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MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK
Main description:
Stephen Gaukroger presents an original account of the development of empirical science and the understanding of human behaviour from the mid-eighteenth century. Since the seventeenth century, science in the west has undergone a unique form of cumulative development in which it has been consolidated through integration into and shaping of a culture. But in the eighteenth century, science was cut loose from the legitimating culture in which it had had a public rationale as a fruitful
and worthwhile form of enquiry. What kept it afloat between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries, when its legitimacy began to hinge on an intimate link with technology? The answer lies in large part in an abrupt but fundamental shift in how the tasks of scientific
enquiry were conceived, from the natural realm to the human realm.
At the core of this development lies the naturalization of the human, that is, attempts to understand human behaviour and motivations no longer in theological and metaphysical terms, but in empirical terms. One of the most striking feature of this development is the variety of forms it took, and the book explores anthropological medicine, philosophical anthropology, the 'natural history of man', and social arithmetic. Each of these disciplines re-formulated basic questions so that empirical
investigation could be drawn upon in answering them, but the empirical dimension was conceived very differently in each case, with the result that the naturalization of the human took the form of competing, and in some respects mutually exclusive, projects.
PRODUCT DETAILS
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP Oxford)
Publication date: January, 2016
Pages: 416
Weight: 742g
Availability: Not available (reason unspecified)
Subcategories: General Issues
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CUSTOMER REVIEWS
In the first volume of his series to date (whose publication has spanned the decade 2006 to 2016), the author studied the period from 1210 to 1685, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture. His second volume overlapped the first, covering 1680 to 1760, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility. Together, these three books represent one of the landmark achievements in the field of history of science, and represent essential reading for a wide range of disciplines. A tremendous intellectual achievement. We all eagerly await the fourth volume, dealing with science and civilisation from about 1840 to 1940. The Natural and the Human, and Stephen Gaukroger's endeavor as a whole, raise once again many of the crucial methodological and ideological issues that are at the heart of doing intellectual history and the history of science This book also has any number of useful, clear, synthetic side discussions, which belong to the general narrative but are somehow synthetic to themselves...this is again an impressive work, which perhaps is best read with its predecessor The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility. The prose is dense, but it is also extremely rewarding. The manifest strength of the analysis is that it moves so seamlessly between different intellectual spheres and disciplines...what Gaukroger achieves so brilliantly is to make clear that such innovations should be included in any attempt to truly understand how science was consolidated as an inescapable intellectual mode. The scope of Gaukroger's project is immense. His scholarship draws on primary sources in at least four languages, and extensive secondary commentary, much of it recent. Gaukroger typically proceeds by a focus on a few key individuals and their works as central nodes in developing this story—Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Diderot, Gibbon, Mandeville, Herder, Kant, Hegel, Strauss, Feuerbach—around which he weaves a larger narrative The copious footnotes (yes, footnotes, not annoying endnotes), typically citing the most recent scholarship and the key primary sources relevant to the discussion, direct the reader to more detailed studies which he has synthesized in depth I find it deeply refreshing to read the effort of a single individual with wide and deep scholarly learning to deal with such a complex array of issues from a coherent organizing perspective. This compelling and erudite book examines the emergence of the human sciences in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and explores the rise of sensibility in studies of human nature and behavior.