Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) was a polymath of dazzling intellectual range and energy. Renowned for his co-discovery of the second law of thermodynamics and his invention of the ophthalmoscope, Helmholtz also made many other contributions to physiology, physical theory, philosophy of science and mathematics, and aesthetic thought. During the late nineteenth century, Helmholtz was revered as a scientist-sagemuch like Albert Einstein in this century.David Cahan has assembled an outstanding group of European and North American historians of science and philosophy for this intellectual biography of Helmholtz, the first ever to critically assess both his published and unpublished writings. It represents a significant contribution not only to Helmholtz scholarship but also to the history of nineteenth-century science and philosophy in general. ... Read more

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A Barely Remembered Scientist
If the average university student has heard of Helmholtz today, it might be in the context of a Helmholtz coil, which is used in physics to generate a uniform magnetic field at its centre. Yet, in a larger context, he has been largely forgotten, despite his vast contributions across many sciences of the 19th century. Perhaps it speaks to the finite size of a curriculum and the onrushing progress of science.

This book attempts to redress that ignorance. It gives a well written description of his many experiments and writings. Very readable, without requiring specialised knowledge of its fields. The level of explanation is comparable to that of Scientific American. What is also neat is how the book fits him into his time, describing the cultural milieu of Germany and its scientific strivings. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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Some highlights
Against Euclidean transcendental intuition. The mind invents the categories in terms of which it perceives the world. "The same aether vibrations which the eye feels as light, the skin feels as heat. The same aerial vibrations which the skin feels as whirring motions, the ear feels as sound." (p. 346). "Kant, however, went further ... [and] considered spatial determinations as little belonging to the real world, 'to the thing in itself,' as the colors which we see belonging to bodies in themselves, and which we rather brought into them through out eyes." (p. 348). Be here there is a strong disanalogy: spatial intuition, according to Kant, contains definite content, namely the Euclidean axioms. The supposed proof of this is that we can all intuit Euclidean geometry and no other geometries. But this proof fails. By the same reasoning one could "prove" that the English language is innate while Swahili is not. Just as we are born with a general language capacity that quickly specialises in response to given environmental conditions, there is every reason to think that our spatial intuition is initially neutral with respect to Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometry and subsequently formed by empirical data. Thus Kant's claim that the Euclidean axioms are innate is: "1. an unproven hypothesis; 2. an unnecessary hypothesis, since it pretends to explain nothing in our factual world of representation that could not also be explained without its help; and 3. a completely unusable hypothesis for the explanation of our knowledge of the real world, since the theorems established by it may first be applied to the relations of the real world after its objective validity has been experimentally proven and determined" (p. 380). Point 3 may be illustrated by the following example (p. 373). Let ABC be an equilateral triangle. Extend AB and AC above A and mark the points b and c on these lines that have the same distance to A as do B and C. Now: does bc=BC? Euclidean geometry says yes; non-Eucliden no. It is not for the mind to decide the outcome: the mind invents the categories in terms of which it perceives the world, but equality or inequality of impressions must depend on equality or inequality in the underlying physical reality, whatever it may be.

"On Academic Freedom in German Universities." "Such was the origin of Universities": "a free confederation of independent men, in which teachers as well as taught were brought together by no other interest than that of love of science; some by the desire of discovering the treasure of mental culture which antiquity had bequeathed, others endeavouring to kindle in a new generation the ideal enthusiasm which had animated their lives" (p. 330). Today "the German student alone has this perfect joy." "He can devote himself to the task of striving after the best and noblest which the human race has hitherto been able to attain in knowledge and in speculation, closely joined in friendly rivalry with a large body of associates of similar aspirations, and in daily mental intercourse with teachers from whom he learns something of the workings of the thought of independent minds." (p. 334). "You, my younger friends, have received in this freedom of the German students a costly and valuable inheritance of preceding generations. Keep it---and hand it on to coming races, purified and ennobled if possible. ... But freedom necessarily implies responsibility. It is as injurious a present for the weak, as it is valuable for strong characters. Do not wonder if parent and statesmen sometimes urge that a more rigid system of supervision and control, like that of the English, shall be introduced even among us. There is no doubt that, by such a system, many a one would have been saved who is ruined by freedom. But the State and the Nation is best served by those who can bear freedom, and have shown that they know how to work and struggle, from their own force and insight and from their own interest in science." (pp. 334-335). "Another point in which German Universities are distinguished from the English and French ones ... is that we start with the object of having instruction given, if possible, only by teachers who have proved their own power of advancing science. ... The English and French ... lay more weight ... on what is called the 'talent for teaching'---that is, the power of explaining the subjects of instruction in a well-arranged and clear manner, and, if possible, with eloquence, and so as to entertain and fix the attention. ... I am by no means prepared to defend what is, frequently, our too great contempt for form is speech and in writing. It cannot ... be doubted that many original men, who have done considerable scientific work, have often an uncouth, heavy, and hesitating delivery. Yet I have not infrequently seen that such teachers had crowded lecture-rooms, while empty-headed orators excited astonishment in the first lecture, fatigue in the second, and were deserted in the third. Anyone who desires to give his hearers a perfect conviction of the truth of his principles must, first of all, know from his own experience how conviction is acquired and how not. ... A teacher who retails convictions which are foreign to him, is sufficient for those pupils who depend upon authority as the source of their knowledge, but not for such as require bases for their convictions ... [Thus] The free conviction of the student can only be acquired when freedom of expression is guaranteed to the teacher's own conviction---the liberty of teaching." (pp. 335-336).

