The Aspiring Adept

Author : Lawrence Principe
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691186286
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Aspiring Adept written by Lawrence Principe and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Aspiring Adept presents a provocative new view of Robert Boyle (1627-1691), one of the leading figures of the Scientific Revolution, by revealing for the first time his avid and lifelong pursuit of alchemy. Boyle has traditionally been considered, along with Newton, a founder of modern science because of his mechanical philosophy and his experimentation with the air-pump and other early scientific apparatus. However, Lawrence Principe shows that his alchemical quest--hidden first by Boyle's own codes and secrecy, and later suppressed or ignored--positions him more accurately in the intellectual and cultural crossroads of the seventeenth century. Principe radically reinterprets Boyle's most famous work, The Sceptical Chymist, to show that it criticizes not alchemists, as has been thought, but "unphilosophical" pharmacists and textbook writers. He then shows Boyle's unambiguous enthusiasm for alchemy in his "lost" Dialogue on the Transmutation and Melioration of Metals, now reconstructed from scattered fragments and presented here in full for the first time. Intriguingly, Boyle believed that the goal of his quest, the Philosopher's Stone, could not only transmute base metals into gold, but could also attract angels. Alchemy could thus act both as a source of knowledge and as a defense against the growing tide of atheism that tormented him. In seeking to integrate the seemingly contradictory facets of Boyle's work, Principe also illuminates how alchemy and other "unscientific" pursuits had a far greater impact on early modern science than has previously been thought.

Author : Lawrence M. Principe
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Aspiring Adept written by Lawrence M. Principe and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Lior Zemer
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN 13 : 9780754623762
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Idea of Authorship in Copyright written by Lior Zemer and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an interdisciplinary approach to copyright law, dealing with symbiotic relations between law, philosophy and the sociology of the human creative ability. The study takes its organising principle from John Locke, defining and proving the fatal flaw inherent in debates on copyright: on the one hand, the copyright community is eager to arm authors with a robust property right over their creation, while on the other this community totally ignores the fact that the exposure of the individual to externalities is what makes him or her capable of creating material that is copyrightable.

Author : Michael Hunter
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351893718
Total Pages : 499 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Boyle Papers written by Michael Hunter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Boyle (1627-91) was the most influential British scientist of the late seventeenth century. His huge archive, which has been at the Royal Society since 1769, has only recently been explored, leading to a new understanding of many aspects of Boyle's thought. This volume brings together the essential materials for understanding the Boyle Papers. It includes a revised version of Michael Hunter's fundamental study of the archive, first published in 1992, which elucidates its history and the way in which handwriting evidence can be used to identify chronological strata within it, thus making it possible to trace the development of Boyle's ideas. Other chapters deal with such components of the Papers as Boyle's 'workdiaries' and his projected Paralipomena; another uses material from the archive to illuminate the making of a key work by Boyle, his Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature; while another illustrates that, large as the archive is, it is only a part of what existed in Boyle's lifetime. Parts of the content have been published before, but they are here presented in revised and fully indexed form. Lastly, the volume includes a completely revised version of the catalogue of the Boyle Papers, Letters and ancillary manuscripts originally published in 1992, updating it by tabulating the extensive use of the archive made in recent years in connection with the publication of the definitive editions of Boyle's Works and Correspondence (1999-2001). In all, the volume will be indispensable to anyone with a serious interest in Boyle.

Author : Louis Komjathy
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9047421736
Total Pages : 576 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cultivating Perfection written by Louis Komjathy and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007-09-30 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important work focuses on early Quanzhen (Complete Perfection) Daoism, a twelfth-century Daoist religious movement and subsequent monastic order. Emphasis in this first study to approach Quanzhen from a comparative religious studies perspective is placed on the complex interplay among views of self, specific training regimens, and the types of experiences that were expected to follow from dedicated praxis. On the basis of historical contextualization and textual analysis it is demonstrated that in its formative and incipient organized phases Quanzhen was a Daoist religious community consisting of a few renunciants dedicated to religious praxis. The study proper is followed by a complete annotated translation of a text attributed to the founder, which represents one of only two early Quanzhen texts translated to date. Subsequent appendices address issues of dating and contents of the early textual corpus as well as technical Quanzhen religious terminology.

