scholarly journals Michael Faraday

Author(s):  
Thomas John Meurig

Michael Faraday, self-taught and without any particular scientific knowledge, from an errand boy of the humblest origins became one of the greatest Englishmen of all time. With simple determination and extraordinary intuition he arrived at the scientific discoveries upon which most of the technology of the twentieth century is based. His life and works had a profound influence upon contemporary thought, inspiring and supplementing the work of other great intellects, such as Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein. John Meurig Thomas, continuing the tradition of the spreading of scientific knowledge of which Michael Faraday is such a shining example, has the gift of illustrating the history and scientific work of this natural philosopher with a style, at once simple and precisely accurate, that makes it accessible to all. Faraday's fascinating and richly detailed story is accompanied by a series of drawings, photographs and letters, material that is largely original.

Author(s):  
Andrew D. Wilson

Hans Christian Ørsted, the Danish chemist and physicist, discovered electromagnetism in 1820. This epochal discovery fundamentally changed the development of physical science, leading to the ground-breaking research of Michael Faraday, Andre-Marie Ampere, James Clerk Maxwell, Heinrich Hertz, Albert Einstein, and others. In his scientific work, Ørsted espoused a dynamical theory of matter which had its roots in Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics of nature, and he remained committed to the belief in the fundamental interconnection of natural forces, a commitment that can be traced back to his religious instruction as a youth and to Friedrich von Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. During the early years of his career, he strove to provide a rigorous metaphysical foundation for the science of chemistry. Throughout his life and scientific work, Ørsted understood natural laws and phenomena to be the rational revelation of God, and sought to develop a unified view of nature reflecting this belief.


Author(s):  
Kirsten Leng

The Introduction makes a case for gendering the history of sexology; specifically it argues that focusing on women’s ideas facilitates a more complex understanding of sexology as a form of knowledge and power. It begins by introducing the key figures and exploring the kinds of political promise they saw in scientific knowledge. It then challenges the limits of Foucault’s highly influential analysis of sexology by contextualizing sexology’s emergence within the rise of the women’s movement in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century. Moreover, the Introduction draws on the sociology of science to reframe sexology as a field, and thus to argue that sexology was built and animated by a diverse range of actors with disparate investments in the creation of this knowledge. Finally, it discusses the limitations of women’s sexual scientific work and the ambivalent legacy it bequeathed.


2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTINE MACLEOD ◽  
JENNIFER TANN

AbstractWhile important research on the history of scientific commemorations has been published in recent years, relatively little attention has been paid to the commemoration of invention and inventors. A comparison of the centenaries of James Watt's death in 1919 and of Michael Faraday's discovery of electromagnetic induction in 1931 reveals how the image of the inventor was being refashioned in the early twentieth century. Although shortly after his death Watt had been acclaimed by the Royal Society as a great ‘natural philosopher’, a century later his reputation had been appropriated by the engineering professions and trades. As the title of Dickinson's 1935 biography described him, he was seen primarily as a ‘craftsman and engineer’, not a scientist. With poor publicity, which failed in particular to make any connection between steam power and electricity, the 1919 centenary excited little interest outside engineering circles. Meanwhile, professional scientists, who were seeking financial recognition for the importance of their research in ‘pure’ science, had found a new icon in Michael Faraday. They seized the occasion of the 1931 centenary to reinforce the link between Faraday's scientific research and the wonders of modern electrical technology and thereby to elevate the role of ‘blue-sky’ research over its ‘mere’ application.


2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 324-345
Author(s):  
Jan Arend

This article presents a case study of how American soil scientists encountered the increasing demands to prove the social utility of their scientific work in the first half of the twentieth century and how this influenced the professional rivalry and competition among them. Previous historical studies of agricultural science in the period have not overlooked the increasing demands for applicability that agricultural scientists were faced with at the time. However, in describing the response of agricultural scientists to these demands, research has focused on the content of their scientific work, that is, their methods, empirical interests, and theories. This study, by contrast, explores how the debates on applied vs. fundamental/basic research in American agricultural science were closely linked to the question of how scientific knowledge could be made understood to laymen and practitioners.


Author(s):  
Anjan Chakravartty

This chapter develops the notion of degrees of metaphysical inference, giving content to a number of widely used but only vaguely specified metaphors regarding what it could mean to “naturalize” metaphysical inferences by “grounding” them in scientific knowledge, and what it could mean to “derive” ontological conclusions from scientific work, or use such work as a “constraint” on ontological theorizing. It examines the prospects of demarcating scientific ontology from non-scientific, philosophical ontologically, the nature of a priori presuppositions and inferences and their possible roles in this demarcation, and the idea of naturalizing metaphysical inferences. In conclusion, it considers whether there is, in fact, anything like an objective distinction to be made between genuinely theorizing and merely speculating about ontology.


1969 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-441 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Prewitt ◽  
Heinz Eulau

Scholars interested in theorizing about political representation in terms relevant to democratic governance in mid-twentieth century America find themselves in a quandary. We are surrounded by functioning representative institutions, or at least by institutions formally described as representative. Individuals who presumably “represent” other citizens govern some 90 thousand different political units—they sit on school and special district boards, on township and city councils, on county directorates, on state and national assemblies, and so forth. But the flourishing activity of representation has not yet been matched by a sustained effort to explain what makes the representational process tick.Despite the proliferation of representative governments over the past century,theoryabout representation has not moved much beyond the eighteenth-century formulation of Edmund Burke. Certainly most empirical research has been cast in the Burkean vocabulary. But in order to think in novel ways about representative government in the twentieth-century, we may have to admit that present conceptions guiding empirical research are obsolete. This in turn means that the spell of Burke's vocabulary over scientific work on representation must be broken.To look afresh at representation, it is necessary to be sensitive to the unresolved tension between the two main currents of contemporary thinking about representational relationships. On the one hand, representation is treated as a relationship between any one individual, the represented, and another individual, the representative—aninter-individualrelationship. On the other hand, representatives are treated as a group, brought together in the assembly, to represent the interest of the community as a whole—aninter-grouprelationship. Most theoretical formulations since Burke are cast in one or the other of these terms.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-317
Author(s):  
Vladimir Feshchenko

