Diagram of an eclipse of the sun, with the moon casting a shadow cone, 1260The Reading Room crew is eagerly anticipating today's eclipse, as watchers of the skies have done for centuries. We've g...
A domestic weather-station: combined thermometer, hygrometer, and barometer. Engraving after B. Martin. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.In the 1770s, the greatest naturalist in t...
“All students and undergraduates should lay aside their various authors and only follow Aristotle and those who defend him. . . . all sterile and inane questions departing or disagreeing from ...
https://oll.libertyfund.org/publications/reading-room/2023-12-27-donway-francis-bacon
It may seem strange to those this side of the Enlightenment that “the advancement of learning” should need any defense. If anything, we today are plagued with fears of misunderstanding rapidl...
On the long runway to take-off of the Enlightenment—and the modern world as we know it—were the intellectual movements of humanism, including the scientific revolution (late fourteenth and fi...
In Borges' Library of Babel, the titular library contains every book from all possible universes, thoughts, and dreams, including both coherent and incoherent works. Everything that ever could be...
In the first Sphere of Paradise, the Moon, we encounter our first cadre of difficult philosophical questions. In addition to those “simple” ones of how one moves in Paradise, and how a body w...
18th-century-pocket-globe-2913.jpg 1.26 MBThe century that began around 1670 was an extraordinary period of exploration and discovery. Antoni van Leeuwenhoek found microscopic animals teeming in ...
https://oll.libertyfund.org/publications/reading-room/Postrel_Pocket_Globes
“Knowledge is, of course, liberty,” said Mattheson.“In compressed tabloids,” said Birkin, looking at the dry, stiff little body of the Baronet. Immediately Gudrun saw the famous sociologi...
Stevens was a scholar of Queen’s College, Oxford and the editor of Euclid’s Elements.
Galen, the founder of experimental physiology, was one of the most distinguished physicians of antiquity.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a French mathematician and philosopher of the scientific method who became increasingly religious as he grew older.
Andrew Tooke (1673–1732) was headmaster of Chaterhouse School and professor of geometry at Gresham College, London.
Jane Haldimand Marcet (1769-1858) was home-educated and became an author of popular works of chemistry, botany, religion, and economics. Her works on economics (sometimes anonymously published to...
Sir Isaac Newton was one of the greatest scientific minds of all time. His work laid the foundations for modern physics, astronomy, and, along with Wilhelm Leibniz, mathematics. His contribution ...
Euclid’s treatise on geometry, Elements, has made him one of the best-known mathematicians of the ancient world. Greek sources attribute a number of other writings in geometry to Euclid, but th...
Favaro was an Italian physicist who edited the complete works of Galileo in 1890.
Hippocrates is traditionally regarded as the father of medicine. The famous Hippocratic Oath was inspired by later admirers of Hippocrates and was not, apparently, his own work.
Galileo Galilei, an Italian mathematician, astronomer, and physicist, is considered a founder of the experimental method. His conflict with the Catholic church arose over his support of Copernicu...
Related Links: Sir Francis Bacon Source: The Advancement of Learning, by Lord Bacon, edited by Joseph Devey, M.A. (New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1901).