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10306 results in History of science: general interest

Page 155 of 516

  • 25 - ANATOMY, PHYSIOLOGY, AND MEDICAL THEORY

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Science
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    07 October 2013, pp 590-610

  • Summary

    Anatomical accuracy depends both on a sufficient stock of bookish knowledge, in order to be aware of the different structures of the body, and on an ability to observe reality and to depict it faithfully. Academic medical readings were supplied by the numerous translations made from Greek and Arabic throughout the medieval period up to the middle of the fourteenth century. The Arabic Galenism that underlay medieval Latin physiology took its principles from Aristotelian physics. Scholastic debates focused more on the definitions of the other constituents of the human body on which medical practice could act, namely, besides anatomical parts, complexions, humors, spirits, virtues, and operations. Explanations of health and disease thus involved a complex system of interactions between qualities. From the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, medical theory had revealed, through the scholastic method of reading sources and reasoning, some failures that to a modern mind seem irreparable.

  • 14 - Translation and Transmission of Greek and Islamic Science to Latin Christendom

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Science
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    07 October 2013, pp 341-364

  • Summary

    The translation of scientific texts from Greek and Arabic in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is both a symptom and a cause of one of the greatest shifts in Western science. In the twelfth century, Toledo became the center for the translation of scientific works, and the separate streams of mathematical, medical, and philosophical translations were united there. Jews played an important role both in circulating and in translating scientific works in Christendom. The motivation for the translations was the perceived lacunae in Latin scientific education, as Burgundio of Pisa and the biographers of Gerard of Cremona both state. If the goal of the translators was to restore the ancient learning of Euclid, Ptolemy, Aristotle, and Galen, they had two sources: the centers of Greek and Arabic learning. For translations to be made, either the Latin scholar must go in search of the texts or the texts must be sent or brought to the Latin center of learning.

  • 7 - SCIENCE IN THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Science
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    07 October 2013, pp 190-206

  • Summary

    In every period, Byzantine education was essentially based on the study of the trivium and quadrivium, a program inherited from late antiquity. Educated Byzantines clearly distinguished between astronomy and astrology, the former being concerned with the theoretical study of celestial events, whereas the latter functioned as a practical art. Byzantine treatises were extremely influential in the musical theory of the Renaissance. The sources of Byzantine geography were also of ancient vintage, authors such as Strabo, Pausanias, Ptolemy, and the so-called minor geographers collected in manuscripts of the ninth and tenth centuries. Byzantine scholars made a few contributions to optics and mechanics, both regarded as mathematical sciences. Byzantine alchemy is represented by three main tendencies: to preserve the heritage of Alexandrine alchemy and its commentators; a concern for combining this traditional culture with contemporary elements; and the integration of alchemical chapters. Botany and zoology were less systematically cultivated in Byzantium than the exact sciences.

  • 9 - The Organization of Knowledge

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Science
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    07 October 2013, pp 240-267

  • Summary

    This chapter investigates the boundaries and relations among medieval disciplines dealing with the natural world. Since medieval intellectuals themselves sought to organize the knowledge they inherited or produced about the natural world, their own views serve as a point of departure. The chapter surveys general notions about disciplines and their relations to one another as they were laid out before the twelfth century. It sketches some of the changes that rendered the older formulations obsolete. The chapter deals with the ways in which these changes were shaped by new conditions, especially the organization of learning within the university, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. A highly influential work by Martianus Capella enumerated seven liberal arts, including three verbal disciplines such as grammar, rhetoric and logic, and four mathematical arts such as arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. During the early Middle Ages, even the reiteration of fixed names and definitions could serve a variety of cultural, religious, and political functions.

