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10306 results in History of science: general interest

Page 234 of 516

  • 20 - Cosmography

  • from Part III - Dividing the Study of Nature
  • Edited by Katharine Park, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Lorraine Daston, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Science
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    03 July 2006, pp 469-496

  • Summary

    In the early sixteenth century, “geography” was not yet a well-established science. Thus, it was quite remarkable that Erasmus of Rotterdam (ca. 1469–1536), one of the era’s leading theologians and humanists, introduced the first Greek edition of the Geography of Ptolemy (ca. 100–170), published in Basel in 1533, by claiming that “hardly any other of the mathematical disciplines is more attractive or more necessary.” Erasmus called attention to the changing status of this newly emerging area of study and emphasized its importance. Only recently, he argued, had traditional limits of knowledge been overcome and scholastic speculations transformed into a clear new view of the earth:

    Earlier, there were more difficulties, since it was unclear if the heavens had a spherical form; since some believed that the world swam in the ocean as a ball swims in water, with only its tip showing and the rest covered with water; and since the men who spread this art in their writings also erred in many other things. Now that the thread has been laid by many others, but especially by Ptolemy, with whose guidance every man can easily find his way out of this labyrinth, the path is paved for you to reach the pinnacle of this art quickly and without deviation. Those who disregard it must frequently speculate hopelessly, in the interpretation of respected authors.

  • A medieval Arabic analysis of motion at an instant: the Avicennan sources to the forma fluens/fluxus formae debate

  • JON McGinnis
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 39 / Issue 2 / June 2006
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    07 June 2006, pp. 189-205
    Print publication:
    June 2006

  • The forma fluens/fluxus formae debate concerns the question as to whether motion is something distinct from the body in motion, the flow of a distinct form identified with motion (fluxus formae), or nothing more than the successive states of the body in motion, the flow of some form found in one of Aristotle's ten categories (forma fluens). Although Albertus Magnus introduced this debate to the Latin West he drew his inspiration from Avicenna. This study argues that Albertus misclassified Avicenna's position, since Albertus could not conceptualize motion at an instant, whereas it is claimed here this was the very position Avicenna adopted. The paper includes an overview of Albertus's discussion and a brief survey of the Avicennan sources upon which Albertus drew. The heart of the paper treats Avicenna's analysis of motion at an instant. Avicenna's general argument was that since spatial points have no extremities, nothing in principle prevents a moving object from being at a spatial point for more than an instant, understood as a limit. It is then argued that Avicenna had the philosophical machinery to make sense of a limit, albeit not in mathematical terms, but in terms of an Aristotelian potential infinite.

  • Gustave-Adolphe Hirn (1815–90): engineering thermodynamics in mid-nineteenth-century France

  • FAIDRA Papanelopoulou
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 39 / Issue 2 / June 2006
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    07 June 2006, pp. 231-254
    Print publication:
    June 2006

  • This paper examines the activities of the Alsatian physicist–engineer and philosopher Gustave-Adolphe Hirn, whose contribution to thermodynamics and the metaphysical interpretation of heat theory are rather neglected parts of the history of French thermodynamics. The industrial environment in which Hirn was reared, and in which he worked, turned his thoughts to an investigation of thermal phenomena in conjunction with their relevance to the industrial needs of his factory. Nurtured in the intellectual environment of Colmar, Hirn also developed a deep sense of morality that was bound to the Christian world view. His work on heat led him to a generalized metaphysics based on the notion of force. However, despite important work on friction and his ‘independent’ discovery of the mechanical equivalent of heat, Hirn never felt that his work received its due recognition from his contemporaries. Without attributing this negligence solely to Hirn's relative isolation in Alsace and to the absence of formal institutional affiliations, the paper suggests that it was Hirn's particular scientific practice that was at odds with well-established practices employed by other French scientists and engineers.

Page 234 of 516