Northern Philosophers

This fallacy Rankine regarded as being at the bottom of a number of evils in modern society especially the lack of mutual communication between men of science and men of practice. He lamented both the tendency of men of science to favour and relish the abstruse and of practical men to over-value the practical skill acquired by observation and experience in business by rejecting what science could contribute. But on a hopeful note he considered that this lack of communication was in decline. Evidence for this, Rankine thought, lay in the founding of university chairs in engineering science and also in the mutual communication between the Mechanical Sciences and Physical Sciences sections of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The Northern philosophers became a powerful force in the Association from the 1850s. 

At the very apex of engineering science in the later nineteenth century stood Sir William Thomson, the most prominent of the Northern philosopher engineers, who became Baron Kelvin of Largs in the New Year s Honours List in 1892. Congratulations flooded in from all and sundry. Fellows of the Royal... 

During the Golden Age of Islam (7th through the 17th century) Muslim philosophers and poets, artists and scientists, princes and laborers created a unique culture that has influenced societies on every continent. Here documentary writer Howard Turner offers a fully illustrated, highly accessible introduction to the scientific achievements of medieval Islam. Howard Turner opens with a historical overview of the spread of Islamic civilization from the Arabian peninsula eastward to India and westward across northern... 

McLean, R.F., Stoddart, D.R., Hopley, D. Polach, H. (1978) Sea level change in the Holocene on the northern Great Barrier Reef. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A291, 167-186. 

Walter, K. M., L. C. Smith and F. S. Chapin (2007) Methane bubbling from the northern lakes Present and future contributions to the global methane budget. Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society A365, 1657-1676... 

The lack of written records detracts from finding out the first use of coal. It can be assumed (tongue-in-cheek) that combustion of coal may have been used to provide warmth that enabled the human population to move into northern latitudes as earth emerged from the most recent ice age some 12,000 years ago. An early documented reference to the use of coal as fuel is the geological treatise On Stones by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus (ca. 371-287 BC). He described the certain black rocks once set on fire, bum like charcoal, and are used by those who work in metals (Mattusch, 2008). 

Ramon Lull, the philosopher, was also a courageous and interesting personality, and though he probably did not try alchemy himself, his name was ascribed to several alchemical texts after his death. Born around 1230 in Catalonia (now northern Spain), Lull was the product of a romantic age. Reared in the royal court of Majorca, he was a poet, scholar, and writer in Latin, Catalan, and Arabic. He married and at first seemed content with his courtly life. Around the age of 30 however, inspired by visions of the crucifixion of Jesus, Lull turned his energies to mysticism and theology. 

This birth of philosophic modernism in Vienna is odd, in a certain way. Vienna s recent philosophical tradition was above all empiricist, rationalist, and positivist, as the prominence of the physicist and empirico-positivist philosopher Ernst Mach and his followers testifies.For cultural-historical reasons, the human sciences in Austria were not saturated with Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, as was the case in Germany and elsewhere in northern Europe, and Austrian philosophy steered strongly away from the metaphysical. Part of the power of the Tractatus is the way in which it feels its way through this steely positivism to lyrical metaphysical and, indeed, mystical insights. 

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