Introduction to the History of Science, from Descartes and Newton to Darwin and Einstein

The course examines the nature and significance of scientific thinking in general through the study of the work of Descartes, Leibnitz, and Newton; the conflict between science and religion in the seventeenth century; materialism's penetration of biology from physics; the revolution in chemistry associated with Priestly and Lavoisier; the interface between science and the industrial revolution; the work of the French biologist Claude Bernard, illustrating the development of biology and experimental medicine; the starting work of Charles Darwin; twentieth-century topics such as field and atomic theory, relativity, and quantum theory; and their important philosophical implications.

Fall, Spring