Science: History of Science (9)

The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young - cover image
  • Biography
  • European Studies: English and Irish Studies
  • Science: History of Science

The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young

  • Andrew Robinson
  • Martin Rees
No one has given the polymath Thomas Young (1773-1829) the all-round examination he so richly deserves—until now. Celebrated biographer Andrew Robinson portrays a man who solved mystery after mystery in the face of ridicule and rejection, and never sought fame.
B C, Before Computers: On Information Technology from Writing to the Age of Digital Data - cover image
  • Information Technology and Computer Science
  • Science
  • Science: History of Science
  • Textbooks and Learning Guides

B C, Before Computers: On Information Technology from Writing to the Age of Digital Data

  • Stephen Robertson
Treading the line between philosophy and technical history, Robertson draws on his extensive technical knowledge to produce a text which is both thought-provoking and accessible to a wide range of readers.
Hanging on to the Edges: Essays on Science, Society and the Academic Life - cover image
  • Economics, Politics and Sociology
  • Science
  • Science: History of Science

Hanging on to the Edges: Essays on Science, Society and the Academic Life

  • Daniel Nettle
Pragmatically arguing from the intersection between social and biological sciences, Nettle reappraises the virtues of policy initiatives such as Universal Basic Income and income redistribution, highlighting the traps researchers and politicians are liable to encounter. This provocative, intelligent and self-critical volume is a testament to the possibilities of interdisciplinary study—whose virtues Nettle stridently defends—drawing from and having implications for a wide cross-section of academic inquiry. This will appeal to anybody curious about the implications of social and biological sciences for increasingly topical political concerns. It comes particularly recommended to Sciences and Social Sciences students and to scholars seeking to extend the scope of their field in collaboration with other disciplines.
With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia - cover image
  • Science
  • Science: History of Science

With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia

  • Nikolai Krementsov
In 1865, British polymath Francis Galton published his initial thoughts about the scientific field that would become ‘eugenics.’ The same year, Russian physician Vasilii Florinskii addressed similar issues in a sizeable treatise, entitled Human Perfection and Degeneration. Initially unheralded, Florinskii’s book would go on to have a remarkable afterlife in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russia. In this lucid and insightful work, Nikolai Krementsov argues that the concept of eugenics brings together ideas, values, practices, and fears energised by a focus on the future.
Science as Social Existence: Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge - cover image
  • Economics, Politics and Sociology
  • Philosophy
  • Science
  • Science: History of Science

Science as Social Existence: Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

  • Jeff Kochan
In this bold and original study, Jeff Kochan constructively combines the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) with Martin Heidegger’s early existential conception of science. Kochan shows convincingly that these apparently quite different approaches to science are, in fact, largely compatible, even mutually reinforcing.
Knowledge and the Norm of Assertion: An Essay in Philosophical Science - cover image
  • Philosophy
  • Science
  • Science: History of Science

Knowledge and the Norm of Assertion: An Essay in Philosophical Science

  • John Turri
Concise, comprehensive, non-technical, and thoroughly accessible, this volume quickly brings readers to the cutting edge of a major research program at the intersection of philosophy and science. It presupposes no philosophical or scientific training. It will be of interest to philosophers and scientists, is suitable for use in graduate and undergraduate courses, and will appeal to general readers interested in human nature, social cognition, and communication.
Animals and Medicine: The Contribution of Animal Experiments to the Control of Disease - cover image
  • Science
  • Science: History of Science

Animals and Medicine: The Contribution of Animal Experiments to the Control of Disease

  • Jack Botting
  • Regina Botting
This volume presents the articles Jack Botting wrote for the Research Defence Society News from 1991 to 1996. Collected, they can now reach a wider readership interested in understanding the part of animal experiments in the history of medicine—from the discovery of key vaccines to the advancement of research on a range of diseases, among them hypertension, kidney failure and cancer.
The Scientific Revolution Revisited - cover image
  • Economics, Politics and Sociology
  • Science
  • Science: History of Science

The Scientific Revolution Revisited

  • Mikuláš Teich
With a narrative that moves from pre-classical thought to the European institutionalisation of science – and a scope that embraces figures both lionised and neglected, such as Nicole Oresme, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Thaddeus Hagecius, Johann Joachim Becher – The Scientific Revolution Revisited illuminates the social and intellectual sea changes that shaped the modern world.
Measuring the Master Race: Physical Anthropology in Norway 1890-1945 - cover image
  • Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
  • European Studies
  • European Studies: Eastern European Studies
  • History
  • Science
  • Science: History of Science

Measuring the Master Race: Physical Anthropology in Norway 1890-1945

  • Jon Røyne Kyllingstad
This book investigates the role played by Scandinavian scholars in inventing this so-called superior race, and discusses how this concept put its stamp on Norwegian physical anthropology, prehistory, national identity, and on the Norwegian eugenics movement. It also explores the decline and scientific disputation of these ideas in the 1930s as they came to be associated with the ‘genetic cleansing’ of Nazi Germany. This is the first comprehensive study on Norwegian physical anthropology, and its findings shed new light on current political and scientific debates about race across the globe.