  • 24 - Medieval Natural History

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Science
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    07 October 2013, pp 569-589

  • Summary

    This chapter explores the motives and opportunities in the Middle Ages for observing and discussing natural things to characterize the ways in which that natural knowledge expressed itself. It focuses on the treatment of beasts, stones, and herbs in medieval scientific writings. The chapter also examines mystic's visions, a schoolchild's Latin assignment, a theologian's dating of Creation, or a sculptor's carving of oak leaves which can tell about the extent of medieval knowledge of natural things. Herbals, bestiaries, and lapidaries were abridged and combined with a strong dash of magic, astrology, and marvels of the world to create the extremely popular genre known as books of secrets and often attributed to Albertus Magnus. The chapter considers the role of visual images in medieval natural history. Several different traditions of illustrating the objects of the natural world ran alongside the written and oral traditions of medieval natural history.

  • 22 - Logic

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Science
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    07 October 2013, pp 532-547

  • Summary

    Medieval thinkers took a science to be an organized body of certain knowledge that might include theology, logic, and grammar as well as mathematics and physics. Medieval logic has to be seen against the background of the split of the Roman Empire into the Latin-speaking, Catholic West and the Greek-speaking, Orthodox East. The most important of Aristotle's logical works for the history of science is his Posterior Analytics. Roger Bacon's Summule was the first general textbook to contain a full section on the demonstrative syllogism. Medieval logic is characterized by a new technique, the analysis and solution of sophismata. Medieval logicians employed the notion of signification as their basic semantic notion. Supposition theory dealt with the subject and predicate terms in propositions, albeit in relation to other terms. Treatises on syncategoremata dealt with all these other terms, such as all, some, or not, that appear in a proposition and exercise some logical function.

  • 13 - EARLY-MEDIEVAL MEDICINE AND NATURAL SCIENCE

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Science
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    07 October 2013, pp 323-340

  • Summary

    Dionysius's career attests to the increasing fragility of Roman society around 400, the wealth that might be made through medicine, and, most important, the intertwining of medicine and Christianity. The arrival of Christianity in 313 as an approved religion of the Roman state, and its increasing dominance, introduced new relationships into medicine and natural science, in both the Latin West and the Greek-speaking East. An increasing Galenism is most evident in the development of medical encyclopedias. Only a handful of works by Galen and Hippocrates were translated into Latin, along with portions of Oribasius and Paul of Aegina, in all probability in the region of Ravenna. Leaving aside the Ravenna commentaries on Galen and Hippocrates, which were present in a few major Benedictine monasteries in Italy discussions of medical theory in the manner of Galen are replaced by summaries of basic facts necessary for establishing the framework for medical practice.

  • 12 - Early-Medieval Cosmology, Astronomy, and Mathematics

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Science
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    07 October 2013, pp 302-322

  • Summary

    Cosmology, astronomy, arithmetic, and geometry meant very different things in a fifth-century Roman villa, a seventh-century Irish monastery, a ninth-century royal library, and an eleventh-century ecclesiastical school. The spatial framework in medieval cosmology contained a central spherical Earth and an enclosing sphere with stars fixed to it. In the Christian literary tradition, commentaries on the biblical book of Genesis used Greek cosmological doctrines extensively. Encounters with Virgil's Georgics and one of the Latin translations of Aratus's Phaenomena were among the natural points of intersection for the study of both language and astronomy. Models and applied mathematics together prepared Latin astronomers for the research of the twelfth century into the Greco-Arabic traditions of their discipline. Saint Augustine, in a discussion of the order found in each of the liberal arts, explained how measurement, or number, lay beneath the essential character of grammar, astronomy, and the other arts as well.

  • 2 - Islamic Mathematics

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Science
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    07 October 2013, pp 62-83

  • Summary

    By the time al-Kāshī, the last major figure in medieval Islamic mathematics, died in 1429, the Muslims had brought mathematics a long way from the Greek and Hindu elements with which they had begun. Calculation, in medieval mathematics, included both arithmetic and algebra. Medieval Islam knew at least three different systems of arithmetic: mental arithmetic, astronomical arithmetic, and decimal arithmetic. One must remember that Islamic mathematicians achieved their greatest results in algebra without the use of algebraic symbolism. Islamic algebraists contributed importantly to the study of Diophantine equations, which demand integer or fractional solutions to a single equation in more than one unknown. Investigations of equations of the Diophantine type and the theory of numbers are closely related subjects. Another set of problems requiring determination of an unknown number involved what now called as combinatorics. One area that medieval Islam did transform was trigonometry.

