Man and the Natural World
- Course Code
- HIST 0525 / ESLI 0252 / ESNF 0252
- Course Type
- Tutorials
- Subject Credit
- Course Availability
Modern scholars have hailed the quickening of \xe2\x80\x98natural philosophy\xe2\x80\x99 in the era from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century as nothing less than a \xe2\x80\x98Scientific Revolution\xe2\x80\x99, in which developments in scientific understanding transformed humanity’s view of the world and also the world itself. This course tests these claims by tracing the broad developments in the mechanical and life sciences using seminal texts in translation, and placing them carefully in their philosophical, cultural and social context.
Sample Syllabus
- A Heliocentric Universe?
- ‘But it still moves’: Troubles with the Authorities
- New Apparatus: New Possibilities
- Publicising a New Natural Philosophy: Bacon
- William Harvey and Early Modern Medicine
- Descartes and the Mechanisation of the World Picture
- ‘God said, “let Newton be” ’
- Evolution and Darwin
Sample Reading
- T.S. Kuhn,The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 3rd edn, 1996
- Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions. C. Wallis trans., Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993
- Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. S. Drake trans., New York: Anchor Books, 1975
- Isaac Newton,Principia. Many translations.
- Charles DarwinOrigin of Species. Many editions.