Author: Richard Owen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226641902
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892), comparative anatomist, colleague and later antagonist of Darwin, and head of the British Museum of Natural History, was a major figure in Victorian science. Yet historians of science have found Owen a difficult subject, in part because he chose not to expound his views in a major theoretical work but rather presented them through annual lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons from 1837 to 1856. Nevertheless, Owen's views on the nature of life, the relations of form and function, the meaning of fossils, and the development of species gave his contemporaries such as Lyell, Grant, Huxley, Whewell, and Darwin a set of positions with which they could agree or disagree while developing their own views. Now, for the first time, modern readers how access to the opening series of Owen's Hunterian Lectures, in which he set out the larger framework of the theoretical reflections that occupied him during the next nineteen years. Presented to the public in the two months before Darwin began his first notebook on the species question, these lectures reveal the nature of the synthesis of French, German, and British biology taking place in metropolitan London in this crucial period in nineteenth-century life science. Phillip Reid Sloan has transcribed and edited the seven surviving lectures and has written an introduction and commentary situating the work in the context of Owen's life and the scientific and intellectual life of the time. Sloan pays particular attention to Owen's early relations to the German scientific and philosophical tradition, and in this respect contributes to an understanding of the relations between science and British Romanticism. In the lectures, Owen surveys the history of comparative anatomy up to his time and develops his views on the nature of life, species duration, physiological function, and the relation between embryology and classification. One can see the degree to which transcendental anatomy and the views of Von Baer, Johannes Müller, E. G. St.-Hilaire, and Cuvier were current in London in the late 1830s. -- from back cover.
Author: Richard Owen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780565011444
Category : Anatomy, Comparative
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
Author: Richard Owen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780113100064
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
Author: Richard Owen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780113100071
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
Author: James Elwick
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822981831
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Elwick explores how the concept of "compound individuality" brought together life scientists working in pre-Darwinian London. Scientists conducting research in comparative anatomy, physiology, cellular microscopy, embryology and the neurosciences repeatedly stated that plants and animals were compounds of smaller independent units. Discussion of a "bodily economy" was widespread. But by 1860, the most flamboyant discussions of compound individuality had come to an end in Britain. Elwick relates the growth and decline of questions about compound individuality to wider nineteenth-century debates about research standards and causality. He uses specific technical case studies to address overarching themes of reason and scientific method.
Author: Stephen T. Asma
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199798095
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
"A comprehensive modern-day bestiary."--The New Yorker
Author: Michael RUSE
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674042972
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
In his latest book, Ruse uncovers surprising similarities between evolutionist and creationist thinking. Exploring the underlying philosophical commitments of evolutionists, he reveals that those most hostile to religion are just as evangelical as their fundamentalist opponents. But more crucially, and reaching beyond the biblical issues at stake, he demonstrates that these two diametrically opposed ideologies have, since the Enlightenment, engaged in a struggle for the privilege of defining human origins, moral values, and the nature of reality.
Author: Harry Whitaker
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387709673
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
No books have been published on the practice of neuroscience in the eighteenth century, a time of transition and discovery in science and medicine. This volume explores neuroscience and reviews developments in anatomy, physiology, and medicine in the era some call the Age of Reason, and others the Enlightenment. Topics include how neuroscience adopted electricity as the nerve force, how disorders such as aphasia and hysteria were treated, Mesmerism, and more.
Author: James T. Costa
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393249158
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
“If you’ve ever fantasized walking and conversing with the great scientist on the subjects that consumed him, and now wish to add the fullness of reality, read this book.” —Edward O. Wilson, author of Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life James T. Costa takes readers on a journey from Darwin’s childhood through his voyage on the HMS Beagle, where his ideas on evolution began, and on to Down House, his bustling home of forty years. Using his garden and greenhouse, the surrounding meadows and woodlands, and even the cellar and hallways of his home-turned-field-station, Darwin tested ideas of his landmark theory of evolution through an astonishing array of experiments without using specialized equipment. From those results, he plumbed the laws of nature and drew evidence for the revolutionary arguments of On the Origin of Species and other watershed works. This unique perspective introduces us to an enthusiastic correspondent, collaborator, and, especially, an incorrigible observer and experimenter. And it includes eighteen experiments for home, school, or garden. Finalist for the 2018 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prizes for Excellence in Science Books.
Author: Robert J. Richards
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226712184
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 609
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Book Description
"All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people who held it and the development of nineteenth-century science. Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved—from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling—Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory. Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology.
