Scientific Knowledge of Spanish Military Engineers in the Seventeenth Century

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josep Lluis i Ginovart
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge

Radical Botany: An Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Natania Meeker ◽  
Antónia Szabari
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Frameworks ◽  
Historical Periods

This chapter uncovers a tradition of radical botany in which plants participate in the effort to imagine new worlds and envision new futures. Offshoots of this tradition wend their way from the seventeenth century into the twenty-first, moving through different historical periods and cultural frameworks and gradually taking on global significance. In a context where modernity is often equated with the exploitation and brutalization of nature, the authors, critics, filmmakers, and theorists whose works are introduced here develop an understanding of vegetality as driving the production of technology, scientific knowledge, and new media forms. This chapter includes a survey of critical plant studies (including the work of Michael Marder, Jeffrey T. Nealon, and Natasha Myers) to show how, in this emergent field, plants remain partners with humans in modernity, even as both plants and humans find themselves under threat by forces that vastly outstrip their abilities to master, grasp, or model them.

Dating Papyri: Familiarity, Instinct and Guesswork1

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-83
Author(s):  
Malcolm Choat
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Physical Properties ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Script Language ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contemporary Practice ◽  
Language Content

This article surveys the history of palaeographical dating of papyri, reflecting on its origins as a system, and what lessons this might have for contemporary practice. In examining the beginnings of palaeography as a discipline in the late seventeenth century with the work of scholars such as Jean Mabillon, it highlights the concerns of that period, especially the authenticity of documents. In this context, palaeographical dating was only one (though of course an important component) of a range of tools scholars used to date and authenticate texts. In the same way, contemporary scholars use an array of methods to date the texts they study, including script, language, content, and the physical properties of the ink and its support. This article highlights the importance of understanding the limitations of each of these methods, whether caused by their subjective nature or the current limits of scientific knowledge, and emphasizes one of the key lessons of Mabillon’s practice, the broad familiarity with many types of script and manuscript which allow these to be properly contextualized and understood.

History of Science and Medicine

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Staffan Müller-Wille
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Medical Sciences ◽  
Growth Of Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores what both historians of medicine and historians of science could gain from a stronger entanglement of their respective research agendas. It first gives a cursory outline of the history of the relationship between science and medicine since the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. Medicine can very well be seen as a domain that was highly productive of scientific knowledge, yet in ways that do not fit very well with the historiographic framework that dominated the history of science. Furthermore, the article discusses two alternative historiographical approaches that offer ways of thinking about the growth of knowledge that fit well with the cumulative and translational patterns that characterize the development of the medical sciences, and also provide an understanding of concepts such as ‘health’ and ‘life’.

Test and Evaluation: The Changing Nature of our Scientific Knowledge

2000 ◽  
Vol 44 (37) ◽  
pp. 565-568 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joyce A. Cameron
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Newtonian Physics ◽  
Test And Evaluation ◽  
Conceptual Foundations

Traditionally, human factors/ergonomics professionals, especially in the United States, use concepts and methods derived from engineering and experimental psychology, both of which are rooted in the conceptual framework of classical, seventeenth-century, Newtonian physics. As a result, our conceptual foundations emphasize reductionism and determinism. However, we need to update these conceptual foundations to reflect the reality of the science of today. Concepts such as holism demand re-thinking the structure of scientific knowledge; principles such as uncertainty have profound implications concerning observation and measurement; and principles such as complementarity require re-examination of the nature of scientific explanation. Many variables of interest to Test and Evaluation (T&E) professionals can be investigated using concepts and methods derived from the physical sciences, the life sciences, and/or the human sciences. However, the science used will profoundly influence the available explanatory concepts and the resulting explanations. Thus, in addition to defining the questions to be asked, T&E professionals need also to consider the kind of science to be used in each investigation.

scholarly journals Perkembangan Eksperimen Fisika Ditinjau dari Filsafat Sains

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-20
Author(s):  
Ike Festiana
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Quantum Physics ◽  
Experimental Methods ◽  
Independent Experiment ◽  
Classical Physics ◽  
Scientific Issue ◽  
World Development

Scientific knowledge as well as experiment keeps on growing every day.  Experiments flourished in the seventeenth century. Previously, information about world development was obtained by connecting the roles of prominent epistemology. Experimentation is defined as a planned program for restoring hypotheses by providing empirical evidence to people. Science is a process of seeking the truth. Activities in finding the truth involves a series of scientific method including experiment. The development of physics history is divided into five periods. Period one is indicated by the absence of systematic and independent experiment. In period two, experimental methods had been accountable, and well accepted as a scientific issue. In period three, (investigations developed more rapidly when classical physics development began to be foundation of current famous quantum physics). Period four which is called The Old Quantum Mechanics is indicated by the invention of microscopic phenomena. Period five is well known by the emergence of new quantum mechanics theory.

