Publications of interest

Dear EUCASS members  and friends,
 

Eucass is pleased to inform you of the publication on November 27th 2025 of the third volume of our Honorary President's book “a history of rational thought” (“une histoire de la pensée rationnelle”) , published by EDP Sciences, only in French for the time being.
 

A History of Rational Thought - Volume 3
by A. Merlen

You can find this book directly on the EDP Sciences website:
https://laboutique.edpsciences.fr/produit/1527/9782759838332/une-histoire-de-la-pensee-rationnelle-tome-3 or in bookshops and on online book sales platforms.

This third volume begins with Galileo's condemnation in 1633 and the publication of Discourse on Two New Sciences, his most important work. A new scientific community emerges, with physicists seeking to explain creation through mathematical laws linking cause and effect. This gives rise to Newton's classical mechanics, the measurement of the speed of light... and the mathematical revolution of Leibniz, Bernoulli, Euler and then Lagrange. The role of religion is now limited to professing a morality that philosophers are reshaping. In 170 years, physicists changed the world view, but emerging sciences such as chemistry and electricity still needed to be developed and would not be theorised until the19th century.

As a reminder, this series of four books offers a history of the discovery of the concepts of physics by those who built it.

The second volume begins with Hypatia, at the end of the Hellenistic period. Religious doctrines now question the place of rationalist philosophy and science in society. This age, often described as entirely dark, with a succession of calamities, wars, schisms, religious obscurantism, invasions and pandemics, will in fact be one of the most fertile periods in philosophical and scientific thought in history. From the enlightened minds of Islam, heirs to the Greeks and Indians, to the laborious intellectual journey of an army of Church doctors, men destroyed the ancient physics. They will have to build a new one, for which Galileo courageously laid the first stone.
You can find this book directly on the EDP Sciences website:
https://laboutique.edpsciences.fr/produit/1482/9782759838158/une-histoire-de-la-pensee-rationnelle-tome-2 or in bookshops and on online book sales platforms.

The first volume, published at the end of March 2025, deals with the joint construction of physics and mathematics between prehistory and the appearance of an early form of algebra in India.
You can find this book directly on the EDP Sciences website:
https://laboutique.edpsciences.fr/produit/1475/9782759836932/une-histoire-de-la-pensee-rationnelle-tome-1 or in bookshops and on online book sales platforms.