"The Relation of Optics to Painting." Small particles in the air scatter light. "The colour of the light reflected by the opaque particles mainly depends on their magnitude. When a block of wood floats on water, and by a succession of falling drops we produce small wave-rings near it, these are repelled by the floating wood as if it were a solid wall. But in the long waves of the sea, a block of wood would be rocked about without the waves being thereby materially disturbed in their progress." Since blue light has the shortest wavelength it is most easily scattered. That is why the sky is blue: while the red and yellow rays pierced through the atmosphere, the blue ones were deflected down to us. "Conversely, the denser turbidity consists mainly of coarser particles, and is therefore whitish. As a rule, this is the case in the lower layers of air, and in states of weather in which the aqueous vapour in the air is near its point of condensation. On the other hand, the light which reaches the eye of the observer after having passed through a long layer of air, has been robbed of part of its violet and blue by scattered reflections; it therefore appears yellowish to reddish-yellow or red, the former when the turbidity is fine, the latter when it is coarse. This the sun and the moon at their rising and setting, and also distant brightly illuminated mountain-tops, especially snow-mountains, appear coloured." "The high transparent landscapes of mountain regions, which so often lead the Alpine climber to under-estimate the distance and the magnitude of the mountain-tops before him, are also difficult to turn to account in a picturesque manner. Views from the valleys ... are far better; not only do they allow the various distances and magnitudes of what is seen to stand out, but they are on the other hand favourable to the artistic unity of colouration." (pp. 286-287)

An excellent collection of Helmholtz's best essays
Hermann von Helmholtz was quite simply one of the most important German scientists of the 19th century.However, what becomes so clear when one peruses the collection edited by David Cahan is that Helmholtz has much ofinterest to say to philosophers, artists, musicians, and historians. Thiscollection includes his most important public addresses on a wide range oftopics and provides a clear portrait of the breadth of Helmholtz'scontributions to science and intellectual life. This provides in Englishwhat is lacking in the original German editions - a readily available,inexpensive edition of Helmholtz's highly influential work. ... Read more

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Two seemingly contradictory tendencies have accompanied the development of the natural sciences in the past 150 years. On the one hand, the natural sciences have been instrumental in effecting a thoroughgoing transformation of social structures and have made a permanent impact on the conceptual world of human beings. This historical period has, on the other hand, also brought to light the merely hypothetical validity of scientific knowledge. As late as the middle of the 19th century the truth-pathos in the natural sciences was still unbroken. Yet in the succeeding years these claims to certain knowledge underwent a fundamental crisis. For scientists today, of course, the fact that their knowledge can possess only relative validity is a matter of self-evidence.

Customer Reviews (1)

A historical study of the shift away from science as revealing the nature of things to science as offering contestable models
In this study, Gregor Schiemann aims to show that the current complexity in conceptions of science, both among scientists and among theorists of science, is not merely a matter of increased attention to the history of science in the modern period.Rather, it owes largely to a revolution within science from an early modern or "classical" conception of science as aiming at certainty to a more modern conception that stresses the essentially hypothetical character of scientific knowledge.He illustrates this shift by attending to the exemplary case of the famous and influential nineteenth century physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, whose early conception of mechanism as the appropriate and final form of all scientific knowledge underwent a shift to the point where mechanism was seen as a model or representation, explicitly acknowledged to be just one among possible approaches to making sense of natural phenomena.