  • 16 - MEDIEVAL ALCHEMY

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Science
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    07 October 2013, pp 385-403

  • Summary

    Alchemy in the Middle Ages was therefore a comprehensive field of endeavor concerning itself with every branch of chemical and mineral technology. Although alchemy was known in the West from the mid-twelfth century, serious attempts to assimilate the huge mass of Arabic writings on the subject were not widespread until the first half of the following century. In the mid-thirteenth century, Latin alchemy underwent a new and powerful treatment in On Minerals by Albertus Magnus. The Opus maius, Opus minus, and Opus tertium of Roger Bacon, all composed in the 1260s at the behest of Pope Clement IV, reveal the keen interest of the Franciscan friar in alchemy. The Summa was apparently written in the last third of the thirteenth century, probably by an obscure Franciscan named Paul of Taranto, who is said to have lectured in Assisi. The Summa perfectionis represents the apogee both of alchemy in the high Middle Ages and its interaction with scholasticism.

  • 17 - Change and Motion

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Science
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    07 October 2013, pp 404-435

  • Summary

    Throughout the Middle Ages, motion and change were seen as the fundamental and immediate expressions of the innate natures of physical things. The genius of Aristotle's definition of motion is that it appeals only to prior and more general metaphysical principles, actuality and potentiality. The ancient atomists Democritus and Leucippus had posited the existence of an empty space or void to allow their atoms to move rather than be fixed motionless against each other. In the tour de force of medieval natural philosophy, Thomas Bradwardine devised a simple rule to govern the relationship between moving and resisting powers and speeds that was both a brilliant application of mathematics to motion and also a tolerable interpretation of Aristotle's text. Two controversial problems in the medieval science of motion concerned the acceleration of falling bodies and the continued motion of projectiles.

  • 15 - THE TWELFTH-CENTURY RENAISSANCE

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Science
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    07 October 2013, pp 365-384

  • Summary

    Of all generalizations in medieval European history, that of a twelfth-century Renaissance has generated the most discussion, ever since Charles Homer Haskins launched it in 1927. Both the secular and the sacred spheres in twelfth-century Europe were the beneficiaries of systematizing tendencies. The recovery of a manuscript of Justinian's corpus of Roman law in Italy in the eleventh century marked a watershed. The whole compass of the secular arts of Greece and Rome was regarded as philosophia. The humanistic interest in cosmology as an extension of philosophia is noticeable among scholars associated with the cathedral school at Chartres in the twelfth century. The principal medieval guide to the intricacies of the Latin language was Priscian's Grammatical Institutes. One of the most conspicuous and distinctive features of twelfth-century thought is the rapid assimilation of Euclid's Elements and engagement with its methodology. The case of astrology exemplifies a prerequisite for the advancement of the natural sciences.

  • 27 - TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Science
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    07 October 2013, pp 630-644

  • Summary

    Henry Adams's use of jarring image of dynamo and Virgin provides an excellent starting point for the study of medieval technology. The first great technological revolution of the Middle Ages took place in the development of labor-saving devices for farming. Closely related to developments in agriculture was the invention of labor-saving power technologies. Economically, the most important direction in which the energy generated by wind and water would flow was toward the manufacture of cloth. The risk and reality of worker, and peasant uprisings, coupled with the normal course of dynastic and territorial conflict and the fear of invasion, contributed to continuously escalating military needs on the part of kings and noblemen. Medieval improvements in ship design made sea trade faster, safer, and far more profitable. The construction of a cathedral represents a cross section of the technological achievements of the late Middle Ages and demonstrates both indigenous talent and the absorption of foreign innovations.