The article analyzes one of the forms of nomadism in the intellectual world, which is called cultural transfers. One of the directions in the study of cultural transfers is the migration of concepts and notions between scientific knowledge (in this case linguistic) and literary experience (mainly experimental). The article is devoted to one of such migration trajectory from the perspective of interdiscourse methodology. We discuss the works of one of the agents of cultural transfer in the field of linguistics – R. Jakobson. The task of the article is to draw a trajectory according to which the linguistic concepts of Jakobson intertwine with parallel processes in literary (mainly poetic) experiments. The analysis concludes that precisely in connection with close contexts and transfers between poetry and linguistics, the Russian science of language represented by Jakobson develops a view of literature as a special language and a special communicative system. This trend is not typical for the Anglo-American linguistic tradition of the twentieth century, the quintessence of which in the middle of the century was represented in the theories of N. Chomsky and his circle.


The first half of the twentieth century was marked by the simultaneous development of logic and mathematics. Logic offered the necessary means to justify the foundations of mathematics and to solve the crisis that arose in mathematics in the early twentieth century. In European science in the late nineteenth century, the ideas of symbolic logic, based on the works of J. Bull, S. Jevons and continued by C. Pierce in the United States and E. Schroeder in Germany were getting popular. The works by G. Frege and B. Russell should be considered more progressive towards the development of mathematical logic. The perspective of mathematical logic in solving the crisis of mathematics in Ukraine was noticed by Professor of Mathematics of Novorossiysk (Odesa) University Ivan Vladislavovich Sleshynsky. Sleshynsky (1854 –1931) is a Doctor of Mathematical Sciences (1893), Professor (1898) of Novorossiysk (Odesa) University. After studying at the University for two years he was a Fellow at the Department of Mathematics of Novorossiysk University, defended his master’s thesis and was sent to a scientific internship in Berlin (1881–1882), where he listened to the lectures by K. Weierstrass, L. Kronecker, E. Kummer, G. Bruns. Under the direction of K. Weierstrass he prepared a doctoral dissertation for defense. He returned to his native university in 1882, and at the same time he was a teacher of mathematics in the seminary (1882–1886), Odesa high schools (1882–1892), and taught mathematics at the Odesa Higher Women’s Courses. Having considerable achievements in the field of mathematics, in particular, Pringsheim’s Theorem (1889) proved by Sleshinsky on the conditions of convergence of continuous fractions, I. Sleshynsky drew attention to a new direction of logical science. The most significant work for the development of national mathematical logic is the translation by I. Sleshynsky from the French language “Algebra of Logic” by L. Couturat (1909). Among the most famous students of I. Sleshynsky, who studied and worked at Novorossiysk University and influenced the development of mathematical logic, one should mention E. Bunitsky and S. Shatunovsky. The second period of scientific work of I. Sleshynsky is connected with Poland. In 1911 he was invited to teach mathematical disciplines at Jagiellonian University and focused on mathematical logic. I. Sleshynsky’s report “On Traditional Logic”, delivered at the meeting of the Philosophical Society in Krakow. He developed the common belief among mathematicians that logic was not necessary for mathematics. His own experience of teaching one of the most difficult topics in higher mathematics – differential calculus, pushed him to explore logic, since the requirement of perfect mathematical proof required this. In one of his further works of this period, he noted the promising development of mathematical logic and its importance for mathematics. He claimed that for the mathematics of future he needed a new logic, which he saw in the “Principles of Mathematics” by A. Whitehead and B. Russell. Works on mathematical logic by I. Sleszynski prompted many of his students in Poland to undertake in-depth studies in this field, including T. Kotarbiński, S. Jaśkowski, V. Boreyko, and S. Zaremba. Thanks to S. Zaremba, I. Sleshynsky managed to complete the long-planned concept, a two-volume work “Theory of Proof” (1925–1929), the basis of which were lectures of Professor. The crisis period in mathematics of the early twentieth century, marked by the search for greater clarity in the very foundations of mathematical reasoning, led to the transition from the study of mathematical objects to the study of structures. The most successful means of doing this were proposed by mathematical logic. Thanks to Professor I. Sleshynsky, who succeeded in making Novorossiysk (Odesa) University a center of popularization of mathematical logic in the beginning of the twentieth century the ideas of mathematical logic in scientific environment became more popular. However, historical events prevented the ideas of mathematical logic in the domestic scientific space from the further development.


Author(s):  
E.A. Radaeva ◽  

The purpose of this study is to present a model for the development of the expressionist method in the genre of the novel using the example of the evolution of the novelistic work of the Austrian writer of the early twentieth century L. Perutz. The results obtained: the creative method of the Austrian writer is moving from scientific knowledge to mysticism; in the center of all novels created with a large interval, there is always a confused hero, broken by what is happening (in other words, the absurdity of the world), whose state is often conveyed through gestures; the author finally moves away from linear narration to dividing the plot into almost autonomous stories, thematically gravitating more and more to the distant historical past. Scientific novelty: the novels of L. Perutz are for the first time examined in relative detail through the prism of the aesthetics of expressionism.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document