Reading Popular Newtonianism

Author : Laura Miller
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2018-06-11
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780813941264

Get Book

Reading Popular Newtonianism by Laura Miller Pdf

Sir Isaac Newton’s publications, and those he inspired, were among the most significant works published during the long eighteenth century in Britain. Concepts such as attraction and extrapolation—detailed in his landmark monograph Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica—found their way into both scientific and cultural discourse. Understanding the trajectory of Newton’s diverse critical and popular reception in print demands consideration of how his ideas were disseminated in a marketplace comprised of readers with varying levels of interest and expertise. Reading Popular Newtonianism focuses on the reception of Newton's works in a context framed by authorship, print, editorial practices, and reading. Informed by sustained archival work and multiple critical approaches, Laura Miller asserts that print facilitated the mainstreaming of Newton's ideas. In addition to his reading habits and his manipulation of print conventions in the Principia, Miller analyzes the implied readership of various "popularizations" as well as readers traced through the New York Society Library's borrowing records. Many of the works considered—including encyclopedias, poems, and a work written "for the ladies"—are not scientifically innovative but are essential to eighteenth-century readers’ engagement with Newtonian ideas. Revising the timeline in which Newton’s scientific ideas entered eighteenth-century culture, Reading Popular Newtonianism is the first book to interrogate at length the importance of print to his consequential career.

Author : J.E. Force,S. Hutton
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2006-04-18
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781402022388

Get Book

Newton and Newtonianism by J.E. Force,S. Hutton Pdf

Newton's theology, his study of alchemy, the early reception of Newtonianism, & the history of Newtonian scholarship are topics included in the eleven essays that comprise this volume.

Author : Elizabethanne A. Boran,Mordechai Feingold
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2017-06-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004336650

Get Book

Reading Newton in Early Modern Europe by Elizabethanne A. Boran,Mordechai Feingold Pdf

Reading Newton in Early Modern Europe investigates how, when, where and why Newton’s Principia was interpreted by readers in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, England and Ireland. University textbooks and popular simplified vernacular texts created new audiences for early modern science.

Author : Michael John Petry
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 793 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9789401116626

Get Book

Hegel and Newtonianism by Michael John Petry Pdf

It could certainly be argued that the way in which Hegel criticizes Newton in the Dissertation, the Philosophy of Nature and the lectures on the History of Philosophy, has done more than anything else to prejudice his own reputation. At first sight, what we seem to have here is little more than the contrast between the tested accomplishments of the founding father of modern science, and the random remarks of a confused and somewhat disgruntled philosopher; and if we are persuaded to concede that it may perhaps be something more than this - between the work of a clearsighted mathematician and experimentalist, and the blind assertions of some sort of Kantian logician, blundering about among the facts of the real world. By and large, it was this clear-cut simplistic view of the matter which prevailed among Hegel's contemporaries, and which persisted until fairly recently. The modification and eventual transformation of it have come about gradually, over the past twenty or twenty-five years. The first full-scale commentary on the Philosophy of Nature was published in 1970, and gave rise to the realization that to some extent at least, the Hegelian criticism was directed against Newtonianism rather than the work of Newton himself, and that it tended to draw its inspiration from developments within the natural sciences, rather than from the exigencies imposed upon Hegel's thinking by a priori categorial relationships.

Author : Francesco Algarotti
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 1739
Category : Color
ISBN : OXFORD:N11673774

Get Book

Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy Explain'd for the Use of the Ladies by Francesco Algarotti Pdf

Author : Tamás Demeter
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2016-09-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004327320

Get Book

David Hume and the Culture of Scottish Newtonianism by Tamás Demeter Pdf

Tamás Demeter discusses the relation of Hume’s philosophy to the methods, language and outlook of Newton-inspired Scottish physiology and chemistry.

Author : Mark Towsey,Kyle B. Roberts
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 433 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2017-10-23
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004348677

Get Book

Before the Public Library by Mark Towsey,Kyle B. Roberts Pdf

Before the Public Library explores the emergence of community-based lending libraries in the Atlantic World in the two centuries before the advent of the Public Library movement in the mid-nineteenth century through essays by eighteen leading scholars.

Author : Kevin L. Cope,Samara Anne Cahill
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2020-02-14
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781684481729

Get Book

1650-1850 by Kevin L. Cope,Samara Anne Cahill Pdf

1650-1850 publishes essays and reviews from and about a wide range of academic disciplines literature, philosophy, art history, history, religion, and science. Interdisciplinary in scope and approach, 1650-1850 emphasizes aesthetic manifestations and applications of ideas, and encourages studies that move between the arts and the sciences.

