A significant number of works have set forth, over the past decades, the emphasis laid by seventeenth-century mathematicians and philosophers on motion and kinematic notions in geometry. These works demonstrated the crucial role attributed in this context to genetic definitions, which state the mode of generation of geometrical objects instead of their essential properties. While the growing importance of genetic definitions in sixteenth-century commentaries on Euclid’s Elements has been underlined, the place, uses and status of motion in this geometrical tradition has however never been thoroughly and comprehensively studied. This book therefore undertakes to fill a gap in the history of early modern geometry and philosophy of mathematics by investigating the different treatments of motion and genetic definitions by seven major sixteenth-century commentators on Euclid’s Elements, from Oronce Fine (1494–1555) to Christoph Clavius (1538–1612), including Jacques Peletier (1517–1582), John Dee (1527–1608/1609) and Henry Billingsley (d. 1606), among others. By investigating the ontological and epistemological conceptions underlying the introduction and uses of kinematic notions in their interpretation of Euclidean geometry, this study displays the richness of the conceptual framework, philosophical and mathematical, inherent to the sixteenth-century Euclidean tradition and shows how it contributed to a more generalised acceptance and promotion of kinematic approaches to geometry in the early modern period.

The book offers an analysis of Joachim Jungius’ Texturæ Contemplatio - a hitherto-unpublished manuscript written in German and Latin that deals with weaving, knitting and other textile practices, attempting to present as well various fabrics and textile techniques in a scientifical and even mathematical framework. The book aims to provide the epistemological, technical and historic framework for Jungius’ manuscript, inspecting fabrics, weaving techniques as well as looms and other textile machines in Holy Roman Empire during the Early Modern Period. It also offers a unique investigation of the notion and metaphor of ‘texture’ during this period, and explores, within the wider context of the ‘meeting’ or ‘trading zones’ thesis, the relations between artisans and natural philosophers during the 17th century. The book is of interest to historians of philosophy and mathematics, as well as historians of technology.

Since precious few architectural drawings and no theoretical treatises on architecture remain from the premodern Islamic world, the Timurid pattern scroll in the collection of the Topkapi Palace Museum Library is an exceedingly rich and valuable source of information. In the course of her in-depth analysis of this scroll dating from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, Gülru Necipoğlu throws new light on the conceptualization, recording, and transmission of architectural design in the Islamic world between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. Her text has particularly far-reaching implications for recent discussions on vision, subjectivity, and the semiotics of abstract representation. She also compares the Islamic understanding of geometry with that found in medieval Western art, making this book particularly valuable for all historians and critics of architecture. The scroll, with its 114 individual geometric patterns for wall surfaces and vaulting, is reproduced entirely in color in this elegant, large-format volume. An extensive catalogue includes illustrations showing the underlying geometries (in the form of incised “dead” drawings) from which the individual patterns are generated. An essay by Mohammad al-Asad discusses the geometry of the muqarnas and demonstrates by means of CAD drawings how one of the scroll’s patterns could be used co design a three-dimensional vault.

"[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the 'Westt's mainstream high culture' and the 'radically changing world' of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike....Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.

This open access book explores commentaries on an influential text of pre-Copernican astronomy in Europe. It features essays that take a close look at key intellectuals and how they engaged with the main ideas of this qualitative introduction to geocentric cosmology. Johannes de Sacrobosco compiled his Tractatus de sphaera during the thirteenth century in the frame of his teaching activities at the then recently founded University of Paris. It soon became a mandatory text all over Europe. As a result, a tradition of commentaries to the text was soon established and flourished until the second half of the 17th century. Here, readers will find an informative overview of these commentaries complete with a rich context. The essays explore the educational and social backgrounds of the writers. They also detail how their careers developed after the publication of their commentaries, the institutions and patrons they were affiliated with, what their agenda was, and whether and how they actually accomplished it. The editor of this collection considers these scientific commentaries as genuine scientific works. The contributors investigate them here not only in reference to the work on which it comments but also, and especially, as independent scientific contributions that are socially, institutionally, and intellectually contextualized around their authors.

“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University