Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science
Description
Scholars in the early seventeenth century who studied ancient Greek scientific theories often drew upon philology and history to reconstruct a more general picture of the Greek past. Gassendi's training as a humanist historiographer enabled him to formulate a conception of the history of philosophy in which the rationality of scientific and philosophical inquiry depended on the historical justifications which he developed for his beliefs. Professor Joy examines this conception and analyzes the nature of Gassendi's historical training, especially its relationship to his career as a physicist and astronomer. She shows how he rehabilitated Epicurean atomism by bringing together the arguments of the Greek atomists and those of his contemporaries. In doing so, he produced an account of the natural world which made it an object of empirical study and mechanical explanation.Product Details
Price
$58.29
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Publish Date
August 08, 2002
Pages
328
Dimensions
5.94 X 9.14 X 0.82 inches | 1.08 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780521522397
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About the Author
Quentin Skinner is Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University between 1974 and 1979 and Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge between 1996 and 2008. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a foreign member of many other national academies, including the Academia Europea, the American Academy and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. His scholarship, which is available in more than two dozen languages, has won him many awards, including the Wolfson History Prize, the Bielefeld Wissenschaftspreis and a Balzan Prize. He has been the recipient of honorary degrees from numerous leading universities, including Athens, Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. His two-volume study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1979), was listed by The Times Literary Supplement in 1996 as one of the hundred most influential books published since World War II. His other books include Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1997), Machiavelli (2000), Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, 2008), Forensic Shakespeare (2014), From Humanism to Hobbes (Cambridge, 2018) and a three-volume collection of essays, Visions of Politics (Cambridge, 2002).
