Henry Oldenburg, born in 1619 in Bremen, Germany, first came to England as a diplomat on a mission to see Oliver Cromwell. He stayed on in England and in 1662 became the Secretary of the Royal Society, and its best known member to the entire learned world of his time. Through his extensive correspondence, now published, he disseminated the Society's ideals and methods at home and abroad. He fostered and encouraged the talents of many scientists later to be far more famous than he, including Newton, Flamsteed, Malpighi, and Leeuwenhoek with whom, as with many others, he developed real friendship. He founded and edited the Philosophical Transactions, the world's oldest scientific journal. His career sheds new light on the intellectual world of his time, especially its scientific aspects, and on the development of the Royal Society; his private life expands our knowledge of social mobility, the urban society, and the religious views of his time.

This unique and encyclopedic reference work describes the evolution of the physics of modern shock wave and detonation from the earlier and classical percussion. The history of this complex process is first reviewed in a general survey. Subsequently, the subject is treated in more detail and the book is richly illustrated in the form of a picture gallery. This book is ideal for everyone professionally interested in shock wave phenomena.

Seventeenth-century philosophy scholars come together in this volume to address the Insiders--Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, and Hobbes--and Outsiders--Pierre Gassendi, Kenelm Digby, Theophilus Gale, Ralph Cudworth and Nicholas Malebranche--of the philosocial canon, and the ways in which reputations are created and confirmed. In their own day, these ten figures were all considered to be thinkers of substantial repute, and it took some time for the Insiders to come to be regarded as major and original philosophers. Today these Insiders all feature in the syllabi of most history of philosophy courses taught in western universities, and the papers in this collection, contrasting the stories of their receptions with those of the Outsiders, give an insight into the history of philosophy which is generally overlooked.

Vol. 2: This is the second in a six volume compendium on the correspondences of John Wallis (1616-1703). Wallis was Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford from 1649 until his death, and was a founding member of the Royal Society and a central figure in the scientific and intellectual history of England.

In late seventeenth-century London, the most provocative images were produced not by artists, but by scientists. Magnified fly-eyes drawn with the aid of microscopes, apparitions cast on laboratory walls by projection machines, cut-paper figures revealing the “exact proportions” of sea monsters—all were created by members of the Royal Society of London, the leading institutional platform of the early Scientific Revolution. Wicked Intelligence reveals that these natural philosophers shaped Restoration London’s emergent artistic cultures by forging collaborations with court painters, penning art theory, and designing triumphs of baroque architecture such as St Paul’s Cathedral. Matthew C. Hunter brings to life this archive of experimental-philosophical visualization and the deft cunning that was required to manage such difficult research. Offering an innovative approach to the scientific image-making of the time, he demonstrates how the Restoration project of synthesizing experimental images into scientific knowledge, as practiced by Royal Society leaders Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren, might be called “wicked intelligence.” Hunter uses episodes involving specific visual practices—for instance, concocting a lethal amalgam of wax, steel, and sulfuric acid to produce an active model of a comet—to explore how Hooke, Wren, and their colleagues devised representational modes that aided their experiments. Ultimately, Hunter argues, the craft and craftiness of experimental visual practice both promoted and menaced the artistic traditions on which they drew, turning the Royal Society projects into objects of suspicion in Enlightenment England. The first book to use the physical evidence of Royal Society experiments to produce forensic evaluations of how scientific knowledge was generated, Wicked Intelligence rethinks the parameters of visual art, experimental philosophy, and architecture at the cusp of Britain’s imperial power and artistic efflorescence.

This book presents important works by the Scottish mathematician Colin MacLaurin (1698-1746), translated in English for the first time. It includes three of the mathematician’s less known and often hard to obtain works. A general introduction puts the works in context and gives an outline of MacLaurin's career. Each translation is also accompanied by an introduction and analyzed both in modern terms and from a historical point of view.

This book is the first transcription and extensive commentary on a fascinating but almost entirely overlooked manuscript compilation of medical recipes and letters, which is held in the University of Nottingham. Collected by the Marquess and Marchioness of Newcastle, William and Margaret Cavendish, during the 1640s and 1650s, this manuscript features letters of advice, recipes, and sundry philosophical and medical reflections by some of the most formidable and influential physicians, philosophers, and courtly scholars of the early seventeenth century. These include “Europe’s physician” Theodore de Mayerne, the adventurer and courtier Kenelm Digby, and the natural philosopher, poet, and playwright Margaret Cavendish. While the transcription and accompanying annotations will allow a diverse array of readers to appreciate the manuscript for the first time, the introduction situates the Cavendishes’ recipe collecting habits, medical preoccupations, natural philosophical views, and politics within their social, cultural, and philosophical contexts, and draws out some of the most significant implications of this important document.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is one of the most important figures in the history of European thought. Although interest in his life and work has grown enormously in recent years, this is the first complete edition of his correspondence. The texts of the letters are richly supplemented with explanatory notes and full biographical and bibliographical information. This landmark publication sheds new light on the intellectual life of a major thinker.