David Wootton has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 4 ratings. The most-rated is The Invention of Science.
The Invention of Science
Summary
A groundbreaking examination of the greatest event in history, the Scientific Revolution, and how it came to change the way we understand ourselves and our world.
We live in a world transformed by scientific discovery. Yet today science and its practitioners have come under political attack. In this fascinating history spanning continents and centuries, historian David Wootton offers a lively defense of science, revealing why the Scientific Revolution was truly the greatest event in our history.
The Invention of Science goes back 500 years in time to chronicle this crucial transformation, exploring the factors that led to its birth and the people who made it happen. Wootton argues that the Scientific Revolution was actually five separate yet concurrent events that developed independently but came to intersect and create a new worldview. Here are the brilliant iconoclasts - Galileo, Copernicus, Brahe, Newton, and many more curious minds from across Europe - whose studies of the natural world challenged centuries of religious orthodoxy and ingrained superstition.
From gunpowder technology, the discovery of the new world, movable type printing, perspective painting, and the telescope to the practice of conducting experiments, the laws of nature, and the concept of the fact, Wootton shows how these discoveries codified into a social construct and a system of knowledge ideas of truth, knowledge, progress. Ultimately he makes clear the link between scientific discovery and the rise of industrialization - and the birth of the modern world we know.
©2015 David Wootton (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Power, Pleasure, and Profit
Summary
We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning-cost-benefit analysis-to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton reveals, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives. Wootton guides us through four centuries of Western thought to reveal how new ideas about politics, ethics, and economics stepped into a gap opened up by religious conflict and the Scientific Revolution. As ideas about godliness and Aristotelian virtue faded, theories about the rational pursuit of power, pleasure, and profit moved to the fore. The new instrumental reasoning cut through old codes of status and rank, enabling the emergence of movements for liberty and equality. But it also helped to create a world in which virtue, honor, shame, and guilt count for almost nothing, and what matters is success. Is our world better for the rise of instrumental reasoning? To answer that question, Wootton states, we must first recognize that we live in its grip.
©2018 Railshead Ltd. (P)2018 Tantor