"People have always been xenophobic, but an explicit philosophical and scientific view of human racial difference only began to emerge during the modern period. Why and how did this happen? Surveying a range of philosophical and natural-scientific texts, dating from the Spanish …
"The novel understanding of the physical world that characterized the scientific revolution depended on a fundamental shift in the way its protagonists understood and described space. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, spatial phenomena were described in relation to a …
"Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887) was a German physicist, psychologist, and philosopher, best known to historians of science as the founder of psychophysics (the experimental study of the relation between mental and physical processes) and the grandfather of experimental psych…
In the early modern period, thinkers began to suggest that philosophy abjure the ideal of dispassionate contemplation of the natural world in favor of a more practically minded project that aimed to make human beings masters and possessors of nature. Humanity would seize control…
These selections from Le système du monde, the classic ten-volume history of the physical sciences written by the great French physicist Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), focus on cosmology, Duhem's greatest interest. By reconsidering the work of such Arab and Christian scholars as Aver…
"This book tries to assess Galileo's work in its historical singularity. It is constructed around a precise question: How did Galileo create the modern science of motion? Starting from this question, I shall go on to determine as accurately as I can what concepts and methods hel…
