Search results for ""Author Jan Golinski""
The University of Chicago Press The Experimental Self: Humphry Davy and the Making of a Man of Science
What did it mean to be a scientist before the profession itself existed? Jan Golinski finds an answer in the remarkable career of Humphry Davy, the foremost chemist of his day and one of the most distinguished British men of science of the nineteenth century. Originally a country boy from a modest background, Davy was propelled by his scientific accomplishments to a knighthood and the presidency of the Royal Society. An enigmatic figure to his contemporaries, Davy has continued to elude the efforts of biographers to classify him: poet, friend to Coleridge and Wordsworth, author of travel narratives and a book on fishing, chemist and inventor of the miners’ safety lamp. What are we to make of such a man? In The Experimental Self, Golinski argues that Davy’s life is best understood as a prolonged process of self-experimentation. He follows Davy from his youthful enthusiasm for physiological experiment through his self-fashioning as a man of science in a period when the path to a scientific career was not as well-trodden as it is today. What emerges is a portrait of Davy as a creative fashioner of his own identity through a lifelong series of experiments in selfhood.
£26.96
The University of Chicago Press Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science, with a new Preface
Arguably the best available introduction to constructivism, a research paradigm that has dominated the history of science for the past forty years, "Making Natural Knowledge" reflects on the importance of this theory, tells the history of its rise to prominence, and traces its most important tensions. Viewing scientific knowledge as a product of human culture, Jan Golinski challenges the traditional trajectory of the history of science as steady and autonomous progress. In exploring topics such as the social identity of the scientist, the significance of places where science is practiced, and the roles played by language, instruments, and images, "Making Natural Knowledge" sheds new light on the relations between science and other cultural domains.
£36.04
The University of Chicago Press British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment
Enlightenment inquiries into weather sought to impose order on a force that had the power to alter human life and social conditions. "British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment" reveals how a new sense of the national climate emerged in the eighteenth century from the systematic recording of the weather, and how it was deployed in discussions of the health and welfare of the population. Enlightened intellectuals hailed climate's role in the development of civilization but acknowledged that human existence depended on natural forces that would never submit to rational control. Reconsidering the Enlightenment through ideas, beliefs, and practices concerning the weather, Jan Golinski aims to reshape our understanding of the movement and its legacy for modern environmental thinking. With its combination of cultural history and the history of science, "British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment" counters the claim that Enlightenment progress set humans against nature, instead revealing that intellectuals of the age drew characteristically modern conclusions about the inextricability of nature and culture.
£80.00
The University of Chicago Press British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment
Enlightenment inquiries into weather sought to impose order on a force that had the power to alter human life and social conditions. "British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment" reveals how a new sense of the national climate emerged in the eighteenth century from the systematic recording of the weather, and how it was deployed in discussions of the health and welfare of the population. Enlightened intellectuals hailed climate's role in the development of civilization but acknowledged that human existence depended on natural forces that would never submit to rational control. Reconsidering the Enlightenment through ideas, beliefs, and practices concerning the weather, Jan Golinski aims to reshape our understanding of the movement and its legacy for modern environmental thinking. With its combination of cultural history and the history of science, "British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment" counters the claim that Enlightenment progress set humans against nature, instead revealing that intellectuals of the age drew characteristically modern conclusions about the inextricability of nature and culture.
£30.59
The University of Chicago Press The Sciences in Enlightened Europe
This text explores the complex relations between "enlightened" values and the making of scientific knowledge. Here monsters and automata, barometers and botanical gardens, polite academies and boisterous clubs are all given their due place in the landscape of enlightened Europe. The contributors examine the production of new disciplines through work with instruments and techniques; consider how institutions of public taste and conversation helped provide a common frame for the study of human and nonhuman natures; and explore the regional operations of scientific culture at the geographical fringes of Europe. Implicated in the rise of both fascism and liberal secularism, the moral and political values that shaped the Enlightenment remain controversial today. Through careful scrutiny of how these values influenced and were influenced by the concrete practices of its sciences, this book seeks to offer an entirely new sense of the Enlightenment.
£40.00
