investigating Averroes’s complex reception, in different philosophical topics and among several Jewish authors, with special attention to its relation to the reception of Maimonides.
Translating Technology in Africa brings together authors from different disciplines who engage with Science and Technology Studies (STS) to stimulate curiosity about the diversity of sociotechnical assemblages on the African continent. The contributions provide detailed praxeographic examinations of technologies at work in postcolonial contexts. The series of 5 volumes aims to catalyse the development of a field of research that is still in its infancy in Africa and promises to offer novel insights into past, present, and future challenges and opportunities facing the continent. The first volume, on "Metrics", explores practices of quantification and digitisation. The chapters examine how numbers are aggregated and how the resulting metrics shape new realities.

Contributors include Kevin. P. Donovan, Véra Ehrenstein, Jonathan Klaaren, Emma Park, Helen Robertson, René Umlauf and Helen Verran
This book shows that a rigorous study of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is not simply an exercise in the history of astronomy, but constitutes a broad inquiry into our germinal ideas about speed, motion, and the spherical nature of celestial entities, as well as the relation between theology and gnoseology. Many have heard of Aristotle’s First Unmoved Mover, the one that moves all things without being moved. Very few, however, have managed to capture the ultimate meaning of that entity. One of the goals of this book is to explore why the existence of such a First Unmoved Mover is necessary, but the journey to this end allows us to understand why Aristotle maintained that there are a total of 55 Unmoved Movers, not just one. The key is Aristotelian astronomy, little studied so far in comparison with other aspects of his thought. In this solid piece of research and free philosophical speculation that Botteri & Casazza offer us, the authors’ gaze raised to the sky—by means of the naked-eye analysis of celestial movements—leads to the reconstruction of Aristotle’s astronomical system, key to understanding his cosmology, his physics, and even his metaphysics.

This book is a revised English translation from the original Spanish publication El sistema astronómico de Aristoteles: Una interpretación, published by Ediciones Biblioteca Nacional, Buenos Aires, 2015.
In Science of the Soul in Ibn Sīnā’s Pointers and Reminders, Michael A. Rapoport provides a philological and interpretive guide for critically reading and interpreting Ibn Sīnā’s (Avicenna, d. 1037) most challenging and influential text. Rapoport argues that chapters VII-X of the Pointers present scientific explanations for phenomena related to the human soul – from intellection to divination, magic, and marvels – within the framework of Ibn Sīnā’s Metaphysics of the Rational Soul. This book dispels widespread notions that the Pointers represents Ibn Sīnā’s mystical or Sufi philosophy and therefore stands apart from the rest of his corpus.
Disciplines and New Approaches to Natural Philosophy, from John Dee to Isaac Newton
Author:
The Scientific Revolution saw the redefinition of many scholastic notions about the nature of the world and its constituent parts, from planets to particles. Wang’s book introduces a convincing and wide-ranging narrative of the changing place of ‘occult qualities’ in the context of emergent new scientific methods and early modern disciplinary realignments. Through in-depth analysis of the diverse treatments of this notion, whereby it becomes now a hollow phrase, now a touchstone for the superiority of new physics, Wang shows how the transformation of this notion is key to understanding almost every facet of the new physics of the age.
Lucretius’ De rerum natura, written around 55 BCE, ranks among the most influential texts in Roman literature. The poet’s vision of a world made of atoms, his mockery of the fear of death and the gods, and fervent advocacy of the mortality of the soul over many centuries incensed his critics on one hand, and on the other earned him a devoted following. This volume provides an introduction to the oldest completely preserved Latin didactic poem and to the most important research questions concerned with the text.
Volume Editors: and
The Renaissance witnessed an upsurge in explanations of natural events in terms of invisibly small particles – atoms, corpuscles, minima, monads and particles. The reasons for this development are as varied as are the entities that were proposed. This volume covers the period from the earliest commentaries on Lucretius’ De rerum natura to the sources of Newton’s alchemical texts. Contributors examine key developments in Renaissance physiology, meteorology, metaphysics, theology, chymistry and historiography, all of which came to assign a greater explanatory weight to minute entities. These contributions show that there was no simple ‘revival of atomism’, but that the Renaissance confronts us with a diverse and conceptually messy process. Contributors are: Stephen Clucas, Christoph Lüthy, Craig Martin, Elisabeth Moreau, William R. Newman, Elena Nicoli, Sandra Plastina, Kuni Sakamoto, Jole Shackelford, and Leen Spruit.
Teaching Cartesian Philosophy in the Early Modern Age
The volume offers the first large-scale study of the teaching of Descartes’s philosophy in the early modern age. Its twenty chapters explore the clash between Descartes’s “new” philosophy and the established pedagogical practices and institutional concerns, as well as the various strategies employed by Descartes’s supporters in order to communicate his ideas to their students. The volume considers a vast array of topics, sources, and institutions, across the borders of countries and confessions, both within and without the university setting (public conferences, private tutorials, distance learning by letter) and enables us thereby to reconsider from a fresh perspective the history of early modern philosophy and education.