Peter Robert Dear

Peter Robert Dear
Cornell University | CU · Department of History

Ph.D.

About

117
Publications
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1,974
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Publications

Publications (117)
Book
Scientific Practices in European History, 1200-1800 presents and situates a collection of extracts from both widely known texts by such figures as Copernicus, Newton, and Lavoisier, and lesser known but significant items, all chosen to provide a perspective on topics in social, cultural and intellectual history and to illuminate the concerns of the...
Chapter
While the social role and character of people with special relationships to natural knowledge might be considered in various cultural settings located in different times and places, the natural philosopher as a type in early-modern Europe commands our attention as occupying a culturally specific place that adumbrated in certain ways the role of the...
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Full-text available
Charles Darwin built a world around an implied metaphysics of time that treated deep time as something qualitatively different from ordinary, experienced time. He did not simply require a vast amount of time within which his primary evolutionary mechanism of natural selection could operate; in practice, he required a deep time that functioned accor...
Chapter
The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon is the definitive reference source on René Descartes, 'the father of modern philosophy' and arguably among the most important philosophers of all time. Examining the full range of Descartes' achievements and legacy, it includes 256 in-depth entries that explain key concepts relating to his thought. Cumulatively they...
Chapter
The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon is the definitive reference source on René Descartes, 'the father of modern philosophy' and arguably among the most important philosophers of all time. Examining the full range of Descartes' achievements and legacy, it includes 256 in-depth entries that explain key concepts relating to his thought. Cumulatively they...
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Examples from Charles Darwin, especially his tacking between different forms of temporality that enabled an integration of human experience and geological immensity, and John Tyndall, with his all-encompassing vision of a mechanical and energetic universe, show the sense in which Victorian scientific naturalism replicated in important respects the...
Chapter
'Experiment' is a category of study that has long stood at the heart of much work in science and technology studies. Its meaning, however, has changed over time, depending upon the overall analytical setting within which it has been invoked and provided with its significance for the understanding of science. This article follows the development of...
Book
In this volume, seven historians of science examine the historical creation and meaning of a range of scientific textual forms from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. They consider examples from the fields of chemistry, medicine, physics, zoology, physiology, and mathematics, exposing the rich possibilities for a new, historically ro...
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Full-text available
Darwin used taxonomic arguments widely in his work on transformism and natural selection, especially in attempts to persuade other (typically non-transformist) naturalists of the correctness of his ideas in Origin of Species. But, as has long been noticed, classificatory practices in natural history were by no means turned on their head in the wake...
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A project to delineate The Emergence of a Scientific Culture must surely be seen as Big History, the sort of history that, like Jonathan Israel’s volumes on the Enlightenment, aims to create a historiographical monument that will inevitably serve as something that others will strive to tear down. Generally, when that happens, even successful destru...
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Scholars nowadays generally accept that there is no single enterprise of “science”—that there is a multiplicity of special studies that are grouped together under that label. This article discusses a possible route by which to trace certain common cultural characteristics of modern science, rooted in a particular (and complex) relationship between...
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In a book that has been 40 years in the making, Westman shows how important astrology was to Copernicus's work and its interpretation into the early 17th century.
Chapter
The title of this chapter alludes, of course, to a famous article by Imre Lakatos, “History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions.” It is also meant to invoke the title of another celebrated article, itself teasingly resonating with Lakatos’s, by Steven Shapin, “History of Science and Its Sociological Reconstructions” (Shapin 1982). Both Laka...
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The boundaries between the history of science and science and technology studies (STS) can be misleadingly drawn, to the detriment of both fields. This essay stresses their commonalities and potential for valuable synergy. The evolution of the two fields has been characterized by lively interchange and boundary crossing, with leading scholars funct...
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Argument Talk of “reason” and “rationality” has been perennial in the philosophy and sciences of the European, Latin tradition since antiquity. But the use of these terms in the early-modern period has left especial marks on the specialties and disciplines that emerged as components of “science” in the modern world. By examining discussions by seve...
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ZittelClaus, EngelGisela, NanniRomano and KarafyllisNicole C. eds., Philosophies of Technology: Francis Bacon and His Contemporaries. Intersections: Yearbook for Early Modern Studies series vol. 11. Leiden: Brill, 2008. 2 vols. Pp. xxix+577. ISBN 978-9-0041-70506. €149.00 (hardback). - Volume 42 Issue 4 - Peter Dear
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The intent and content of Isis since its inauguration in 1913 have in some ways tracked changes in both a professionalizing history of science and in the cultures of scientific disciplines. George Sarton saw history as part of an overall metascientific project in which the sciences themselves participated, and his perspective was often duplicated b...
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Bertoloni MeliDomenico, Thinking with Objects: The Transformation of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. xii+389. ISBN 0-8018-8426-8. £46.50 (hardback). ISBN 0-8018-8427-6. £20.00 (paperback). - Volume 41 Issue 2 - Peter Dear
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Editor's IntroductionA Mechanical Microcosm: Bodily Passions, Good Manners, and Cartesian Mechanism
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ooK REVIEWS 463 treated in isolation as a function of its discussion in Book 11 of the Confessions, appears closely connected with Augustine's debate with the Academic skeptics. Similarly, the readily controverted topic of gender and sexuality appears coherently integrated with Rist's most original chapter, his discussion of Augustine's theories of...
