Book reviews

1998 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-379
Author(s):  
Colin A. Russell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Philosophy Of Mathematics ◽  
Mathematical Practice ◽  
X Rays ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Von Liebig ◽  
Principles Of Geology

Eleven book reviews in the July 1998 edition of Notes and Records : Robert Boyle. A free enquiry into the vulgarly received notion of nature , Edward B. Davis and Michael Hunter (eds.). P. Mancosu, Philosophy of mathematics and mathematical practice in the seventeenth century . Patricia Fara, Sympathetic attractions: magnetic practices, beliefs, and symbolism in eighteenth–century England . Alan Cook, Edmond Halley: charting the heavens and the seas . Jan Bondeson, A cabinet of medical curiosities . J.M.H. Moll, Presidents of The Royal Society of Medicine . W.H. Brock, Justus von Liebig: the chemical gatekeeper . Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830–33) , J. Secord (ed.). X–rays––the first hundred years , Alan Michette and Slawka Pfauntsch (eds.). Jack Morrell, Science at Oxford 1914–1939 . John Polkinghorne, Beyond science. The wider human context .

The Royal Society and Italy 1667-1795

1982 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-81 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
The Past ◽  
Psychology Today ◽  
Italian Science ◽  
High Esteem ◽  
John Wallis

Italy has often held a special place in the view of cultivated Englishmen, and this is especially the case for Italian sciences in the seventeenth century (1). At the first beginnings of the Royal Society in 1645 the young men who met for discussions in London held Italian science in high esteem. So much was this the case that among their topics of discussion, as John Wallis, by then Savilian Professor at Oxford, recalled in 1678, were the valves in the veins (whose description by Fabricius of Aquapendente had so impressed William Harvey), Galileo s telescopic discoveries and Torricelli s barometric experiment, all part of that ‘New Philosophy’ which he took to have been founded by Galileo and Bacon. This last was certainly the view to which most of the early Fellows of the Royal Society subscribed, paying constant tribute to Galileo’s role in the foundation of the new experimental science as well as in the advancement of the Copernican theory, as can be seen from the works of Robert Boyle and, later, Newton. The chronological point, self-evident but not always remembered, that living men are not constrained by dates, although historians may wish to be, is exemplified in the case of Newton’s respect for Galileo enunciated in 1687 in the first edition of the Principia , maintained through all the vicissitudes of revision in 1713 and 1723, and as long as the Principia was read, as it was throughout the seventy-five years after Newton’s death (1727), his 1687 tribute to Galileo remained fresh. Similarly, the works of post-Galilean Italian scientists by no means lost their influence because time had worn on into the eighteenth century and they had published in the seventeenth; even today a fifty-year-old book in a new edition may excite new readers, and this of course was even more true in the past when scientific advances approximated in their rate of development to those of, say, economics or psychology today.

Philosophy

Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 24-68
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
David Hartley ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Contents

This chapter examines how the late seventeenth-century British philosophy of sensation, feeling, and selfhood responded to the challenges of mechanism with the idiom of the insensible. It shows how this idiom carries forward from John Locke and Robert Boyle to philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of sensibility, who use it to address a variety of problems. The consistent, Lockean element in these usages by David Hartley, Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and David Hume, Eliza Haywood and Adam Smith, is that they do not refer to mental contents. One does not hear of “insensible perceptions.” There are no “unconscious thoughts” or “unfelt sensations” in the British tradition surveyed here. Writers in this tradition rather describe insensible powers that affect the mind without themselves being mental. They are nonconscious, not unconscious. This is an implication carried by the idiom into articulations of quite a wide variety of other ideas. All of them indicate the persistent usefulness in philosophies of feeling of a stylistic gesture toward something beyond the reach of both feeling and philosophy.

AN OPEN ELITE: THE PECULIARITIES OF CONNOISSEURSHIP IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIAN COWAN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Royal Academy ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Modern Approach ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social

Seventeenth-century English virtuoso attitudes to the visual arts have often been contrasted with a putative eighteenth-century culture of connoisseurship, most notably in a still influential 1942 article by Walter Houghton. This essay revisits Houghton's thesis and argues that English virtuoso culture did indeed allow for an incipient notion of artistic connoisseurship but that it did so in a manner different from the French model. The first section details a virtuoso aesthetic in which a modern approach to the cultural heritage of antiquity was central. The instructive ethical and historical attributes of an art work were deemed more important than attribution to a master artist, although one can discern an incipient notion of a virtuoso canon of great artists. The second section examines the social and institutional position of the English virtuosi and argues that the lack of a Royal Academy of Arts in the French manner made virtuoso attitudes to the arts unusually receptive to outside influences such as the Royal Society and other private clubs and academies. It concludes by considering the ways in which some eighteenth-century concepts of taste and connoisseurship defined themselves in contrast to an earlier and wider-ranging virtuosity even if they failed to fully supplant it.