Scientific method

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Hatfield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Communication Technology ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Instrument Making ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Careful Observation ◽  
Body Of Knowledge

Procedures for attaining scientific knowledge are known as scientific methods. These methods include formulating theories and testing them against observation or experiment. Ancient and medieval thinkers called any systematic body of knowledge a ‘science’, and their methods were aimed at knowledge in general. According to the most common model for scientific knowledge, formulated by Aristotle, induction yields universal propositions from which all knowledge in a field can be deduced. This model was refined by medieval and early modern thinkers, and further developed in the nineteenth century by Whewell and Mill. As Kuhn observed, idealized accounts of scientific method must be distinguished from descriptions of what scientists actually do. The methods of careful observation and experiment have been in use from antiquity, but became more widespread after the seventeenth century. Developments in instrument making, in mathematics and statistics, in terminology, and in communication technology have altered the methods and the results of science.

What's the Fuss about Social Constructivism?

Episteme ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-85
Author(s):  
John Dupré
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Social Enterprise ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Many ◽  
Social Construction Of Science

The topic of this paper is social constructivist doctrines about the nature of scientific knowledge. I don't propose to review all the many accounts that have either claimed this designation or had it ascribed to them. Rather I shall try to consider in a very general way what sense should be made of the underlying idea, and then illustrate some of the central points with two central examples from biology. The first thing to say is that, on the face of it, some doctrine of the social construction of science must self-evidently be true. The notion of science as progressing through the efforts of solitary geniuses may have had some plausibility in the seventeenth century, but it has none today. Science is a massively cooperative, social, enterprise. And surely it is constructed. Scientific knowledge doesn't grow on trees; it is produced through hard work by human agents. Putting these two banal points together we conclude that science is socially constructed.

scholarly journals Science and Knowledge

2016 ◽  
Vol 71 (02) ◽  
pp. 321-335
Author(s):  
Roger Chartier
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indigenous Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Western Science ◽  
Traditional Definition ◽  
Histoire Des Sciences ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Clear Line

This review article poses three questions, essentially based on the first two volumes of Histoire des sciences et des savoirs, a collective undertaking edited by Dominique Pestre. First, it considers the relationships between “science” and “knowledge.” Can a clear line be drawn between them? Or should “scientific” knowledge (with or without quotation marks) be considered a particular class of knowledge? And, if this is the case, must we define it according to a certain number of specific operations? Second, the article turns to the acceptance, criticism, or rejection of the traditional definition of the “scientific revolution,” dated to the seventeenth century and characterized by the mathematization of nature and the introduction of experimental practices. Should this be replaced by other perspectives, highlighting previous reconfigurations of fields of knowledge or the plurality of “revolutions”? Finally, the article considers the attention paid to connected histories of knowledge, which move away from Eurocentricism and introduce new actors. Recognizing these circulations does not however efface the asymmetry of exchanges, the stigmatization of indigenous knowledge, or the imperialistic imposition of Western science.

Book Reviews: A theosophical Boyle?

1994 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-319
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Select Group ◽  
History Of ◽  
University Of Chicago Press

Robert Boyle Reconsidered . Edited by Michael Hunter. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xviii + 231, £30.00. ISBN 0-521-44205-2 The 300th anniversary of the death of Robert Boyle (1627-91) was commemorated by a select group of Boyle scholars in a symposium convened 14-16 December 1991 at the Horsington House Hotel, Somerset, during the course of what appears to have been a traditional Irish wake, ‘where participants were lavishly provided for through the generosity of the Foundation for Intellectual History’ (p. xvii). Twelve of the contributions presented at the symposium are published in Robert Boyle Reconsidered , and another contribution, ‘Who was Robert Boyle? The creation and presentation of an experimental self’ by Steven Shapin, appears as a chapter in his new book, A Social History of Truth: Gentility, Credibility, and Scientific Knowledge in Seventeenth Century England (University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Science, Tradition, and the Science of Tradition

1989 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-173
Author(s):  
Joseph Mali
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Religious Controversy ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
Modes Of Thought

The ArgumentScience consists in progress by innovation. Scientists, however, are committed to all kinds of traditions that persist or recur in society regardless of intellectual and institutional changes. Merton's thesis about the origins of the scientific revolution in seventeenth-century England offers a sociohistorical confirmation of this revisionist view: the emergence of a highly rational scientific method out of the religious-ethical sentiments of the English Puritans implies that scientific knowledge does indeed grow out of – and not really against – customary modes of thought.In tracing the intellectual origins of this view back to the religious controversy between Protestants and Catholics, the essay demonstrates that the essential conflict between them with regard to natural science stemmed from their antagonistic conceptions of tradition and its function in the production of genuine knowledge – of religious as well as of natural affairs. Whereas the Protestants believed only in those truths that are immediately revealed by God to each man through his reason, the Catholics adhered to truths that are related to men or “made” by them through culture and history.

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