Digital List Price: | $30.00 |
Kindle Price: | $16.50 Save $13.50 (45%) |
Sold by: | Amazon.com Services LLC |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine Book 10) Kindle Edition
Alchemy can't be science--common sense tells us as much. But perhaps common sense is not the best measure of what science is, or was. In this book, Bruce Moran looks past contemporary assumptions and prejudices to determine what alchemists were actually doing in the context of early modern science. Examining the ways alchemy and chemistry were studied and practiced between 1400 and 1700, he shows how these approaches influenced their respective practitioners' ideas about nature and shaped their inquiries into the workings of the natural world. His work sets up a dialogue between what historians have usually presented as separate spheres; here we see how alchemists and early chemists exchanged ideas and methods and in fact shared a territory between their two disciplines.
Distilling Knowledge suggests that scientific revolution may wear a different appearance in different cultural contexts. The metaphor of the Scientific Revolution, Moran argues, can be expanded to make sense of alchemy and other so-called pseudo-sciences--by including a new framework in which "process can count as an object, in which making leads to learning, and in which the messiness of conflict leads to discernment." Seen on its own terms, alchemy can stand within the bounds of demonstrative science.
- ISBN-13978-0674022492
- PublisherHarvard University Press
- Publication dateSeptember 1, 2006
- LanguageEnglish
- File size2706 KB
-
Next 3 for you in this series
$41.34 -
Next 5 for you in this series
$86.33 -
All 8 for you in this series
$157.32
Customers who bought this item also bought
- The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300–1700 (Synthesis)Jennifer M. RamplingKindle Edition
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“In his accessible and absorbing book, [Moran] explores the intellectual framework of alchemy and seeks to identify the extent to which alchemy was a science and how it contributed positively to the scientific revolution...I can recommend this elegant book without hesitation to anyone who wishes to understand the practices and motivations of the alchemists as they sank over the horizon in the 16th and 17th centuries and the true chemists rose to take their place.”―Peter Atkins, Times Higher Education Supplement
“This is a book that fills a real gap in introductory literature on the Scientific Revolution and in the history of science. Bruce Moran provides a useful introduction to and overview of the history of chemistry in the early modern period. There is a good mix of attention to the practices of alchemy and chemistry as well as to the development of chemical theory. There is no other book like it.”―Pamela H. Smith, Pomona College
“I used to direct students looking for an introduction to the history of alchemy to Betty J. Teeter Dobbs's The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy: Or, The Hunting of the Greene Lyon...Now I will direct my students, and anyone else who asks me what alchemy is, to Bruce T. Moran's book. This compact volume provides a full and nuanced account of the history of alchemy from the medieval traditions of distillation to the Enlightenment definition of the discipline of chemistry...Precise, but never narrow, its scope includes artisanal knowledge and matter theory, and also encompasses medical and magical ideas and practices. This book is indispensable for anyone who studies or teaches the histories of early modern science and medicine.”―Lauren Kassell, American Historical Review
“In spite of the wealth of scholarship which informs the specialist, it still comes as a surprise to those not in the field of history that the pre-Enlightenment world was not enslaved by “irrational superstition” and that there is a reasonable and organic relationship between what is today regarded as “science” and many things which we have, however incorrectly, discarded as “pseudo-science.” Public Broadcasting specials no less than their cable counterparts leave most of the whiggish assumptions of the audience intact when they claim to present the “real story” behind Galileo, Newton, or the other “big names” of the Scientific Revolution. Those wishing to bridge the gap which separates the historian of science from popular assumptions about the history of science have faced the problem that there are few tools with which to accomplish this task. Books which are both accessible to a general audience and accurate are hard to find. Bruce Moran has written one, and it is a welcome addition to the classroom and the shelf. Distilling Knowledge is written by an established scholar in a plain and engaging style that keeps the reader’s attention. This book has an obvious application in survey courses in the history of science, but it is also an excellent book to recommend to the casual reader or the colleague across campus in the hard sciences who would like to know more about the history of science.”―Steven Matthews, Sixteenth Century Journal
“Bruce T. Moran's Distilling Knowledge is an excellent short survey of its topic, and as such it superbly fills a real gap in the existing literature.”―John Henry, BJHS
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B0957W7JP8
- Publisher : Harvard University Press (September 1, 2006)
- Publication date : September 1, 2006
- Language : English
- File size : 2706 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 221 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0674022491
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,983,860 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #515 in General Chemistry & Reference
- #3,493 in Science History & Philosophy
- #3,512 in General Chemistry
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Disclaimer to the disclaimer: I got As. There isn't another place on the internet I can brag about this, since it happened long ago, so...sorry. I got As!
This is a very rich, very interesting, and dense account of how we got from mystical alchemy to the beginning of "real" chemistry of the Scientific Revolution. Oddly, this is an area that is underrepresented in historical scholarship (I don't get it, because I think it's one of the most interesting aspects of intellectual/scientific history).
The transition from "pure" alchemy to "pure" chemistry is a lot like watching a child grow: there's vertical progress, but not without periodic regressions and quite a few tantrums. Then, suddenly, you're shipping your kid off to college and wondering "where did the girl who liked My Little Pony go?"
The book itself is a survey, and I'm guessing it was written with graduate students in mind. I'll punt to the professor:
"To include alchemy and chemistry as parts of the Scientific Revolution, it is not necessary to wait until Lavoisier made use of quantitative (gravimetric) techniques in the laboratory, acknowledged the conservation of weight...or explained combustion and calcination by means of oxygen....Cleaving matter from spirit may be a notable achievement from the point of view of contemporary experimental research; but to partition the two in the early modern era, so as to separate wholesome science from feeble metaphysics, is to make a serious mistake." (p. 184)
Also,
Chemistry "first became suitable to the university not by becoming anything new or unique but by adapting itself to the procedures of medieval alchemy and traditional (scholastic) natural philosophy." (p. 185)
That really is the book in a nutshell. I would give extra stars for the Lemery bit about ferrets if I could, because I don't often laugh out loud when I'm reading about the history of science.
I would have loved footnotes. Alas.