Author : J.B. Shank
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 590 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2008-09-15
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780226749471

Get Book

The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment by J.B. Shank Pdf

Nothing is considered more natural than the connection between Isaac Newton’s science and the modernity that came into being during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Terms like “Newtonianism” are routinely taken as synonyms for “Enlightenment” and “modern” thought, yet the particular conjunction of these terms has a history full of accidents and contingencies. Modern physics, for example, was not the determined result of the rational unfolding of Newton’s scientific work in the eighteenth century, nor was the Enlightenment the natural and inevitable consequence of Newton’s eighteenth-century reception. Each of these outcomes, in fact, was a contingent event produced by the particular historical developments of the early eighteenth century. A comprehensive study of public culture, The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment digsbelow the surface of the commonplace narratives that link Newton with Enlightenment thought to examine the actual historical changes that brought them together in eighteenth-century time and space. Drawing on the full range of early modern scientific sources, from studied scientific treatises and academic papers to book reviews, commentaries, and private correspondence, J. B. Shank challenges the widely accepted claim that Isaac Newton’s solitary genius is the reason for his iconic status as the father of modern physics and the philosophemovement.

Author : Belinda Jack
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 470 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2012-07-17
Category : History
ISBN : 9780300160383

Get Book

The Woman Reader by Belinda Jack Pdf

This lively story has never been told before: the complete history of women's reading and the ceaseless controversies it has inspired. Belinda Jack's groundbreaking volume travels from the Cro-Magnon cave to the digital bookstores of our time, exploring what and how women of widely differing cultures have read through the ages. Jack traces a history marked by persistent efforts to prevent women from gaining literacy or reading what they wished. She also recounts the counter-efforts of those who have battled for girls' access to books and education. The book introduces frustrated female readers of many eras—Babylonian princesses who called for women's voices to be heard, rebellious nuns who wanted to share their writings with others, confidantes who challenged Reformation theologians' writings, nineteenth-century New England mill girls who risked their jobs to smuggle novels into the workplace, and women volunteers who taught literacy to women and children on convict ships bound for Australia. Today, new distinctions between male and female readers have emerged, and Jack explores such contemporary topics as burgeoning women's reading groups, differences in men and women's reading tastes, censorship of women's on-line reading in countries like Iran, the continuing struggle for girls' literacy in many poorer places, and the impact of women readers in their new status as significant movers in the world of reading.

Author : Dustin D. Stewart
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2020-10-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192599636

Get Book

Futures of Enlightenment Poetry by Dustin D. Stewart Pdf

This book offers a revisionist account of poetry and embodiment from Milton to Romanticism. Scholars have made much of the period's theories of matter, with some studies equating the eighteenth century's modernity with its materialism. Yet the Enlightenment in Britain also brought bold new arguments for the immateriality of spirit and evocative claims about an imminent spirit realm. Protestant religious writing was of two minds about futurity, swinging back and forth between patience for the resurrected body and desire for the released soul. This ancient pattern carried over, the book argues, into understandings of poetry as a modern devotional practice. A range of authors agreed that poems can provide a foretaste of the afterlife, but they disagreed about what kind of future state the imagination should seek. The mortalist impulse—exemplified by John Milton and by Romantic poets Anna Letitia Barbauld and William Wordsworth—is to overcome the temptation of disembodiment and to restore spirit to its rightful home in matter. The spiritualist impulse—driving eighteenth-century verse by Mark Akenside, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and Edward Young—is to break out of bodily repetition and enjoy the detached soul's freedom in advance. Although the study isolates these two tendencies, each needed the other as a source in the Enlightenment, and their productive opposition didn't end with Romanticism. The final chapter identifies an alternative Romantic vision that keeps open the possibility of a disembodied poetics, and the introduction considers present-day Anglophone writers who put it into practice.

Author : Joseph Fletcher
Publisher : Anthem Press
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2021-12-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781785279522

Get Book

William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788-1795 by Joseph Fletcher Pdf