  • 10 - SCIENCE AND THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Science
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    07 October 2013, pp 268-285

  • Summary

    This chapter presents several methodological precepts that are required for the success of the relationship between religion and the natural sciences during the Middle Ages. The person who most influentially defined the proper attitude of Christians toward pagan learning was Augustine. Augustine most copiously illustrated the exegetical utility of the natural sciences, while revealing his own command of pagan scientific literature, in his Literal Commentary on Genesis, where he brought it to bear on the interpretation of the biblical Creation story. The motivation for writing about the natural world was supplied by the handmaiden formula. The overwhelming majority of medieval scientific achievements were produced by scholars who subscribed to the Augustinian formula of science as the handmaiden of theology and the church. The church became the patron of the sciences through its support of schools and universities, many of which were under its authority and protection.

  • 3 - THE MIXED MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Science
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    07 October 2013, pp 84-108

  • Summary

    Of the scientific traditions of medieval Islamic civilization, optics and mechanics especially stand out in their decisive roles in the transformation of the relations and applications of the mathematical and natural sciences. The Islamic Middle Ages witnessed breakthroughs in all the Aristotelian mixed sciences, a point that, along with their comparative rates of success, was not lost on one early observer. Optics drew on at least three textual traditions: the mathematical visual models of Euclid and Ptolemy, natural-philosophical traditions of Aristotle and the atomists, and the anatomical and medical tradition of Galen and his followers. As in most Islamic scientific traditions, the early transmission of optics and mechanics involved Greco-Arabic and Arabo-Latin phases on a cross-cultural level and Arabo-Persian phases on an intracultural level. The applications of mathematics to natural bodies in both branches of mechanics were largely limited to geometrical models or proofs, in contrast to the observational methods of both optics and astronomy.

The Cambridge History of Science
  • Volume 2, Medieval Science
  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    07 October 2013
  • This volume in the highly respected Cambridge History of Science series is devoted to the history of science in the Middle Ages from the North Atlantic to the Indus Valley. Medieval science was once universally dismissed as non-existent - and sometimes it still is. This volume reveals the diversity of goals, contexts and accomplishments in the study of nature during the Middle Ages. Organized by topic and culture, its essays by distinguished scholars offer the most comprehensive and up-to-date history of medieval science currently available. Intended to provide a balanced and inclusive treatment of the medieval world, contributors consider scientific learning and advancement in the cultures associated with the Arabic, Greek, Latin and Hebrew languages. Scientists, historians and other curious readers will all gain a new appreciation for the study of nature during an era that is often misunderstood.

North East Indian Linguistics
  • Volume 5
  • Edited by Gwendolyn Hyslop, Stephen Morey, Mark W. Post
  • Published by:
    Foundation Books
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    01 March 2013
  • North East Indian Linguistics Volume 5 presents the latest research on the languages of North East India. This present volume both builds on earlier contributions made by established NEILS participants and introduces new work by scholars making their first mark in regional scholarship.

    Providing a rich database in the form of two appendices, Alexander Kondakov’s paper represents a solid sociolinguistic background against which future grammatical investigation of Koch dialects can be conducted. Mark W. Post’s paper continues Kondakov’s focus on the social and cultural dimensions of dialectology, in an attempt to resolve the vexing question of Galo’s genetic position in the Tani languages. Gwendolyn Hyslop presents the most comprehensive statement yet of the internal structure of this little-studied subgroup spanning Arunachal Pradesh and neighbouring Bhutan. Continuing investigation into nominalization and relational marking in North East Indian languages, Stephen Morey demonstrates that Latin-style grammatical ‘case’ labels are often inappropriate for the languages of North East India. The volume closes with an analysis of Wihu song poetry by Stephen Morey and Meenaxi Bhattacharjya – the latest of several ground-breaking contributions to ethno-musico-linguistic studies in North East India emerging from the Volkswagenstiftung-funded project led by Stephen Morey.

Page 155 of 516