It is a great pleasure to be here in Oslo, nearly 30 years after I was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I wish to thank the Norwegian Nobel Institute and the U.S. Embassy in Norway for arranging this ...lecture. Today, I am here to take stock of the contributions of the so-called “Green Revolution,” and explore the role of science and technology in the coming decades to improve the quantity, quality, and availability of food for all of the world’s population.
Although I am an agricultural scientist, my work in food production and hunger alleviation was recognized through the Nobel
To read the standard histories of the birth and growth of modern science which are intended for other than historians’ eyes—for example, texts used to train scientists and popular accounts—is to ...enter an “altered state of consciousness.” In the magical universe of these accounts, “real science” and the modern world that it makes possible—or at least those parts of it in which Westerners take pride—spring up out of a few brilliant ideas and some hardworking genius’s stubborn insistence on fiddling with pieces of wire and glass. Modern science, we are told, arose out of the dissatisfaction
Some of the motivation for this volume is the reevaluation of a prominent historiographical orientation of twentieth-century research on the scientific revolution, in light of the proliferation of ...novel methodological orientations and studies in the last generation of scholars. The historiographical orientation at issue is what is called the mathematization of nature; its exemplary proponents are Alexandre Koyré, Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis, and Edwin Arthur Burtt.¹ This should be a welcome reevaluation, especially since the position has held fairly strongly for almost a century. Burtt published the first edition of hisMetaphysical Foundations of Modern Sciencein 1924.² Dijksterhuis reiterated in
Carolyn Merchant's (1980) groundbreaking book, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, is a profound scholarly legacy for environmental history, philosophy, and feminism. ...In rigorous detail, Merchant shows how the controlling images and metaphors of nature as female have functioned historically to justify the dominating of women and nature. Focusing primarily on the scientific revolution, Merchant explores the ethical implications of a worldview that reconceptualizes nature as a machine rather than a living organism. The uniqueness of The Death of Nature is its unprecedented scholarly attention to the ways in which the feminization of nature and the naturalization of women are linked historically to the justified dominations of women and the earth.
“Learn from me … how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge” (p. 35). Victor Frankenstein’s warning is one reason why his story continues to fascinate and why books like the present volume are ...written. The terrible repercussions of the ambition to become like Prometheus and “animate the lifeless clay” (p. 39) hold a stark lesson for today. This lesson, however, is not quite what it is often made out to be. Early on in the book, Victor—the “modern Prometheus” of Mary Shelley’s subtitle—lets on that his inclination is not so modern after all but is indebted to premodern,
In E. A. Burtt’s classic formulation, “the central metaphysical contrast between medieval and modern thought, in respect to their conception of man’s relation to his natural environment,” is that:
...For the dominant trend in medieval thought, man occupied a more significant and determinative place in the universe than the realm of physical nature, while for the main current of modern thought, nature holds a more independent, more determinative, and more permanent place than man … in the Middle Ages on the teleological side: an explanation in terms of the relation of things to human purpose was accounted just as real
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