Between Matter And Method

Building on the lively exchange between anthropology and art that has emerged in recent years, Between Matter and Method makes a bold and creative contribution to this rapidly growing field. Taking an expansive approach to the arts, it finds commonalities in approaches that engage with visual artifacts, sound, performance, improvisation, literature, dance, theater, and design. The book questions current disciplinary boundaries and offers a new model grounded in a shared methodology for interdisciplinary encounter between art and anthropology. Gretchen Bakke and Marina Peterson have gathered together anthropologists whose work is notable for engaging the arts and creative practice in conceptually rigorous and methodologically innovative ways, including Kathleen Stewart, Keith Murphy, Natasha Myers, Stuart McLean, Craig Campbell, and Roger Sansi. Essays span the globe from Indonesia, West Virginia and Los Angeles in the United States, to the Orkney Islands in the UK, and Russia and Spain.

This collection of essays deals with three clusters of problems in the philo sophy of science: scientific method, conceptual models, and ontological underpinnings. The disjointedness of topics is more apparent than real, since the whole book is concerned with the scientific knowledge of fact. Now, the aim of factual knowledge is the conceptual grasping of being, and this understanding is provided by theories of whatever there may be. If the theories are testable and specific, such as a theory of a particular chemical reaction, then they are often called 'theoretical models' and clas sed as scientific. If the theories are extremely general, like a theory of syn thesis and dissociation without any reference to a particular kind of stuff, then they may be called 'metaphysical' - as well as 'scientific' if they are consonant with science. Between these two extremes there is a whole gamut of kinds of factual theories. Thus the entire spectrum should be dominated by the scientific method, quite irrespective of the subject matter. This is the leitmotiv of the present book. The introductory chapter, on method in the philosophy of science, tackles the question 'Why don't scientists listen to their philosophers?'.

To do research that really makes a difference -- the authors of this book argue -- social scientists need a diverse set of questions and methods, both qualitative and quantitative, in order to reflect the complexity of the world. Bringing together a consortium of voices across a variety of fields, Methods That Matter offers compelling and successful examples of mixed methods research that does just that. Discussing their own endeavors to combine quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the authors invite readers into a conversation about the best designs and practices of mixed methods to stimulate creative ideas and find new pathways of insight. The result is an engaging exploration of a promising approach to the social sciences. --

The seventeenth-century scientific revolution and the eighteenth-century chemical revolution are rarely considered together, either in general histories of science or in more specific surveys of early modern science or chemistry. This tendency arises from the long-held view that the rise of modern physics and the emergence of modern chemistry comprise two distinct and unconnected episodes in the history of science. Although chemistry was deeply transformed during and between both revolutions, the scientific revolution is traditionally associated with the physical and mathematical sciences whereas modern chemistry is seen as the exclusive product of the chemical revolution. This historiographical tension, between similarity in ’form’ and disparity in historical ’content’ of the two events, has tainted the way we understand the rise of modern chemistry as an integral part of the advent of modern science. Against this background, Matter and Method in the Long Chemical Revolution examines the role of and effects on chemistry of both revolutions in parallel, using chemistry during the chemical revolution to illuminate chemistry during the scientific revolution, and vice versa. Focusing on the crises and conflicts of early modern chemistry (and their retrospectively labeled ’losing’ parties), the author traces patterns of continuity in matter theory and experimental method from Boyle to Lavoisier, and reevaluates the disciplinary relationships between chemists, mechanists, and Newtonians in France, England, and Scotland. Adopting a unique approach to the study of the scientific and chemical revolutions, and to early modern chemical thought and practice in particular, the author challenges the standard revolution-centered history of early modern science, and reinterprets the rise of chemistry as an independent discipline in the long eighteenth century.

This volume deals with the philosophy of mathematics and of science and the nature of philosophical and scientific enquiry.

The aim of the book is to describe some of the recent advances, through computer simulation in a broad sense, in the understanding of the complex processes occurring in solids and liquids.The rapid growth of computer power, including the new parallel processors, has stimulated a ferment of new theoretical and computational ideas, which have been developed in particular by the authors in a pluriennal research project supported by Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) for the development of novel software for large scale computations.The book will cover advances in ab initio (Car-Parrinello) molecular dynamics, quantum monte carlo simulations, self-consistent density functional computation of electronic states, classical molecular dynamics simulation of thermodynamic processes, chemical reactions and transport properties.Besides the description of the results of these techniques in leading edge applications, the book will address specific aspects of the algorithms and software which have been developed by the authors in order to implement in an efficient way the new theoretical advances in these computationally intensive problems.These aspects which are generally not discussed in any detail in the literature, can be of great help for newcomers in the field.