Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739-1841
Stephen Gaukroger presents an original account of the development of science and our understanding of ourselves during a period which saw a fundamental shift in how the role of science was seen. At the core of the shift lies the aim of understanding human behaviour and motivations in empirical rather than theological and metaphysical terms.
Stephen Gaukroger presents an original account of the development of empirical science and the understanding of human behaviour from the mid-eighteenth century. Since the seventeenth century, science in the west has undergone a unique form of cumulative development in which it has been consolidated through integration into and shaping of a culture. But in the eighteenth century, science was cut loose from the legitimating culture in which it had had a public rationale as a fruitful