The book, revised and translated from a larger monograph in German, aims both to illustrate an epochal shift in the self-conception of the natural sciences, and uses the idea that this shift took place visibly in the work of Hermann Von Helmholtz as a guiding thread in an effort to resolve controversies in the historical interpretation of the significance of his wide-ranging work.While the focus is really on interpretation of changes in Helmholtz's conception, and it would thus be mainly of interest to historians of science working on the period, it also helps to validate and clarify a claim made by historians and sociologists, that actual working scientists aren't themselves worried about the loss of prestige to the status of scientific theorization that might come about if we accept the "theory laden" character of interpretation or the idea that science delivers models or pictures and that sometimes there is no deciding between competing models.The book shows, one might say, that the problematic character of scientific knowledge was not introduced by twentieth century philosophers and historians of science.Rather, already in the nineteenth century scientists had abandoned pretensions to certainty and had accepted the "hypotheticity" of scientific theory.

The book is divided neatly into two parts.The first sets the stage for a consideration of changes in Helmholtz's philosophy of nature and science, by outlining various strands of the conception of mechanism within "classical" (or early modern) science, and by contrasting "classical" with "modern" science and philosophy of nature.The second part explores the nature of the shift, whereby Helmholtz reluctantly came to acknowledge the hypothetical character of his claims regarding mechanics.What is intriguing about Schiemann's approach is that he demonstrates the motivations for this shift to be rooted not in appeals to philosophy but in developments within his scientific work.Helmholtz's initial confidence in science's ability to reach certainty was largely inspired by his own sense of the importance of the principle of conservation of energy, the clarification of which was one of his early major accomplishments, rather than due to a latent neo-Kantianism (as has been suggested by other researchers).Later it was Helmholtz's attempts to scientifically investigate the foundations of scientific practice by studying perception, and his attempts to subject geometry to empirical study, that led him to see theories as models and the idea of a unified theory as at most a regulative ideal.

The book is quite fascinating, and the author takes great care in teasing out the importance of subtle differences -- as, for example, of the difference between various conceptions of mechanism -- and of the importance of changes in Helmholtz's expression of ideas, especially in public addresses, for the significance of his work as a whole.At the same time, I should add, it is a rather tedious read, given the needlessly baroque style of writing.Most likely, this is due to the fact it was translated from the German in what I would consider to be an excessively literal fashion, preserving the often lengthy and convoluted (clause within clause within clause) sentence structure of the original monograph.There is also a tendency towards qualification regarding details, and regarding subtle differences between scholarly assessment of those details, that is likely to be appreciable only by scholars of Helmholtz, and not by the more general audience who is likely to be intrigued by the broader theme of the "loss of certainty" in science's self-conception. ... Read more

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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free.This is an OCR edition with typos.Excerpt from book:UNI VKKSITY OF , CAUKOUNIA.V - . /THE RELATION OF OPTICSPAINTING.Being the substance of a series of Lectures delivered in Cologne, Berlin, and Bonn.I Fear that the announcement of my intention to address you on the subject of plastic art may have created no little surprise among some of my hearers. For I cannot doubt that many of you have had more frequent opportunities of viewing works of art, and have more thoroughly studied its historical aspects, than I can lay claim to have done; or indeed have had personal experience in the actual practice of art, in which I am entirely wanting. I have arrived at my artistic studies by a path which is but little trod, that is, by the physiology of the senses; and in reference to those who have a long acquaintance with, and who are quite at home in the beautiful fields of art, I may comparemyself to a traveller who has entered upon them by a steep and stony mountain path, but who, in doing so, has passed many a stage from which a good point of view is obtained. If therefore I relate to you what I consider I have observed, it is with the understanding that I wish to regard myself as open to instruction by those more experienced than myself.The physiological study of the manner in which the perceptions of our senses originate, how impressions from without pass into our nerves, and how the condition of the latter is thereby altered, presents many points of contact with the theory of the fine arts. On a former occasion I endeavoured to establish such a relation between the physiology of the sense of hearing, and the theory of music. Those relations in that case are particularly clear and distinct, because the elementary forms of music depend more closely on the nature and on the peculiarities of our perceptions than is... ... Read more

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This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more