Synopses & Reviews
This book examines the creation of ‘national armies’ through compulsory military service in France and Prussia during the French Revolution and the Prussian Reform Period.
The French Revolution tried to establish military and political structures in which the armed forces and society would merge. In order to ensure that the army would never become a means of oppression against the people, the whole population should thus ‘be’ the army. Defeated by the enormous military potential that these new political settings had unchained in France, Prussia adapted the French innovations to its own needs, thus laying the basis for its contributions to the victories of the coalition troops in 1813-15.
Conscription had implications that went beyond the purely military sphere and involved assumptions about the nature of the state and its relationship to its citizens. It was the material basis of Napoleon’s campaigns and of the German ‘wars of national liberation’ of 1813-15, before becoming a cornerstone of the Prussian Reforms and the creation of a civil society ‘from above’. Military service has therefore been one of the most essential and contradictory institutions of the modern nation-state.
Citizens, Soldiers and National Armies will be of interest to historians of modern Europe, military historians and students of intellectual history in general.
Synopsis
The central theme running throughout this outstanding new survey is the nature of the philosophical debate created by modern science's foundation in experimental and mathematical method. More recently, recognition that reasoning in science is probabilistic generated intense debate about whether and how it should be constrained so as to ensure the practical certainty of the conclusions drawn. These debates brought to light issues of a philosophical nature which form the core of many scientific controversies today.
Scientific Method: A Historical and Philosophical Introduction presents these debates through clear and comparative discussion of key figures in the history of science. Key chapters critically discuss
* Galileo's demonstrative method, Bacon's inductive method, and Newton's rules of reasoning
* the rise of probabilistic Bayesian' methods in the eighteenth century
* the method of hypotheses through the work of Herschel, Mill and Whewell
* the conventionalist views of Poincar and Duhem
* the inductivism of Peirce, Russell and Keynes
* Popper's falsification compared with Reichenbach's enumerative induction
* Carnap's scientific method as Bayesian reasoning
The debates are brought up to date in the final chapters by considering the ways in which ideas about method in the physical and biological sciences have affected thinking about method in the social sciences. This debate is analyzed through the ideas of key theorists such as Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend.
Synopsis
< p=""> The results, conclusions and claims of science are often taken to be reliable because they arise from the use of a distinctive method. Yet today, there is widespread skepticism as to whether we can validly talk of method in modern science. This outstanding survey explains how this controversy has developed since the 17th century, and explores its philosophical basis.<>
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [262]-271) and index.