The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

Strevens, Michael

ISBN 10: 1631491377 / ISBN 13: 9781631491375

Edité par Liveright Publishing Corporation, New York/London, 2020

A propos de cet article

Hardcover blue boards with gilt lettering on the spine. Includes b/w illustrations, Glossary, Notes, References and Index, 350 pages. The exception to the condition is a remainder mark on the top of the text block. The DJ is in As New condition. N° de réf. du vendeur 012149

Détails bibliographiques

Titre : The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality ...

Éditeur : Liveright Publishing Corporation, New York/London

Date d'édition : 2020

Reliure : Hardcover

Etat : As New

Etat de la jaquette : As New

Edition : 1st Edition

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis :

- Why is science so powerful?
- Why did it take so long--two thousand years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics--for the human race to start using science to learn the secrets of the universe?

In a groundbreaking work that blends science, philosophy, and history, leading philosopher of science Michael Strevens answers these challenging questions, showing how science came about only once thinkers stumbled upon the astonishing idea that scientific breakthroughs could be accomplished by breaking the rules of logical argument.

Like such classic works as Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Knowledge Machine grapples with the meaning and origins of science, using a plethora of vivid historical examples to demonstrate that scientists willfully ignore religion, theoretical beauty, and even philosophy to embrace a constricted code of argument whose very narrowness channels unprecedented energy into empirical observation and experimentation. Strevens calls this scientific code the iron rule of explanation, and reveals the way in which the rule, precisely because it is unreasonably close-minded, overcomes individual prejudices to lead humanity inexorably toward the secrets of nature.

"With a mixture of philosophical and historical argument, and written in an engrossing style" (Alan Ryan), The Knowledge Machine provides captivating portraits of some of the greatest luminaries in science's history, including Isaac Newton, the chief architect of modern science and its foundational theories of motion and gravitation; William Whewell, perhaps the greatest philosopher-scientist of the early nineteenth century; and Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark. Today, Strevens argues, in the face of threats from a changing climate and global pandemics, the idiosyncratic but highly effective scientific knowledge machine must be protected from politicians, commercial interests, and even scientists themselves who seek to open it up, to make it less narrow and more rational--and thus to undermine its devotedly empirical search for truth.

Rich with illuminating and often delightfully quirky illustrations, The Knowledge Machine, written in a winningly accessible style that belies the import of its revisionist and groundbreaking concepts, radically reframes much of what we thought we knew about the origins of the modern world.

À propos de l?auteur:

Michael Strevens, a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, is a professor of philosophy at New York University. He was born in New Zealand and has been writing about philosophy of science for twenty-five years. He lives in New York.