Description

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Condition: Pencil note on endpaper. Black stain on upper side of book cutout. Otherwise in perfect condition. / Zustand: Bleistiftnotiz auf Vorsatz. Schwarzer Fleck auf Buchschnittoberseite. Ansonsten im einwandfreien Zustand. - Content: In 1993, Alex Holzman, former editor for the history of science at Cambridge University Press, invited us to submit a proposal for a history of science that would join the distinguished series of Cambridge histories launched nearly a century ago with the publication of Lord Acton�s fourteen-volume Cambridge Modern History (1902-12). Convinced of the need for a comprehensive history of science and believing that the time was auspicious, we accepted the invitation. Although reflections on the development of what we call �science� date back to antiquity, the history of science did not emerge as a distinctive field of scholarship until well into the twentieth century. In 1912 the Belgian scientisthistorian George Sarton (1884-1956), who contributed more than any other single person to the institutionalization of the history of science, began publishing Isis, an international review devoted to the history of science and its cultural influences. Twelve years later he helped to create the History of Science Society, which by the end of the century had attracted some 4,000 individual and institutional members. In 1941 the University of Wisconsin established a department of the history of science, the first of dozens of such programs to appear worldwide. Since the days of Sarton historians of science have produced a small library of monographs and essays, but they have generally shied away from writing and editing broad surveys. Sarton himself, inspired in part by the Cambridge histories, planned to produce an eight-volume History of Science, but he completed only the first two installments (1952,1959), which ended with the birth of Christianity. His mammoth three-volume Introduction to the History of Science (1927-48), a reference work more than a narrative history, never got beyond the Middle Ages. The closest predecessor to The Cambridge History of Science \s the three-volume (four-book) Histoire G�rale des Sciences (1957-64), edited by Ren�aton, which appeared in an English translation under the tide General History of the Sciences (1963-4). Edited just before the late-twentieth-century boom in the history of science, the Taton set quickly became dated. During the 1990s Roy Porter began editing the very useful Fontana History of Science (published in the United States as the Norton History of Science), with volumes devoted to a single discipline and written by a single author. The Cambridge History of Science comprises eight volumes, the first four arranged chronologically from antiquity through the eighteenth century, the latter four organized thematically and covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Eminent scholars from Europe and North America, who together form the editorial board for the series, edit the respective volumes: Volume 1: Ancient Science, edited by Alexander Jones, University of Toronto; Volume 2: Medieval Science, edited by David C. Lindberg and Michael H. Shank, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Volume 3: Early Modern Science, edited by Lorraine J. Daston, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and Katharine Park, Harvard University; Volume 4: Eighteenth-Century Science, edited by Roy Porter, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London; Volume 5: The Modem Physical and Mathematical Sciences, edited by Mary Jo Nye, Oregon State University; Volume 6: The Modem Biological and Earth Sciences, edited by Peter Bowler, Queen�s University of Belfast, and John Pickstone, University of Manchester; Volume 7: The Modem Social Sciences, edited by Theodore M. Porter, University of California, Los Angeles, and Dorothy Ross, Johns Hopkins University; Volume 8: Modem Science in National and International Context, edited by David N. Livingstone, Queen�s University of Belfast, and Ronald L. Numbers, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Our collective goal is to provide an authoritative, up-to-date account of science � from the earliest literate societies in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the beginning of the twenty-first century � that even nonspecialist readers will find engaging. Written by leading experts from every inhabited continent, the essays in The Cambridge History of Science explore the systematic investigation of nature, whatever it was called. (The term �science� did not acquire its present meaning until early in the nineteenth century.) Reflecting the ever-expanding range of approaches and topics in the history of science, the contributing authors explore non-Western as well as Western science, applied as well as pure science, popular as well as elite science, scientific practice as well as scientific theory, cultural context as well as intellectual content, and the dissemination and reception as well as the production of scientific knowledge. George Sarton would scarcely recognize this collaborative effort as the history of science, but we hope we have realized his vision.