The growing professionalisation of the law and the natural sciences owed much to the spread of the empire – and Cambridge intellectuals would benefit more than most from these processes. Natural philosophers travelled across the empire amassing botantical, geological, and antiquarian collections and expanding scientific knowledge, with much of the credit for their findings owed to local enslavers or enslaved Africans. Britons with financial investments in slave-trading organisations also donated to found professorships. In the case of the law, experts in international law and treaty-making, particularly Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, applied their expert knowledge to cases concerning piracy, plantation holdings, and imperial companies. As with missionary organisations, the problem of enslavement continued to be a source of debate in the eighteenth century, as philosophers of natural law and rights considered the ethical justifications for racial enslavement.

This chapter invites consideration of Bloomsbury as the Biography group. It details Bloomsbury’s founding and defining contributions to the “New Biography,” particularly in theoretical and creative works by Harold Nicolson, Virginia Woolf, and the most influential British biographer of the past century, Lytton Strachey. Focusing its attention most carefully on the latter two, it explores how both Woolf and Strachey, as “spiritual” writers of the modernist age (Woolf, “Modern Fiction”), understood biography as a means of revealing personality, while diverging on some essential matters. Woolf, whose initial understanding of biography as an art evolved into a more subdued description of it as (mere) craft, anticipated that this aim might be accomplished through archival assiduity over time by a succession of fact-bound biographers, each bringing a different perspective to facts, old and new. Strachey, for his part, who always considered biography an art form, thought such an aim might be accomplished in the present, using fictional means to reveal both the personality of the nominal biographical subject and the personality of the biographer. This chapter finally reads Strachey as the most important progenitor of biographical fiction.

This chapter summarizes the aims, scope, and contents of the book. Both science and humanism have evolved over hundreds of years, and both are associated with influential forms of inquiry into the world. Throughout this evolution, humanism and science have been intimately connected, in ways that are crucial for thinking about whether, as a significant strand of humanist thought contends, the sciences can (or can be relied upon to) enhance the welfare of humans, other life, and the environment. It is clear that there is no necessary connection between scientific inquiry and social or moral progress; the sciences have facilitated both significant goods and significant harms. Faced today with pressing challenges to the well-being of people and the planet, our attitudes toward science call for renewed scrutiny. With chapters spanning the history of entanglements of forms of humanism and science up to the present, and case studies of the value implications of the sciences, this book asks us to think about what relationships between science and humanism we should build for the future.

Michael Holroyd’s claim that science was “unheard of” in Bloomsbury is refuted in this chapter. It begins by asking how “science” and the “scientific” signified in Bloomsbury: how far science was equated with facts, with theories, or with processes of inquiry; how far it was identified with dogmatic attitudes, with rationalism, or with open-mindedness. It then asks what educational experiences shaped the attitudes of Bloomsbury men towards it, with a particular focus on their formative experiences at schools such as Eton College and St Paul’s School, and where Classics dominated the curriculum, and at Clifton College, which was unusually progressive in the seriousness with which it treated science. Finally, it considers how science was treated in two Bloomsbury periodicals, Desmond MacCarthy’s New Quarterly (1907–10) and The Nation and Athenaeum in its Bloomsbury period, 1923–31.

The concern of this chapter is with varieties of philosophical humanism and their own conceptions of the nature and significance of science. After an initial characterization of major themes in Renaissance humanism, it describes three main varieties that are evident in twentieth-century European philosophy – humanism as essentialism, humanism as rational subjectivity, and existential humanism. Different varieties of humanism are associated with different conceptions of science, some allied to the sciences, others antipathetic to them, while yet others offer subtler positions. The upshot is that there are different tales to tell about the relationship of (varieties of) philosophical humanism to (conceptions of) science, only some of which fit popular modern celebratory claims about a necessary alliance of humanism and science. If we take a wider look at the history of philosophy, we find ongoing experimentation with forms of humanism and explorations of diverse ways of understanding and evaluating scientific knowledge and ambitions. What we find is what we ought to expect of social, creative, epistemically sophisticated, self-expressive creatures: endless variety.

Humanism, conceived as a worldview concerning, among other things, how we understand ourselves and our relationships with others, and science, conceived as a family of forms of inquiry into the world, are deeply interwoven over our intellectual and cultural histories. This chapter considers their co-evolution as a prelude to the present, reviewing formative aspects of Renaissance humanism and deepening associations of values central to the Enlightenment with precursors to modern science, en route to an arguably peculiar situation today. While some past, humanist conceptions of the aim of science seem intimately connected to the idea of making a better world – one featuring better and more widespread human and planetary flourishing – contemporary thinking seems largely devoid of normative discussions of what science itself is for. This chapter offers reflections on a possible return to a humanist conception of the role and promise of science.

What counts as scientific writing has undergone massive changes over the centuries. Medical writing is a good representative of the register of scientific English, as it combines both theoretical concerns and practical applications. Ideas of health and sickness have been communicated in English written texts for over a thousand years from the Middle Ages to the present, with different traditions and layers of writing reflecting literacy developments and changing thought-styles. This chapter approaches the topic from the perspective of registers and genres, considering how texts are shaped by their functions and communicative purposes and various audiences. Some genres run throughout the history of English: remedy books were already extant in the Old English period. Another core genre, the case study, mirrors wider scientific developments in response to changes in styles of thinking: medieval scholasticism is gradually replaced by a growing interest in increasingly systematic empirical observation. The establishment of learned societies from the seventeenth century onwards gives rise to new genres like the experimental report, and concomitant disciplinary advances and technological developments in the following centuries gradually pave the way for modern evidence-based medicine. Today medical advances are communicated in digital publications to a worldwide readership.

