The Age of Genius - A. C. Grayling

What happened to the European mind between 1605 when an audience watching Macbeth at the Globe might believe that regicide was such an aberration of the natural order that ghosts could burst from the ground and 1649 when a large crowd perhaps including some who had seen Macbeth forty-four years earlier could stand and watch the execution of a king? Or consider the difference between a magus casting a star chart and the day in 1639 when Jonathan Horrock and William Crabtree watched the transit of Venus across the face of the sun from their attic successfully testing its course against Kepler's Tables of Planetary Motion in a classic case of confirming a scientific theory by empirical testing. In this turbulent period science moved from the alchemy and astrology of John Dee to the painstaking observation and astronomy of Galileo from the classicism of Aristotle still favoured by the Church to the evidence-based collegiate investigation of Francis Bacon. And if the old ways still lingered and affected the new mind set - Descartes's dualism an attempt to square the new philosophy with religious belief; Newton the man who understood gravity and the laws of motion still fascinated to the end of his life by alchemy - by the end of that tumultuous century `the greatest ever change in the mental outlook of humanity' had irrevocably taken place.

TITLE: The Age of Genius

AUTHOR: A. C. Grayling

SKU: 9781408870389

PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

DATE PUBLISHED: 10/03/2016

PLACE PUBLISHED: United Kingdom

PAGES: 368

BINDING: Paperback / softback

LANGUAGE: English

DIMENSIONS: 153 mm x 234 mm

WEIGHT: 586 gr