Peter Dear
The Intelligibility of Nature
How Science Makes Sense of the World
Paper $140
ISBN: 9780226139494 Published March 2008
科學作為一種概念或紀律如何在歷史中演化?
從力學哲理、牛頓引力、化學革命、自然歷史啟蒙、生物進化、磁場動力、量子理論……等等範疇,美國康乃爾大學科技及歷史教授Peter Dear 將揭示「知」、「行」兩大科學原則如何合而為一架構,並為世世代代科學家所遵從、實踐。
Scientists who wish to reflect on their vocation will gain valuable insights from this beautifully contrived book, and all readers will be prompted to think more carefully about the nature and ethos of science.
– Richard Yeo, Nature
In The Intelligibility of Nature, Peter Dear considers how science as an idea and a discipline has evolved and positioned itself. His intellectual journey begins with a crucial observation: that scientific ambition is, and has been, directed toward two distinct but frequently conflated ends—doing and knowing.
Teasing out this tension between doing and knowing during key episodes in the history of science—mechanical philosophy and Newtonian gravitation, elective affinities and the chemical revolution, enlightened natural history and taxonomy, evolutionary biology, the dynamical theory of electromagnetism, and quantum theory—Dear reveals how the two principles became formalized into a single enterprise, science, that would be carried out by a new kind of person, the scientist.
Continue Reading »