Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution

by Lisa Jardine (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1999

  $3.25

  The intellectual revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries is considered by many to be the most important event in Western history. Its breakthroughs in thought and its advances in science stand at the centre of every dimension of modern life. Yet the Renaissance intellectual revolution remains one of the great unexplained events of history. What kind of upheaval was it that produced its permanent changes in our outlook and understanding? What triggered the acceleration in the growth of knowledge, such that in one century man acquired a pre-eminent ability to control nature? This work documents the forces for change which brought the human and natural sciences together and gave them shape. Each of her series of key components - among them, precise time measurement, enhanced astronomical observation, selective animal and plant breeding, and technological advances in navigation - lays a crucial part of the foundations for modern thought.

• Used

  Paperback
  2000

  $3.25

  Today the 'two cultures' - art and science - have come to be treated as fundamentally opposed, their aims incompatible. Scientific research is castigated for its inhumane methods & lack of moral responsibility, while art is treated as an enduring source of essential guidance to society's spiritual well-being. Lisa Jardine makes clear in this remarkable book that this is a distinction which is both artificial & historically inaccurate. The intellectual revolution of the 17th & early 18th eighteenth centuries was the single most formative event in Western history, bringing together the humanities & natural sciences in an unprecedented ferment of conceptual & practical creativity. She documents the forces for change which brought the human & natural sciences together & gave them shape. Each of her series of key components - among them, precise time measurement, enhanced astronomical observation, selective animal & plant breeding & technological advances in navigation - lays a crucial part of the foundations for modern thought. INGENIOUS PURSUITS brilliantly illuminates the practice of science, its impact on the emerging modern world & its continuing relevance to society.