Dominique Raynaud – författare

A gripping journey through the icy regions of our changing planetFrom the Arctic Ocean and ice sheets of Greenland, to the glaciers of the Andes and Himalayas, to the great frozen desert of Antarctica, The White Planet takes readers on a spellbinding scientific journey through the shrinking world of ice and snow to tell the story of the expeditions and discoveries that have transformed our understanding of global climate. Written by three internationally renowned scientists at the center of many breakthroughs in ice core and climate science, this book provides an unparalleled firsthand account of how the "white planet" affects global climate—and how, in turn, global warming is changing the frozen world.Jean Jouzel, Claude Lorius, and Dominique Raynaud chronicle the daunting scientific, technical, and human hurdles that they and other scientists have had to overcome in order to unravel the mysteries of past and present climate change, as revealed by the cryosphere--the dynamic frozen regions of our planet. Scientifically impeccable, up-to-date, and accessible, The White Planet brings cutting-edge climate research to general readers through a vivid narrative. This is an essential book for anyone who wants to understand the inextricable link between climate and our planet''s icy regions.

This book clarifies the interrelationship between optics, vision and perspective before the Classical Age, examining binocularity in particular. The author shows how binocular vision was one of the key juncture points between the three concepts and readers will see how important it is to understand the approach that scholars once took. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the concept of Perspectiva – the Latin word for optics – encompassed many areas of enquiry that had been viewed since antiquity as interconnected, but which afterwards were separated: optics was incorporated into the field of physics (i.e., physical and geometrical optics), vision came to be regarded as the sum of various psycho-physiological mechanisms involved in the way the eye operates (i.e., physiological optics and psychology of vision) and the word ‘perspective’ was reserved for the mathematical representation of the external world (i.e., linear perspective).

This book provides the first critical edition of Ibn al-Haytham’s On the Shape of the Eclipse with English translation and commentary, which records the first scientific analysis of the camera obscura. On the Shape of the Eclipse includes pioneering research on the conditions of formation of the image, in a time deemed to be committed to aniconism. It also provides an early attempt to merge the two branches of Ancient optics—the theory of light and theory of vision.

Ce livre démontre, par une comparaison des concepts et des méthodes de la sociologie avec ceux des sciences naturelles, que beaucoup des critères avancés pour doter la sociologie d''un statut épistémologique spécial pour tout dire dérogatoire ont un caractère douteux. Eléments d''un discours identitaire partiellement dérivés du Methodenstreit allemand, ces critères réalisme des théories sociologiques, multiplicité et irréductibilité des paradigmes sociologiques, langage, concepts et programmes inclarifiables, statut logique hors norme des concepts sociologiques, historicité des faits sociaux, inexistence de lois, impossibilité du raisonnement expérimental ne résistent pas à l''examen critique. Par bien des aspects, la sociologie apparaît ainsi comme une science ordinaire. Ce résultat se rattache très directement à la fameuse question de l''unité des sciences, sans pourtant souscrire au physicalisme défendu par le Cercle de Vienne. Au contraire, l''auteur prône un monisme épistémologique neutre qui tente de circonscrire le statut scientifique de la sociologie sans le déduire d''une transposition des sciences naturelles. Cet ouvrage d''épistémologie sociologique saura donc satisfaire les attentes des lecteurs et s''imposer comme un ouvrage de référence.