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An original account of willful ignorance and how this principle relates to modern probability and statistical methods Through a series of colorful stories about great thinkers and the problems they chose to solve, the author traces the historical evolution of probability and explains how statistical methods have helped to propel scientific research. However, the past success of statistics has depended on vast, deliberate simplifications amounting to willful ignorance, and this very success now threatens future advances in medicine, the social sciences, and other fields. Limitations of existing methods result in frequent reversals of scientific findings and recommendations, to the consternati...
In 1503, for the first time, a student in Paris was able to spend his entire university career studying only the printed textbooks of his teacher, thanks to the works of the humanist and university reformer Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples (c. 1455-1536). As printed books became central to the intellectual habits of following generations, Lefèvre turned especially to mathematics as a way to renovate the medieval university. Making Mathematical Culture argues this was a pivatol moment in the cultural history of Europe and explores how the rise of the printed book contributed to the growing profile of mathematics in the region. Using student manuscripts and annotated books, Making Mathematical Culture offers a new account of printed textbooks, as jointly made by masters and students, and how such collaborative practices informed approaches to mathematics.
Originally published in 1990, this was the first ever translation or edition of obscure fourteenth-century philosopher Richard Kilvington's work.
Reading Hobbes Backwards treats Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) as a peace theorist, who from early manuscripts of his system made by disciples in England and France, to the late Historia Ecclesiastica, saw sectarianism and Trinitarian doctrines supporting the papal monarchy as the ultimate cause of the punishing religious wars of the post-Reformation. But Hobbes was also indebted to scholasticism and the millennia-old Aristotle commentary tradition, Greek, Byzantine, Jewish and Islamic, surviving in the universities of Paris and Oxford, naming his ‘English Politiques’ Leviathan after the scaly monster of the Book of Job, perhaps as a decoy. Politically connected through Cavendish circles and ...
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The studies in this volume present early science in its rich and divergent complexity. Many historians of the Scientific Revolution have used early modern scholasticism to represent pre-seventeenth century science as a whole, but a close look at ancient, medieval, and even early modern scientific writers shows that before the Scientific Revolution - and not only in Europe - there were many and diverse traditions of interpreting the natural world. This book provides a broad range of historical evidence concerning early science, which may be used as a basis for new and more complex historical interpretations. Originally published as Volume XIV, Nos. 1-3 (2009) of Brill's journal Early Science and Medicine.