Pioneers in Optics: Robert Hooke

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 48-50
Author(s):  
Michael W. Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Early Education ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Isle Of Wight ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Scientific Equipment ◽  
Entire Society

Robert Hooke was a brilliant British experimental and theoretical scientist who lived and worked in London during the seventeenth century. As a child, Hooke suffered from a devastating case of smallpox that left him physically and emotionally scarred for the rest of his life. He was born the son of a minister on July 18, 1635, at Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight. Hooke's father, John Hooke, took an active role in Robert's early education until he entered the Westminster School at the age of thirteen following his father's suicide. After graduating Westminster in 1648, Hooke first conducted an apprenticeship with artist Sir Peter Lely and then entered Oxford University where he met and studied under some of the greatest scientists in England. Hooke eventually became a paid assistant for Robert Boyle and helped develop a working air pump. He remained in Boyle's laboratory until 1662 when he was made curator of experiments for the Royal Society of London, a job that entailed demonstration of scientific equipment and experimental procedures during weekly meetings of the entire society.

John Birchensha and the Early Royal Society: Grand Scales and Scientific Composition

1990 ◽  
Vol 115 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leta E. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
String Vibrations ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

The concept of music as science, still a vital part of the natural philosophy of the seventeenth century, found a strong advocate in the early Royal Society, whose agenda frequently embraced musical topics. From the organization's inception in 1660 to the early eighteenth century the Society's minutes recount acoustical experiments performed at meetings and describe papers on topics ranging from string vibrations to music's medicinal powers.

The Institute of Science of Bologna and The Royal Society in the eighteenth century

2002 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Cavazza
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society

English astronomers had known of the astronomical studies of G.D. Cassini, F.R.S., in Bologna even before the foundation of The Royal Society, and throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century and much of the eighteenth, Fellows of the Society were kept informed of Bolognese science, whereas that in turn was often strongly influenced by ideas and discoveries in England. Fellows of the Society were from time to time elected from Bologna, and the Society had members of the Bolognese academy among its Italian Fellows.

scholarly journals Thomas Birch's ‘Weekly Letter’ (1741–66): correspondence and history in the mid-eighteenth-century Royal Society

2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markman Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Discrete Group ◽  
British Library ◽  
Private Knowledge

Thomas Birch (1705–66), Secretary of the Royal Society from 1752 to 1765, and Philip Yorke, second Earl of Hardwicke (1720–90), wrote a ‘Weekly Letter’ from 1741 to 1766, an unpublished correspondence of 680 letters now housed in the British Library (Additional Mss 35396–400). The article examines the dimensions and purposes of this correspondence, an important conduit of information for the influential coterie of the ‘Hardwicke circle’ gathered around Yorke in the Royal Society. It explores the writers' self-conception of the correspondence, which was expressed in deliberately archaic categories of seventeenth-century news exchange, such as the newsletter, aviso and a-la-main. It shows how the letter writers negotiated their difference in status through the discourse of friendship, and concludes that the ‘Weekly Letter’ constituted for the correspondents a form of private knowledge, restricted in circulation to their discrete group, and as such unlike the open and networked model of Enlightenment science.

Founders of marine science in Britain: the work of the early Fellows of the Royal Society

1965 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-50 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Coastal Waters ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Trading Posts ◽  
Open Sea ◽  
High Degree ◽  
John Evelyn ◽  
British People

On 25 March 1663 John Evelyn recorded in his diary: ‘to our Society, where was an account of severall Experiments made lately at Sea by our President & other members a fortnight before’ (1). Why were the early Fellows of the Royal Society interested in the sea and what did they hope to discover? It was during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the importance of the sea to the British people was made clear. They became dependent on shipping both for defence and for economic development. W hen they established trading posts and colonies in distant lands all communications had to be made by sea and soon merchant ships were sailing regularly over oceans where only an occasional bold sailor had previously ventured to challenge the monopoly of other nations. At the same time British explorers were searching for new routes and fresh opportunities for trade. These developments stimulated interest in subjects connected with shipping. At the beginning of the seventeenth century navigation was being studied by many British mathematicians though satisfactory ways of determining longitude were not perfected until the eighteenth century (2). The continued difficulty of fixing a ship’s position in the open sea made precise observations difficult but sailors learned to take advantage of the prevailing winds and currents. They had reached a high degree of proficiency in navigating coastal waters and this knowledge was gradually extended to new lands. In 1612 Henry, Prince of Wales, commanded Sir Thomas Button to record during his exploration

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