Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and Shaping of the Modernity 1680-1760

The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and Shaping of the Modernity 1680-1760

Gaukroger, Stephen

Paperback

Series: Science and the Shaping of Modernity

PhilosophySports General

ISBN10: 0199664668
ISBN13: 9780199664665
Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr
Published: Dec 29 2012
Pages: 516
Weight: 1.90
Height: 1.20 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.10
Language: English
Understanding the emergence of a scientific culture -- one in which cognitive values generally are modelled on, or subordinated to, scientific ones -- is one of the foremost historical and philosophical problems with which we are now confronted. The significance of the emergence of such scientific values lies above all in their ability to provide the criteria by which we come to appraise cognitive enquiry, and which shape our understanding of what it can achieve.

The period between the 1680s and the middle of the eighteenth century is a very distinctive one in this development. It is then that we witness the emergence of the idea that scientific values form a model for all cognitive claims. It is also at this time that science explicitly goes beyond technical expertise and begins to articulate a world-view designed to displace others, whether humanist or Christian. But what occurred took place in a peculiar and overdetermined fashion, and the outcome in the mid-eighteenth century was not the triumph of 'reason', as has commonly been supposed, but rather a simultaneous elevation of the standing of science and the beginnings of a serious questioning of whether science offers a comprehensive form of understanding.

The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility is the sequel to Stephen Gaukroger's acclaimed 2006 book The Emergence of a Scientific Culture. It offers a rich and fascinating picture of the development of intellectual culture in a period where understandings of the natural realm began to fragment.

Also in

Philosophy

View All