The Aesthetics of Science

The Aesthetics of Science
Author: Milena Ivanova
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2020-01-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0429638558

This volume builds on two recent developments in philosophy on the relationship between art and science: the notion of representation and the role of values in theory choice and the development of scientific theories. Its aim is to address questions regarding scientific creativity and imagination, the status of scientific performances—such as thought experiments and visual aids—and the role of aesthetic considerations in the context of discovery and justification of scientific theories. Several contributions focus on the concept of beauty as employed by practising scientists, the aesthetic factors at play in science and their role in decision making. Other essays address the question of scientific creativity and how aesthetic judgment resolves the problem of theory choice by employing aesthetic criteria and incorporating insights from both objectivism and subjectivism. The volume also features original perspectives on the role of the sublime in science and sheds light on the empirical work studying the experience of the sublime in science and its relation to the experience of understanding. The Aesthetics of Science tackles these topics from a variety of novel and thought-provoking angles. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in philosophy of science and aesthetics, as well as other subdisciplines such as epistemology and philosophy of mathematics.

Aesthetic Science

Aesthetic Science
Author: Arthur P. Shimamura
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2012-01-02
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0199732140

What do we do when we view a work of art? What does it mean to have an 'aesthetic' experience? Are such experiences purely in the eye of the beholder? This book addresses the nature of aesthetic experience from the perspectives of philosophy psychology and neuroscience.

On Aesthetics in Science

On Aesthetics in Science
Author: WECHSLER
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 206
Release: 1988-02-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780817633790

Aesthetic Science

Aesthetic Science
Author: Alexander Wragge-Morley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2020-04-17
Genre: Science
ISBN: 022668105X

The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it really was. In Aesthetic Science, Alexander Wragge-Morley challenges this interpretation by arguing that key figures such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke, and Thomas Willis saw the study of nature as an aesthetic project. To show how early modern naturalists conceived of the interplay between sensory experience and the production of knowledge, Aesthetic Science explores natural-historical and anatomical works of the Royal Society through the lens of the aesthetic. By underscoring the importance of subjective experience to the communication of knowledge about nature, Wragge-Morley offers a groundbreaking reconsideration of scientific representation in the early modern period and brings to light the hitherto overlooked role of aesthetic experience in the history of the empirical sciences.

Thinking about Science, Reflecting on Art

Thinking about Science, Reflecting on Art
Author: Otávio Bueno
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Aesthetics
ISBN: 9781138687325

Thinking about Science, Relecting on Art is the first book to systematically examine the relationship between the philosophy of science and aesthetics.

Aesthetics, Industry & Science

Aesthetics, Industry & Science
Author: M. Norton Wise
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2018-06-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 022653149X

On January 5, 1845, the Prussian cultural minister received a request by a group of six young men to form a new Physical Society in Berlin. In fields from thermodynamics, mechanics, and electromagnetism to animal electricity, ophthalmology, and psychophysics, members of this small but growing group—which soon included Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Brücke, Werner Siemens, and Hermann von Helmholtz—established leading positions in what only thirty years later had become a new landscape of natural science. How was this possible? How could a bunch of twenty-somethings succeed in seizing the future? In Aesthetics, Industry, and Science M. Norton Wise answers these questions not simply from a technical perspective of theories and practices but with a broader cultural view of what was happening in Berlin at the time. He emphasizes in particular how rapid industrial development, military modernization, and the neoclassical aesthetics of contemporary art informed the ways in which these young men thought. Wise argues that aesthetic sensibility and material aspiration in this period were intimately linked, and he uses these two themes for a final reappraisal of Helmholtz’s early work. Anyone interested in modern German cultural history, or the history of nineteenth-century German science, will be drawn to this landmark book.

Exploring Emotions, Aesthetics and Wellbeing in Science Education Research

Exploring Emotions, Aesthetics and Wellbeing in Science Education Research
Author: Alberto Bellocchi
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2016-10-19
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3319433539

This book addresses new research directions focusing on the emotional and aesthetic nature of teaching and learning science informing more general insights about wellbeing. It considers methodological traditions including those informed by philosophy, sociology, psychology and education and how they contribute to our understanding of science education. In this collection, the authors provide accounts of the underlying ontological, epistemological, methodological perspectives and theoretical assumptions that inform their work and that of others. Each chapter provides a perspective on the study of emotion, aesthetics or wellbeing, using empirical examples or a discussion of existing literature to unpack the theoretical and philosophical traditions inherent in those works. This volume offers a diverse range of approaches for anyone interested in researching emotions, aesthetics, or wellbeing. It is ideal for research students who are confronted with a cosmos of research perspectives, but also for established researchers in various disciplines with an interest in researching emotions, affect, aesthetics, or wellbeing.

Truth and Beauty

Truth and Beauty
Author: S. Chandrasekhar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2013-11-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 022616277X

"What a splendid book! Reading it is a joy, and for me, at least, continuing reading it became compulsive. . . . Chandrasekhar is a distinguished astrophysicist and every one of the lectures bears the hallmark of all his work: precision, thoroughness, lucidity."—Sir Hermann Bondi, Nature The late S. Chandrasekhar was best known for his discovery of the upper limit to the mass of a white dwarf star, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983. He was the author of many books, including The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes and, most recently, Newton's Principia for the Common Reader.

Beauty and Revolution in Science

Beauty and Revolution in Science
Author: James W. McAllister
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2018-09-05
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1501728644

Explaining why he embraced the theory of relativity, the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist P. A. M. Dirac stated, "It is the essential beauty of the theory which I feel is the real reason for believing in it." How reasonable and rational can science be when its practitioners speak of "revolutions" in their thinking and extol certain theories for their "beauty"? James W. McAllister addresses this question with the first systematic study of the aesthetic evaluations that scientists pass on their theories.Using a wealth of other examples, McAllister explains how scientists' aesthetic preferences are influenced by the empirical track record of theories, describes the origin and development of aesthetic styles of theorizing, and reconsiders whether simplicity is an empirical or an aesthetic virtue of theories. McAllister then advances an innovative model of scientific revolutions, in opposition to that of Thomas S. Kuhn.Three detailed studies demonstrate the interconnection of empirical performance, beauty, and revolution. One examines the impact of new construction materials on the history of architecture. Another reexamines the transition from the Ptolemaic system to Kepler's theory in planetary astronomy, and the third documents the rise of relativity and quantum theory in the twentieth century.

The Outward Mind

The Outward Mind
Author: Benjamin Morgan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2017-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 022646220X

Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as incontrovertibly intertwined.