In philosophy of science, Mach’s account of thought experiments is more often described as relevant for contemporary usage than Ørsted’s. In this chapter, I survey recent Kantian accounts of thought experiment, arguing that the leading views inspired by Kant in philosophy of science remain broadly empiricist. This tendency may be due to their focus primarily on the role of thought experiments in the sciences. In later chapters, I will argue – against recent Kantian views – that Kant understood cognition more broadly to include not only sensory perception but also mathematical construction. Acknowledging that cognition does not always require empirical fulfillment opens new ways of understanding how thought experiments work in philosophy, which may rightly differ from their use in the sciences.

This concluding chapter, “Governing the Unknown: Legal–Scientific Settlements,” offers a new framework to describe the momentary stabilization of scientific facts in and through lawmaking: legal–scientific settlements. From these legal–scientific settlements emerge a range of distributional consequences that have material effects on people’s lives and shape the ability of individuals to survive and thrive despite public health crises.

This chapter explores the transformative role of knowledge and technology in Europe’s economic history, with a special focus on the Industrial Revolution. It examines how the transfer of scientific and technological knowledge contributed to economic growth and convergence between European countries. The chapter highlights the role of education, institutional frameworks and innovation in facilitating the diffusion of technology across borders. It also considers the factors that limited convergence, such as disparities in institutional and educational development. By tracing the evolution of technological and scientific advancements, the chapter provides insight into the processes that allowed Europe to lead global economic development during the Industrial Revolution and beyond.

This chapter presents Ockham’s theory of demonstration in Summa Logicae III-2, the syllogism that produces scientific knowledge. He relies on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics and Grosseteste’s commentary it. Grosseteste, however, founded the necessity of demonstration on necessary relations in the world. For Ockham, the main challenge is to elaborate a theory of science that addresses the singular beings in a contingent world. His theory is characterized by a conception of purely logical necessity, a semiotic conception of cause, and the requirement that subject terms must have reference in order for affirmative propositions to be true. Many propositions about the natural world are not susceptible to demonstration in the strict sense, but Ockham distinguishes different kinds of demonstration. He is not so much trying to limit the field of demonstrable natural knowledge as to relax the meaning of demonstrability so that it includes many dubitable propositions that can be made evident.

In his chapter, Christopher Morash examines the modern myth of Revival, which takes the form of what Roland Barthes calls a new “mythic concept.” A good example of this form of myth is the story Yeats tells of meeting Synge in Paris, a meeting that Morash claims did not necessarily have to take place in order for the story to acquire a mythic function. A more substantial instance of the myth of Revival emerges from Synge’s interest in philosophy and science, particularly the work of Herbert Spencer, which enabled him to create a mythic vision of nature based on the ambivalent relationship between the observer and natural world they observe. Synge’s reading of Spencer ultimately leads him to confront early on a central problem of later modernist writers, that is, the instability of the subject/object relationship and the “ambivalent revival” of the observer’s perspective in aesthetic production.

Science and theatre were intertwined from the start of ‘modern drama’ in the works of Georg Buchner and Émile Zola, who ushered modern ideas about science into the theatre and made conscious engagement with science an intrinsic part of a break with the theatrical past. This chapter traces the explicit, conscious interaction between science and the modern stage, from August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen’s works through to those of Bernard Shaw, Leonid Andreyev, Maxim Gorky, Elizabeth Robins, Eugène Brieux, Harley Granville Barker, Karel Čapek, Tawfiq al-Hakim, James Ene Henshaw, Mary Burrill, Susan Glaspell, and Sophie Treadwell; the probing of race science on stage by Harlem Renaissance playwrights; the Federal Theatre Project’s science-inflected productions; and Bertolt Brecht’s changing depiction of science and scientists. In addition, there is another meaning of ‘science in the theatre’ that the chapter draws out: the hidden, often unacknowledged roles played by science and technology in staging.

Chapter 6 takes up the best-known bookish metaphor: the book of nature. Tracing the phrase “book of nature” and its attendant metaphors through early modern English writing, this chapter shows how its Christian use did not fully disappear when the metaphor suddenly flipped to work in service of the modern scientific method. The “book of nature” gave people a language for knowledge in a rapidly changing epistemology.

In this chapter, we introduce and explain the key principles of integrated learning and outline ways in which it can be put into practice to provide quality Arts experiences, as well as quality learning in other areas. We suggest ways to achieve integrated learning that you can adapt to construct your own successful program. We also move beyond the concept of curriculum integration to look at child integration as it should be applied in the classroom. Schools do exclude, both intentionally and otherwise. We explore the justifications offered for, and ways to remove, these barriers to engagement in the Arts by all. We argue that everyone needs to experience the Arts equally, no matter what their background or what form of diverse learning is brought to the classroom. For some children, this is the only pathway to success. In the Arts, anyone can engage; everyone gets to live them.

What is the value of theory for management practice? Recent scholarship suggests that managers who work like scientists perform better along a number of dimensions. Mastering a broad repertoire of theory, being able to apply that repertoire to make better sense of organizations and innovation, and being able to think through the limitations and possibilities of theory are what allows innovation managers to work like scientists.