Hist. Sci., xlix (2011) HOW THEOLOGY, IMAGINATION, AND THE SPIRIT OF INQUIRY SHAPED NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES Edward Grant Indiana University, Bloomington Historians of science have long debated historiographical issues and have even come to regard some of them as rather passé. The issues I shall consider will be applied to the late Middle Ages and, where necessary, extended to the early modern period, or, as I shall refer to it, the Scientific Revolution. In the broad range of medieval science and natural philosophy, I shall focus almost exclusively on natural philosophy, because, as we shall see, natural philosophers posed questions that probed “into all aspects of the world: nature, the supernatural, and an imaginary world of the hypothetical and possible”.1 It included bits and pieces of virtually all of the contemporary sciences, as well as thoughts and ideas that would be appropriate to sciences that only came into being in the modern era. It was not until the sciences of astronomy, optics, and mechanics — the exact sciences, known as the “middle sciences” to Aristotle and his followers in the late Middle Ages — became fully integrated with natural philosophy in the seventeenth century that early modern science emerged.
Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire into a wealthy and well-connected family. His grandfather was one of the leading intellectuals of 18th century England. Darwin initially planned to pursue a career in medicine, and began studying at Edinburgh University in England, but later changed to divinity, and studied at Cambridge. This lead to him joining a five year scientific expedition on the HMS Beagle. Charles Darwin was famous for his controversial theory that animals evolved by means of natural selection.
The beagle, Explain the importance of the following people: Jean Baptiste Lamarck French biologist. He is credited with the first use of the word biology Charles Lyell Scottish geologist, studied at oxford Thomas Malthus British philosopher and economist famous for his ideas about population growth. Peter and
Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the origin, nature, extent, and limits of human knowledge. (Richmond, 1970) his interest went beyond the nature of thought, but how it develops and understanding how genetics impacts the process. Jean Piaget’s interest in the natural sciences came at an early age. By the age of ten, he published his first research paper on the albino sparrow. (Rotman, 1977) Piaget continued to study the natural sciences and received his Ph.D. in Zoology from University of Neuchatel in 1918.
First Year Seminar Essay #4 Compare and contrast the description of nature as given by Charles Darwin and the description given by Romantic Artists (or any writer from the module). Victoria Lewis November 11, 2012 Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory and The Romantics philosophy were both great breakthroughs of the 19th century. They both turned away from the mindless following of the church and came up with their own ideas and ways of viewing the world around them. Darwin’s theory opposed the Romantic Artist’s theory that nature is proof of God’s existence. Darwin presented biological facts that could not be ignored, and it began a huge debate, a debate that is still going on today.
Dehumanization in Brave New World The topic is my response to the chapter included in the text book from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which tells us about how people are born and how they are “conditioned” in various methods in the fictional world in the future. My response is that people in the story are dehumanized since they do not behave like human beings, nor are they treated as human beings. One of reasons why I would think that is that they do not behave like human beings. First of all, people do not give birth to children or establish their own families any more. As human beings, even other animals, it is our nature to start a family, conceive babies, give birth to them and then nurture them in our own family.
Discuss the importance of the role Bismarck as a cause of German unification. It has been said by several historians that the second half of the nineteenth century was the ‘Age of Bismarck.’ In the mid 1800’s Bismarck provided dynamic leadership- a trait which had been lacking during the events of 1848-89. Ian Mitchell stated “Bismarck was everywhere.” However, there has been a considerable degree of debate concerning the role of Bismarck in the unification of Germany. Some argue that unification would have been inevitable and had nothing to do with Bismarck, although others argue that the unification was solely down to Bismarck’s role. Other factors are such as French revolutionary ideas swept across Europe, 1848 Revolutions, Prussian economic and military strength.
Mendel’s conclusions were ignored. Mendel himself didn’t even find his ideas generally applicable, he thought they were only applicable, even by Mendel himself. Mendel thought his ideas were only applicable to certain categories of species or traits. A major block to understanding their significance was the importance attached by 19th century biologists to the apparent blending of inherited traits in the overall beginning of the progeny, which is know known to be due to multi-gene interactions, in contrast to the organ-specific binary characters studied by Mendel. In 1900, however, his work was re-discovered by three European scientists.
The Biology Behind Physical Attraction “We do not marry, for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry for our posterity,” said 16th century French essayist Montaigne. Although Montaigne wrote this five centuries ago, two centuries before Darwin introduced his theories of evolution and natural selection, his words proved to be way before his time. We would like to think physical attraction is relative, that love is blind, and that it’s all about personality. But biologist have evidence that say that humans look for certain physical signs in our potential mates as indicators for things such as health and fertility. Factors such as facial symmetry, waist to hip ratio, and even smell are all things we are subconsciously taking in when looking at potential mates and evaluating their attractiveness.
The foundation of the field of geology itself in the middle of the nineteenth century paved the way for archaeology. Previous to scientists such as Cuvier, Smith, Hutton, and Lyell (page 7), the world was thought to be only 6,000 years old in the Western world. With the conscious decision by scholars to examine the natural world as a conglomerate of observable forces, scientists began to notice anomalies in geologic excavations. Things like manmade tools located near deposits of extinct animal skeletons questioned the traditional chronology of contemporary knowledge. In 1959 the scientists Sir Joseph Prestwich and John Evans studied these anomalies and popularized in the scientific community what is known as the “antiquity of man,” expanding the lifetime of humanity to be much older than most common folk imagined at the time (page 9).