Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought

About this book

Deals with scientific objectivity, with the historiography of medieval science, the medieval conception of laws of nature, and the historical relation between rational design in scientific experimentation and in the arts, exemplified especially by perspective painting.

Contents

Designed in the mind - Western visions of science, nature and humankind; the Western experience of scientific objectivity; historical perspective of medieval science; Robert Grosseteste (c1168-1253); Roger Bacon (c1219-1292); infinite power and the laws of nature - a medieval speculation; experimental science and the rational artist in early modern Europe; mathematics and Platonism in the 16th-century Italian universities and in Jesuit educational policy; sources of Galileo Galilei's early natural philosophy; the Jesuits and Galileo's ideas of sceicne and of nature; Galileo and the art of rhetoric; Galileo Galilei - a philosophical symbol; Alexandre Koyre and Great Britain - Galileo and Mersenns; Marin Mersenne and the origins of language; le corps a la Renaissance - theories of perceiver and perceived in hearing; expectation, modelling and assent in the history of optics - i, Alhazen and the medieval tradition, ii, Kepler and Descartes; contingent expectation and uncertain choice - historical contexts of arguments from probabilities; P.-L. Moreau de Maupertuis, F.R.S. (1698-1759) - precurser du transformisme; the public and private faces of Charles Darwin; the language of science; some historical questions about disease; historians and the scientific revolution; the origins of western science.

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