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Description for Baroque Science
Paperback. Presents a fresh perspective on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Instead of celebrating the triumph of reason and rationality, the authors study the paradoxes and anxieties that stemmed from the New Science and the intellectual compromises that shaped it and enabled its spectacular success. Num Pages: 352 pages, 51 halftones. BIC Classification: 1D; 3JD; HBJD; HBLH; PDX. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 230 x 152 x 20. Weight in Grams: 484.
In Baroque Science Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris present a radically new perspective on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Instead of celebrating the triumph of reason and rationality, they study the paradoxes and anxieties that stemmed from the New Science and the intellectual compromises that shaped it and enabled its spectacular success. Gal and Chen-Morris show how the protagonists of the new mathematical natural philosophy grasped at the very far and very small by entrusting observation to the mediation of artificial instruments, and how they justified this mediation by naturalizing and denigrating the human senses. They show how the physical-mathematical ordering of heavens and earth demanded obscure and spurious mathematical procedures, replacing the divine harmonies of the late Renaissance with an assemblage of isolated, contingent laws and approximated constants. Finally, they show how the new savants, forced to contend that reason is hopelessly estranged from its surrounding world and that nature is irreducibly complex, turned to the passions to provide an alternative, naturalized foundation for their epistemology and ethics. The New Science, Gal and Chen-Morris reveal, is a Baroque phenomenon: deeply entrenched in and crucially formative of the culture of its time.
Product Details
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2014
Publisher
The University of Chicago Press United States
Number of pages
352
Condition
New
Number of Pages
352
Place of Publication
, United States
ISBN
9780226212982
SKU
V9780226212982
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-50
About Ofer Gal
Ofer Gal is associate professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney. Raz Chen-Morris is a senior lecturer in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Bar-Ilan University.
Reviews for Baroque Science
"This important work will provide scholars with new questions and offer opportunities to reconsider timeless questions about the nature of humanity and knowledge. Highly recommended." (Choice)"