William Harvey's Natural Philosophy - 9780521455350

William Harvey's Natural PhilosophyAuthor(s): Roger French\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521455350, 978-0521455350\nSynopsis\nWilliam Harvey's natural philosophy was a view of the world that he had put together during his education in Cambridge and Padua. It contained ways of structuring knowledge, formulating questions and arriving at answers that directed the programme of work in which he discovered the circulation of the blood. This book, the most extensive discussion of Harvey to be published for over twenty-five years, reports extensively on the views of those who wrote for and against him. It is a study of a major change in natural philosophy and of the forces which acted for and, equally important, against change. In a period traditionally central to historians of science, it is argued here that natural philosophy and particularly Harvey's speciality within it - anatomy - was theocent.