This is a new translation, with introduction, commentary, and an explanatory glossary.
"Sachs's translation and commentary rescue Aristotle's text from the rigid, pedantic, and misleading versions that have until now obscured his thought. Thanks to Sachs's superb guidance, the Physics comes alive as a profound dialectical inquiry whose insights into the enduring questions about nature, cause, change, time, and the 'infinite' are still pertinent today. Using such guided studies in class has been exhilarating both for myself and my students." ––Leon R. Kass, The Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago
Aristotle’s Physics is the only complete and coherent book we have from the ancient world in which a thinker of the first rank seeks to say something about nature as a whole. For centuries, Aristotle’s inquiry into the causes and conditions of motion and rest dominated science and philosophy. To understand the intellectual assumptions of a powerful world view—and the roots of the Scientific Revolution—reading Aristotle is critical. Yet existing translations of Aristotle’s Physics have made it difficult to understand either Aristotle’s originality or the lasting value of his work.
In this volume in the Masterworks of Discovery series, Joe Sachs provides a new plain-spoken English translation of all of Aristotle’s classic treatise and accompanies it with a long interpretive introduction, a running explication of the text, and a helpful glossary. He succeeds brilliantly in fulfilling the aim of this innovative series: to give the general reader the tools to read and understand a masterwork of scientific discovery.
Isaac Newton’s classic writings on light and optics are the heart of this volume in the series, Masterworks of Discovery: Guided Studies of Great Texts in Science. The innovative series is aimed at making the great works of scientific discovery accessible to students and lay readers. For each volume, distinguished historians of science have carefully selected original texts (or extracts) and accompanied them with interpretive commentary, explanatory notes, and bio-bibliographical material. These volumes are not synopses or histories to take the place of the original works. Instead, they enable non-specialists to read these classics for themselves and take an active part in discovering the excitement of scientific discovery.
Newton first revealed his scientific genius in his pathbreaking work on optics and the properties of light. Through Newton’s early 1672 letter to the Royal Society and long extracts from his mature work, Opticks (1704), the reader can follow Newton’s own descriptions of his experiments on prisms and films, his arguments about white and colored light and the “particle” nature of light, and his influential remarks on scientific method. Dennis Sepper’s deft commentaries, diagrams, and notes help clarify difficulties that modern readers are apt to encounter in Newton’s language and science. Sepper also provides an engaging sketch of Newton’s life, the scientific background to these discoveries, and their aftermath.
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