The Transformation of Science in Germany at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century: Physics, Mathematics, Poetry, and Philosophy

Paperback, xiv + 374 pages [+8], NOT ex-library. Limited signs of gentle wear only, short creases to tips of corners. Book is clean and bright with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Spine free of vertical creases. -- This volume brings together a surprising number of scholars from different disciplines who all contribute to the plethora of insights that lead to early 19th century science in Germany. Many books have looked at early nineteenth century science through the lens of the whole of Europe. This book takes a solidly Germanic view of natural science, depicting a view of natural science. It dismantles the well-worn cliche of a speculative philosophy and an empirical natural science that began to move further and further away from each other, ultimately becoming irreconcilable. Such an interpretation of the physical-philosophical discourse into different disciplines imposes the dualistic viewpoint of our own time onto an era where erecting such categorical boundaries between knowledge areas was completely foreign. A discussion of physics in the early nineteenth century drew no distinction between itself and philosophy, which is the biggest contribution of this volume. -- Contents: Introduction: Physics around 1800. Art Science or Philosophy? An Approach; Schelling's Speculative Physics / Olaf Breidbach [Schelling's Approach and Position around 1800; Realities of Experience around 1800; Schelling's Order of Nature and the Philosophy of Nature as a Basis of Modern Dialectics; Naturphilosophie in the Perspective of Transcendental Philosophy; Speculative Physics; Dynamic and Speculative Physics; Thinking in Terms of Process and the Doctrine of Metamorphosis; Principium and Productivity; Polarity and Dialectics; Speculation and Empiricism; Natural Science in its Most Rigorous Sense]; "Art is the Expression of Eternal Being": Achim von Arnim's Poetics of Nature / Roswitha Burwick [Immateriality as a Basic Principle of Arnim's "Specielle Kraftlehre" in Versuch einer Theorie der elektrischen Erscheinungen; "Specielle Kraftlehre" as a Model of Interaction and Integration in the Sciences; Arnim's Theory of the Interconnectedness of the Sciences and the Arts; Arnim's Theory of the Limits of Scientific Knowledge about the World]; Mathematics around 1800 / Judith V. Grabiner [Introduction; Seventeenth-Century Prelude to Eighteenth-Century Mathematics; Analysis in the Eighteenth-Century (Interaction between Analysis and the Physical Sciences; Communicating Results in Analysis to the Scientific Community); Foundations of the Calculus; Algebra in the Eighteenth-Century; Number Theory in the Eighteenth-Century; Geometry; Probability and Statistics; French Revolution; Transition from the Eighteenth to the Nineteenth Century; Conclusion]; Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften and Contemporary Physics around 1800 / Helmut Hühn; Collision between Physics and Metaphysics in England around 1800 / Kathleen Lundeen; Abraham Gottlob Werner: Money, Romance, Classification / Andre Wakefield [Life and Works; Werner's Scientific and Romantic Legacy]; Physics of Coleridgean Romanticism / Dometa Wiegand Brothers; Jakob Friedrich Fries on Inference Types in the Natural Sciences / Temilo van Zantwijk [Philosophy as a Methodology for the Natural Sciences; Scientific and Aesthetic Argumentation; Maximal Proximity to a Constitutive Theory: Rational Mechanics; Rational Proof in Newton's Rational Mechanics; Inductive Proof and the Fourth Methodical Rule; From a Regulative to a Constitutive Theory: Electricity and Magnetism; Towards a Metacritique of Critical Rationalism]; Notes on Contributors; Index.…