Overview

In ""The Concept of Nature"" six distinguished authors (three historians of science, a philosopher, a mathematician, and a biologist) describe the major phases in the development of scientific conceptions of nature, from classical Greece to the present. Professor Geoffrey Lloyd shows how different ideas of nature originated in the polemics of ancient Athens. Alexander Murray analyses medieval conceptions of nature in terms of contrasts between learned and unlearned, between schools of thought, and between christianity and Greek philosophy. Professor Richard Westall argues that the essence of the scientific revolution of the 17th century was its novel conception of nature, quanitified, mechanized, and secularized. Professor Elliott Sober examines ways in which Darwinism undermined teleological thinking in biology. Finally, Professor Roger Penrose makes accessible to the layman the nine basic theories on which modern physics draws in constructing its world-views; while Professor Rober May shows how biological processes can now be investigeted, and perhaps controlled, at both the molecular and the population level.

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9780198522768

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