A Compassionate Peace: Future for the Middle East (Pelican S.)

History

Everett Mendelsohn

Asia

Penguin Books, Ltd.

history, Middle East, Israel, Palestine

A Compassionate Peace: A Future for Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East

Middle East

The Noonday Press

This work originated in an effort to find out what elements wento into concept formation in the biological sciences and what the relation of this process is to the knowledge and techniques of the physical sciences. Mr. Mendelsohn investigates in detail the history of a single biological theory, that of animal heat, and traces its changes through time and the sources of these changes. In one form or another, the heat of the warm-blooded animal was recognized and explained from the earliest times, and the necessity of reconciling biological and physical heat was always present. The biologist needs to know whether a biological phenomenon can usefully be reduced to a physical or mechanical analogue or whether one must seek strictly biological theories to explain biological phenomena. The author carries the story from the speculations of the ancient Greeks, through Harvey's ideas related to the circulationl of the blood, to the explanation based on respiraion and combustion at the end of the eighteenth century. The architects of the new theory of animal heat, tying their work closely to the latest developments in chemistry and physics, repudiated the idea that special biological laws governed the behavior of living systems. The problem of animal heat and the new concepts and techniques developed in the late eighteenth century for constructing a theory to explain it can be taken as marking the beginning of scientific biology. Everett Mendelsohn teaches the history of science at Harvard University.

Heat and Life: The Development of the Theory of Animal Heat

Harvard University Press

Twenty-five years ago, Gerald Holton's Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought introduced a wide audience to his ideas. Holton argued that from ancient times to the modern period, an astonishing feature of innovative scientific work was its ability to hold, simultaneously, deep and opposite commitments of the most fundamental sort. Over the course of Holton's career, he embraced both the humanities and the sciences. Given this background, it is fitting that the explorations assembled in this volume reflect both individually and collectively Holton's dual roots. In the opening essay, Holton sums up his long engagement with Einstein and his thematic commitment to unity. The next two essays address this concern. In historicized form, Lorraine Daston returns the question of the scientific imagination to the Enlightenment period when both sciences and art feared imagination. Daston argues that the split whereby imagination was valued in the arts and loathed in the sciences is a nineteenth-century divide. James Ackerman on Leonardo da Vinci meshes perfectly with Daston's account, showing a form of imaginative intervention where it is irrelevant to draw analogies between art and science. Historians of religion Wendy Doniger and Gregory Spinner pursue the imagination into the bedroom with literary-theological representations. Science, culture, and the imagination also intersect with biologist Edward Wilson and physicist Steven Weinberg. Both tackle the big question of the unity of knowledge and worldviews from a scientific perspective while art historian Ernst Gombrich does the same from the perspective of art history. To emphasize the nitty-gritty of scientific practice, chemists Bretislav Fredrich and Dudley Herschback provide a remarkable historical tour at the boundary of chemistry and physics. In the concluding essay, historian of education Patricia Albjerg Graham addresses pedagogy head-on. In these various reflections on science, art, literature, philosophy, and education, this volume gives us a view in common: a deep and abiding respect for Gerald Holton's contribution to our understanding of science in culture. Peter Galison is Mallinckrodt Professor of History of Science and of physics at Harvard University. Stephen R. Graubard is editor of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and its journal, Daedalus, and professor of history emeritus at Brown University. Everett Mendelsohn is director of the History of Science Program at Harvard University.

Science in Culture (10 Essays)

Politics & Social Sciences

EDWARD O. WILSON

Stephen, R. Graubard

Social Sciences

Routledge

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Books by Everett Mendelsohn