A History of Universalism: Conceptions of the Internationality of Science from the Enlightenment to the Cold War

That science is fundamentally universal has been proclaimed innumerable times. But the precise geographical meaning of this universality has changed historically. This article examines conceptions of scientific internationalism from the Enlightenment to the Cold War, and their varying relations to cosmopolitanism, nationalism, socialism, and 'the West'. These views are confronted with recent tendencies to cast science as a uniquely European product

Science and polity in france at the end of the old regime

xii, 601 p.; 24 cm

De l’histoire naturelle à la biologie : relations entre les programmes de recherche de Cuvier, Lamarck et Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire

En parlant de la métamorphose du Jardin du roi en Muséum d’Histoire naturelle dans l’une des premières communications que j’ai faites dans ce domaine, il m’est arrivé de dire qu’il s’agissait de la Révolution française en microcosme botanique. On peut en effet lire le Mémoire sur le Jardin du roi rédigé par André Thouin à l’intention du ministre de la Maison du roi en octobre 1788, juste après la mort de Buffon, comme un cahier de doléances des naturalistes. Dévoués à leur science et à la cho..

Dictionary of scientific biography

xii+624hlm.;29c

Lazare and Sadi Carnot: a scientific and filial relationship

Lazare Carnot was the unique example in the history of science of someone who inadvertently owed the scientific recognition he eventually achieved to earlier political prominence. He and his son Sadi produced work that derived from their training as engineers and went largely unnoticed by physicists for a generation or more, even though their respective work introduced concepts that proved fundamental when taken up later by other hands. There was, moreover, a filial as well as substantive relation between the work of father and son. Sadi applied to the functioning of heat engines the analysis that his father had developed in his study of the operation of ordinary machines. Specifically, Sadi's idea of a reversible process originated in the use his father made of geometric motions in the analysis of machines in general. This unique book shows how the two Carnots influenced each other in their work in the fields of mechanics and thermodynamics, and how future generations of scientists have further benefited from their work