Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • 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
Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution

Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution

Dear, Peter

Paperback

Series: Science & Its Conceptual Foundations (Paperback)

Sports GeneralHistory & Philosophy of Science

ISBN10: 0226139441
ISBN13: 9780226139449
Publisher: Univ Of Chicago Pr
Published: Nov 25 1995
Pages: 304
Weight: 1.06
Height: 0.78 Width: 6.07 Depth: 9.02
Language: English
Although the Scientific Revolution has long been regarded as the beginning of modern science, there has been little consensus about its true character. While the application of mathematics to the study of the natural world has always been recognized as an important factor, the role of experiment has been less clearly understood.

Peter Dear investigates the nature of the change that occurred during this period, focusing particular attention on evolving notions of experience and how these developed into the experimental work that is at the center of modern science. He examines seventeenth-century mathematical sciences--astronomy, optics, and mechanics--not as abstract ideas, but as vital enterprises that involved practices related to both experience and experiment. Dear illuminates how mathematicians and natural philosophers of the period--Mersenne, Descartes, Pascal, Barrow, Newton, Boyle, and the Jesuits--used experience in their argumentation, and how and why these approaches changed over the course of a century. Drawing on mathematical texts and works of natural philosophy from all over Europe, he describes a process of change that was gradual, halting, sometimes contradictory--far from the sharp break with intellectual tradition implied by the term revolution.

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