An ending? Mathematics and natural philosophy education at liberal dissenting academies in the aftermath of the scientific revolution: 1689-1796.

摘要

This dissertation studies the evolution of English Presbyterian and Congregational Dissenting academies' mathematics curriculum from 1660-1796. From the Nonconforming ministers' expulsion to the suppression of Unitarian academy masters, many academies made mathematics and science an important part of the academic curriculum. This work first considers the spiritual, academic and economic reasons for the emphasis.;By examining manuscript lectures and published texts, it also traces how the curriculum transformed over the eighteenth century. Rather than relying on rationales, the dissertation explores academy masters' intentions through axioms, theorems and problems. With the geometry curriculum, the increasing number of algebraic and logical demonstrations used to justify Isaac Barrow's edition of Euclid's Elements anticipates the nineteenth-century arithmeticization of analysis. The algebra curriculum emphasized practical problems: landholding, investment, public policy. The early eighteenth-century academies introduced Cartesian, then Newtonian physics into the curriculum. Later natural philosophy texts disseminated the emerging eighteenth-century sciences of electricity and chemistry. Thus, the Dissenting academy mathematics and natural philosophy curricula trace not only the outgrowth of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution, but some roots of nineteenth-century revolutions.;The evidences of Christianity lectures also suggest how one revolution of thought can lead into another. Reacting to religious skepticism, evidences of Christianity courses sought to justify and reinforce students' religious belief. In the early and mid-eighteenth century, Philip Doddridge used science to justify orthodox Calvinism. At the century's end, however, William Broadbent and Joseph Priestley restricted their defense of Christianity to what they could term reasonable. In the evidences of Christianity lectures, therefore, efforts to prevent the spread of atheism and agnosticism led to early Unitarianism.