Author : William Eaton
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1847144373
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Boyle on Fire written by William Eaton and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2004-05-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The philosophy of Robert Boyle (1627-1691) is a hot topic in early modern philosophy. Boyle was at the centre of the scientific community of 17th-century England, and an accurate view of the Enlightenment scientific revolution is impossible without recognition of the contributions that he made. Work on Boyle's philosophy is also shedding light on contemporary issues in the philosophy of science - it can help us understand the nature of scientific explanation and the role that the mechanical model of explanation plays in present-day science. Boyle's mechanical philosophy ushered in a new explanatory model for science and even though his corpuscular hypothesis failed, its failure does not entail the failure of the explanatory model of which it was an instance. Boyle on Fire demonstrates these points by examining Boyle's work concerning a method of experiment common in the seventeenth century called Fire Analysis. In the Sceptical Chymist (1661), Boyle attacks elemental theories of chemical explanation primarily by raising objections against Aristotelian and Paracelsian interpretations of fire analysis. The book reconstructs Boyle's corpuscular account of fire analysis and then compares it to these objections. This process reveals those characteristics of mechanical explanations that make them epistemologically superior to elemental theories of chemical explanation, and it is these characteristics that survive the death of the corpuscular hypothesis and have become an enduring feature of the scientific enterprise.

Author : William R. Newman
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226577058
Total Pages : 359 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Alchemy Tried in the Fire written by William R. Newman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-11-15 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2005 Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society. What actually took place in the private laboratory of a mid-seventeenth century alchemist? How did he direct his quest after the secrets of Nature? What instruments and theoretical principles did he employ? Using, as their guide, the previously misunderstood interactions between Robert Boyle, widely known as "the father of chemistry," and George Starkey, an alchemist and the most prominent American scientific writer before Benjamin Franklin as their guide, Newman and Principe reveal the hitherto hidden laboratory operations of a famous alchemist and argue that many of the principles and practices characteristic of modern chemistry derive from alchemy. By analyzing Starkey's extraordinary laboratory notebooks, the authors show how this American "chymist" translated the wildly figurative writings of traditional alchemy into quantitative, carefully reasoned laboratory practice—and then encoded his own work in allegorical, secretive treatises under the name of Eirenaeus Philalethes. The intriguing "mystic" Joan Baptista Van Helmont—a favorite of Starkey, Boyle, and even of Lavoisier—emerges from this study as a surprisingly central figure in seventeenth-century "chymistry." A common emphasis on quantification, material production, and analysis/synthesis, the authors argue, illustrates a continuity of goals and practices from late medieval alchemy down to and beyond the Chemical Revolution. For anyone who wants to understand how alchemy was actually practiced during the Scientific Revolution and what it contributed to the development of modern chemistry, Alchemy Tried in the Fire will be a veritable philosopher's stone.

Author : Michael Hunter
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317172868
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Boyle Studies written by Michael Hunter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The significance of Robert Boyle (1627-91) as the most influential English scientist in the generation before Newton is now generally acknowledged, but the complexity and eclecticism of his ideas has also become increasingly apparent. This volume presents an important group of studies of Boyle by Michael Hunter, the leading expert on Boyle’s life and thought. It forms a sequel to two previous books: Hunter’s Robert Boyle: Scrupulosity and Science (2000) and The Boyle Papers: Understanding the Manuscripts of Robert Boyle (2007). Like them, it conveniently brings together material otherwise widely scattered in essay volumes and academic journals, while nearly a third of the book’s content is hitherto unpublished. The collection opens with a substantial introduction that places the studies that follow in the context of existing studies of Boyle; appended to it is an annotated edition of Boyle’s telling list of desiderata for science. The next three essays comprise a group of essentially biographical studies, exploring various aspects of Boyle’s life and intellectual evolution, after which three others provide further evidence of the ’convoluted’ Boyle divulged in Robert Boyle: Scrupulosity and Science. Finally, we have two chapters, one hitherto published only in French and the other not at all, which throw important light on topics that preoccupied Boyle in the last few years of his life - the supernatural and the exotic. Together, these essays add greater depth to our understanding of Boyle, both as an individual and as a natural philosopher.

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004453962
Total Pages : 620 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-05-20 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume deals with corpuscular matter theory that was to emerge as the dominant model in the seventeenth century. By retracing atomist and corpuscularian ideas to a variety of mutually independent medieval and Renaissance sources in natural philosophy, medicine, alchemy, mathematics, and theology, this volume shows the debt of early modern matter theory to previous traditions and thereby explains its bewildering heterogeneity. The book assembles nineteen carefully selected contributions by some of the most notable historians of medieval and early modern philosophy and science. All chapters present new research results and will therefore be of interest to historians of philosophy, science, and medicine between 1150 and 1750.

Author : R. Crocker
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 9401702179
Total Pages : 293 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Henry More, 1614-1687 written by R. Crocker and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first modern biography to place Henry More’s (1614-1687) religious and philosophical preoccupations centre-stage, and to provide a coherent interpretation of his work from a consideration of his own writings, their contexts and aims. It is also the first study of More to exploit the full range of his prolific writings and a number of unknown manuscripts relating to his life. It contains an annotated handlist of his extant correspondence.