Description: 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
Review Quotes: "In the first volume of his series to date (whose publication has spanned the decade 2006 to 2016), the author studied the period from 1210 to 1685, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture. His second volume overlapped the first, covering 1680 to 1760, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility. Together, these three books represent one of the landmark achievements in the field of history of science, and represent essential reading for a wide range of disciplines. A tremendous intellectual achievement. We all eagerly await the fourth volume, dealing with science and civilisation from about 1840 to 1940." -- Clifford Cunningham, Sun News Miami
"The Natural and the Human...presents a fascinating, astonishingly broad-based...overview of the emergence of the human sciences, which contributes to large discussions about Western culture." -- R.J.W. Mills, 1650-1850