The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument : : Historical Studies / / Peter Dear.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Penn eBook Package Archive 1898-1999 (pre Pub)
• HerausgeberIn: Dear, Peter,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2015]; ©1991
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (224 p.) :; 6 illus.

In this volume, seven historians of science examine the historical creation and meaning of a range of scientific textual forms from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. They consider examples from the fields of chemistry, medicine, physics, zoology, physiology, and mathematics, exposing the rich possibilities for a new, historically rooted approach to our scientific cultural heritage.Peter Dear presents the case for "taking texts seriously"-asking historians of science to confront issues and techniques moving to the forefront in a number of disciplines, and asking literary scholars and literary-minded intellectual historians not to "put science quietly to one side," or treat it as a mere source of cultural metaphors, but to understand it in terms of historically specific textual construction.The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument will interest historians, philosophers, and sociologists, as well as literary scholars concerned with science.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. J. C. Reil and the "Journalization" of Physiology -- 2. Writing Zoologically: The Zeitschrift fur wissenschaftliche Zoologie and the Zoological Community in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany -- 3. Rigorous Discipline: Oliver Heaviside Versus the Mathematicians -- 4. Setting the Table: The Disciplinary Development of Eighteenth-Century Chemistry as Read Through the Changing Structure of Its Tables -- 5. Narratives, Anecdotes, and Experiments: Turning Experience into Science in the Seventeenth Century -- 6. Argument and Narrative in Scientific Writing -- 7. Eighteenth-Century Medical Education and the Didactic Model of Experiment -- Selected Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index -- Backmatter