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London in the late Elizabethan period produced most famously, in the history of science, Francis Bacon. Bacon’s stress on utility, and the potential role of a form of natural philosophy in promoting the practical interests of the state, provides a constant backdrop to Deborah Harkness’s wide-ranging examination of knowledge enterprises already occu...
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MARCUS HELLYER, Catholic Physics: Jesuit Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Germany. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Pp. xii+337. ISBN 0-268-03071-5. $50.00 (hardback). - - Volume 40 Issue 1 - PETER DEAR
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Mario Biagioli's follow-up to his celebrated book Galileo, Courtier comprises four substantial chapters, three of which have been published in earlier forms. Perhaps as a result of this genesis, the book is considerably less coherent thematically than its predecessor, which focused on Galileo in his guise as a client of powerful patrons, whether th...
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The categories of “experience” and “experiment” lay at the heart of the conceptions of natural knowledge that dominated European learning at both the beginning and the end of the Scientific Revolution. The Latin words generally used to denote “experience” in both the medieval and early modern periods, experientia and experimentum, were generally in...
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Bruce Moran's new book forms part of Harvard University Press's series “New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine.” The series is aimed at a general readership rather than a specialized academic market, although its volumes can also serve as basic introductions to scholars in other specialties who need a quick entrée into their fields. In...
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Throughout the history of the Western world, science has possessed an extraordinary amount of authority and prestige. And while its pedestal has been jostled by numerous evolutions and revolutions, science has always managed to maintain its stronghold as the knowing enterprise that explains how the natural world works: we treat such legendary scien...
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Full-text available
The mismatch between common representations of "science" and the miscellany of ma- terials typically studied by the historian of science is traced to a systematic ambiguity that may itself be traced to early modern Europe. In that cultural setting, natural philosophy came to be rearticulated (most famously by Francis Bacon) as involving both contem...
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Scitation is the online home of leading journals and conference proceedings from AIP Publishing and AIP Member Societies
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Configurations 11.2 (2003) 145-161 The central issue that I want to address is that of "intelligibility" in the history of science. By using this term, however, I do not mean to imply simply an enterprise of analyzing more-or-less coherent conceptual structures, so as to be able to say that people believed a particular doctrine either because it wa...
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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.1 (2002) 100-101 Historians do not generally bestow much hard criticism on recent, widely accepted scientific theories; their job is not to justify or condemn them but to account for them. By the same token, philosophers of science all too often simply justify rather than explain what scientists accept. Belle...
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This note suggests that a fruitful way of investigating the history of mathematics lies in consideration of its pedagogical purposes. As a general illustration of the directions that such an approach might take, the paper discusses early-modern arguments for the practical utility of mathematics and its capacity to inculcate good habits of thought,...
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BOOK REVIEWS 363 Ann Blair. The Theater of Nature:Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv + 382. Cloth, $45.oo. Jean Bodin's Universae naturae theatrum 0596) is the least celebrated of all the major publications by this outstanding figure of the French renaissance. It lacks the apparent political, hi...
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Mersenne accomplished the harmonization of mechanics through the mechanization of music. Not merely for him another of the quadrivial disciplines, music was central to Mersenne’s mathematical endeavors because it provided the paradigm of harmony by which the rest could be developed and judged. Mersenne wrote more on music than on any other single s...
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In 1689 Robert Boyle, the famed chemist and physical experimentalist whose name is memorialized in the foundational gas law, managed to persuade the British parliament to remove the ban on the transmutation of metals. Isaac Newton suspected that Boyle had done this because he knew of a red powder that he thought, or so Lawrence Principe plausibly c...
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Configurations 6.2 (1998) 173-193 The "Scientific Revolution" is nowadays, as a category, much less attractive to historians than it once was. It seems to carry overtones of Whiggish triumphalism that are widely seen as out of keeping with a proper scholarly understanding of issues to do with the making of European natural knowledge in the sixteent...
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Although the Scientific Revolution has long been regarded as the beginning of modern science, there has been little consensus about its true character. While the application of mathematics to the study of the natural world has always been recognized as an important factor, the role of experiment has been less clearly understood. Peter Dear investig...
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The increased popularity of the label "cultural" within science studies, especially in relation to "cultural studies, " invites consideration of how it is and can be used in historical work. A lot more seems now to be invested in the notion of "cultural history. " This article examines some recent historiography of science as a means of considering...
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SegreMichael, In the Wake of Galileo. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Pp. xix + 192. ISBN 0-8135-1700-1. $27.95. - Volume 26 Issue 3 - Peter Dear
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Full-text available
Words have social as well as lexical meanings. This paper traces a semantic shift of the word 'objective, and the issues arising from it, in the seventeenth century. A word attaching to the concept of 'truth' at the beginning of the century came increasingly to give way to considerations of 'disinterestedness'; the restructuring of European intelle...
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PeraMarcello and SheaWilliam R. (eds). Persuading Science: The Art of Scientific Rhetoric. Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 1991. Pp. xi + 212. ISBN 0-88135-071-0. $39.95. - Volume 25 Issue 3 - Peter Dear

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