History of Science: Antiquity to 1700

Phillip Cary
Eastern University
Ph.D., Yale University

Phillip Cary is the Director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. He is also a scholar-in-Residence at the Templeton Honors College.
He received his undergraduate training from Washington University (St. Louis) with a double degree in English literature and philosophy. He earned his M.A. in philosophy and a Ph.D. in philosophy and religious studies from Yale University…
Long before he was declared a saint by the Church, Augustine gained profound influence as both a Church Father and a Christian Platonist philosopher—defending the doctrine of the Trinity, defining the epochal idea of religious grace, delving into the inner relationship between God and soul, and much more.
Today, according to Professor Phillip Cary, Augustine is recognizable even to non-Christians as the most important Christian writer outside of the Bible.
Yet Augustine was also a man—a rhetorician trained in the Roman way whose life and discovery of his calling make for one of the most fascinating stories in the history of religious philosophy.

This long-awaited update to the original Dictionary of the History of Ideas (see p.1700 for an excerpted version of our review, which was published October 1, 1974) is "designed to introduce a general audience to the main ideas and movements of global cultural history from antiquity to the twenty-first century."

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the history of ideas about the sun and the stars, from antiquity to modern times. Two theoretical astrophysicists who have been active in the field since the early 1960s tell the story in fluent prose. About half of the book covers most of the theoretical research done from 1940 to the close of the twentieth century, a large body of work that has to date been little explored by historians.