The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739-1841 - Hardcover

Gaukroger, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198757638 ISBN 13: 9780198757634

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2016

Synopsis

Stephen Gaukroger presents an original account of the development of empirical science and the understanding of human behaviour from the mid-eighteenth century. Since the seventeenth century, science in the west has undergone a unique form of cumulative development in which it has been consolidated through integration into and shaping of a culture. But in the eighteenth century, science was cut loose from the legitimating culture in which it had had a public rationale as a fruitful

About this title

About the Author

Stephen Gaukroger, who was educated at London and Cambridge Universities, is Emeritus Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney. He is author of nine books in the history of science and history of philosophy, including an intellectual biography of Descartes, as well as translations of the works of Descartes and Arnauld. The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1685, was published in 2006, and The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680-1760, was published in 2010. His work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Serbian.

Review

"The scope of Gaukroger's project is immense. His scholarship draws on primary sources in at least four languages, and extensive secondary commentary, much of it recent. Gaukroger typically proceeds by a focus on a few key individuals and their works as central nodes in developing this story--Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Diderot, Gibbon, Mandeville, Herder, Kant, Hegel, Strauss, Feuerbach--around which he weaves a larger narrative...The copious footnotes (yes, footnotes, not annoying endnotes), typically citing the most recent scholarship and the key primary sources relevant to the discussion, direct the reader to more detailed studies which he has synthesized in depth...I find it deeply refreshing to read the effort of a single individual with wide and deep scholarly learning to deal with such a complex array of issues from a coherent organizing perspective." -- Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"The Natural and the Human, and Stephen Gaukroger's endeavor as a whole, raise once again many of the crucial methodological and ideological issues that are at the heart of doing intellectual history and the history of science." --Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

"In the first volume of his series to date (whose publication has spanned the decade 2006 to 2016), the author studied the period from 1210 to 1685, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture. His second volume overlapped the first, covering 1680 to 1760, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility. Together, these three books represent one of the landmark achievements in the field of history of science, and represent essential reading for a wide range of disciplines. A tremendous intellectual achievement. We all eagerly await the fourth volume, dealing with science and civilisation from about 1840 to 1940." --Sun News Miami

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0198757638
• ISBN 13: 9780198757634
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 412