Leviathan and the Air-Pump

preview-18
  • Leviathan and the Air-Pump Book Detail

  • Author : Steven Shapin
  • Release Date : 2011-08-15
  • Publisher : Princeton University Press
  • Genre : Science
  • Pages : 446
  • ISBN 13 : 1400838495
  • File Size : 34,34 MB

Leviathan and the Air-Pump by Steven Shapin PDF Summary

Book Description: Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-pump to the intellectual integrity of the knowledge it might yield. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild. The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding what was at stake in the early history of scientific experimentation. They describe the protagonists' divergent views of natural knowledge, and situate the Hobbes-Boyle disputes within contemporary debates over the role of intellectuals in public life and the problems of social order and assent in Restoration England. In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then.

Disclaimer: www.yourbookbest.com does not own Leviathan and the Air-Pump books pdf, neither created or scanned. We just provide the link that is already available on the internet, public domain and in Google Drive. If any way it violates the law or has any issues, then kindly mail us via contact us page to request the removal of the link.

Leviathan and the Air-Pump

Leviathan and the Air-Pump

File Size : 14,14 MB
Total View : 2653 Views
DOWNLOAD

Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Ho

Leviathan and the Air-Pump

Leviathan and the Air-Pump

File Size : 34,34 MB
Total View : 2575 Views
DOWNLOAD

Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Ho

Never Pure

Never Pure

File Size : 76,76 MB
Total View : 5409 Views
DOWNLOAD

Steven Shapin argues that science, for all its immense authority and power, is and always has been a human endeavor, subject to human capacities and limits. Put

Gender and Boyle's Law of Gases

Gender and Boyle's Law of Gases

File Size : 30,30 MB
Total View : 7345 Views
DOWNLOAD

Boyle's Law, which describes the relation between the pressure and volume of a gas, was worked out by Robert Boyle in the mid-1600s. His experiments are still c

A Social History of Truth

A Social History of Truth

File Size : 43,43 MB
Total View : 1065 Views
DOWNLOAD

How do we come to trust our knowledge of the world? What are the means by which we distinguish true from false accounts? Why do we credit one observational stat