William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788-1795 takes seriously William Blake’s wish to be read as a natural philosopher, particularly in his early works, and illuminates the way that poetry and visual art were for Blake an imaginative way of philosophizing. Blake’s poetry and designs reveal a consistent preoccupation with eighteenth-century natural philosophical debates concerning the properties of the physical world, the nature of the soul, and God’s relationship to the material universe. This book traces the history of these debates, and examines images and ideas in Blake’s illuminated books that mark the development of the monist pantheism in his early works, which contend that every material thing is in its essence God, to the idealism of his later period, which casts the natural world as degenerate and illusory. The book argues that Blake’s philosophical thought was not as monolithic as has been previously characterized, and that his deepening engagement with late eighteenth-century vitalist life sciences, including studies of the asexual propagation of the marine polyp, marks his metaphysical turn. In contrast to the vast body of scholarship that emphasizes Blake’s early religious and political positions, William Blake as Natural Philosopher draws out the metaphysics underlying his commitments. In so doing, the book demonstrates that pantheism is important because it entails an ethics that respects the interconnected divinity of all material objects – not just humans – which in turn spurns hierarchical power structures. If everything is alive and essentially divine, Blake’s early work implies, then everything is worthy of respect and capable of giving and receiving infinite delight. Therefore, one should imaginatively and joyfully immerse oneself in the community of other beings in which one is already enmeshed. Often in the works discussed in this book, Blake offers negative examples to suggest his moral philosophy; he dramatizes the disastrous individual and social consequences of humans behaving as if God were a transcendent, immaterial, nonhuman demiurge, and as if they were separate from and ontologically superior to the degraded material universe that they see as composed of inert, lifeless atoms. William Blake as Natural Philosopher traces the evolution of eighteenth-century debates over the vitalist qualities of life and the nature of the soul both in the United Kingdom and on the continent, devoting significant attention to the natural philosophy of Newton, Locke, Berkeley, Leibniz, Buffon, La Mettrie, Hume, Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, and many others.

Author : Mircea Pitici
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2019-11-05
Category : Mathematics
ISBN : 9780691197944

Get Book

The Best Writing on Mathematics 2019 by Mircea Pitici Pdf

The year's finest mathematical writing from around the world This annual anthology brings together the year's finest mathematics writing from around the world. Featuring promising new voices alongside some of the foremost names in the field, The Best Writing on Mathematics 2019 makes available to a wide audience many articles not easily found anywhere else—and you don't need to be a mathematician to enjoy them. These essays delve into the history, philosophy, teaching, and everyday aspects of math, offering surprising insights into its nature, meaning, and practice—and taking readers behind the scenes of today's hottest mathematical debates. In this volume, Moon Duchin explains how geometric-statistical methods can be used to combat gerrymandering, Jeremy Avigad illustrates the growing use of computation in making and verifying mathematical hypotheses, and Kokichi Sugihara describes how to construct geometrical objects with unusual visual properties. In other essays, Neil Sloane presents some recent additions to the vast database of integer sequences he has catalogued, and Alessandro Di Bucchianico and his colleagues highlight how mathematical methods have been successfully applied to big-data problems. And there's much, much more. In addition to presenting the year's most memorable math writing, this must-have anthology includes an introduction by the editor and a bibliography of other notable writings on mathematics. This is a must-read for anyone interested in where math has taken us—and where it is headed.

Author : Stefka Ritchie
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 361 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2018-11-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9781527521094

Get Book

Samuel Johnson’s Pragmatism and Imagination by Stefka Ritchie Pdf

The central theme of this book is an under-studied link between the canon of Francis Bacon’s and Isaac Newton’s scientific and philosophical thought and Samuel Johnson’s critical approach that can be traced in a textual study of his literary works. The interpretive framework adopted here encourages familiarity with the history and philosophy of science, confirming that the history of ideas is an entirely human construct that constitutes an integral part of intellectual history. This further endorses the argument that intermediality can only be of benefit to future research into the richness of Johnson’s literary style. As perceived boundaries are crossed between conventionally distinct communication media, the profile of Johnson that emerges is of a writer of passionate intelligence who was able to combine a pragmatic approach to knowledge with flights of imagination as a true artist.

Author : Annika Mann
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2018-11-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813941783

Get Book

Reading Contagion by Annika Mann Pdf

Eighteenth-century British culture was transfixed by the threat of contagion, believing that everyday elements of the surrounding world could transmit deadly maladies from one body to the next. Physicians and medical writers warned of noxious matter circulating through air, bodily fluids, paper, and other materials, while philosophers worried that agitating passions could spread via certain kinds of writing and expression. Eighteenth-century poets and novelists thus had to grapple with the disturbing idea that literary texts might be doubly infectious, communicating dangerous passions and matter both in and on their contaminated pages. In Reading Contagion, Annika Mann argues that the fear of infected books energized aesthetic and political debates about the power of reading, which could alter individual and social bodies by connecting people of all sorts in dangerous ways through print. Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Tobias Smollett, William Blake, and Mary Shelley ruminate on the potential of textual objects to absorb and transmit contagions with a combination of excitement and dread. This book vividly documents this cultural anxiety while explaining how writers at once reveled in the possibility that reading could transform the world while fearing its ability to infect and destroy.