David C. Lindberg

David Charles Lindberg (born November 15, 1935 in Minneapolis , Minnesota , † January 6, 2015 in Madison , Wisconsin ) was an American historian of science who was primarily concerned with the history of physics (optics) and the relationship between science and religion Medieval and early modern times.

Lindberg studied physics at Wheaton College and Northwestern University and received his PhD in history and philosophy of science from Indiana University in 1965 . After two years at the University of Michigan , he was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1967 , where he became Evjue-Bascom and later Hilldale Professor of the History of Science and Director of the Institute for Research in Humanities (of which he had been a member since 1975) was. In 2001 he retired. In 1970/71 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study and he was a visiting scholar at Oxford University (St. Edmund Hall and Trinity College) for one year. He was also a Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Bellagio .

He edited several works by Roger Bacon and wrote monographs on the history of optics in the Middle Ages and early modern times.

He was a Guggenheim Fellow and President of the History of Science Society in 1977/78. He is a member of the Medieval Academy of America, the Renaissance Society of America and a corresponding member of the Academie Internationale d´Histoire des Sciences. In 1991 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

In 1999 he received the George Sarton Medal .

Lindberg died of his Alzheimer's disease in a nursing home. He was married to Greta Johnson for 55 years and had a son and a daughter.

Furniture and joinery was one of his hobbies.

Fonts

• The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to AD 1450 , University of Chicago Press, 1992, 2nd edition 2008
• John Pecham and the Science of Optics: Perspectiva Communis , University of Wisconsin Press 1970 (Latin edition and translation of Pecham's work with introduction and commentary)
• Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler , University of Chicago Press 1976; German eye and light in the Middle Ages. The development of optics from Alkindi to Kepler , translated by Mathias Althoff, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1987, ISBN 3-518-57835-9
• Studies in the history of medieval optics , London, Variorum Reprints 1983
• Roger Bacon's Philosophy of Nature: a critical edition , Oxford University Press 1983, St. Augustine's Press, South Bend, Indiana, 1998 (Latin edition and translation of De multiplicatione specierum and De speculis comburentibus by Bacon with commentary)
• Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva in the Middle Ages: A Critical Edition and English Translation of Bacon's Perspectiva, with Introduction and Notes , Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996
• A catalog of Medieval and Renaissance optical manuscripts , Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1975
• The genesis of Kepler's theory of light: Light metaphysics from Plotinus to Kepler , Osiris, NS, Volume 2, 1986, pp. 5-46
• The theory of pinhole images from Antiquity to the 13th century , Archive Hist. Exact Sciences, Vol. 5, 1968, pp. 154-176
• Al-Kindi's Critique of Euclid's Theory of Vision , Isis, Volume 62, 1971, pp. 469-489
• with Margaret Ruth Williams: An introduction to the profession of medical technology , Philadelphia, Lea & Febiger 1975, 1979
• In the Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages , Oxford University Press 2010 (editor Robert E. Bjork), he is responsible for articles in the field of the history of science and wrote, among other things, the article glasses and lenses.

As editor:

• Science in the Middle Ages , University of Chicago Press 1978
• With Ronald L. Numbers, Roy Porter, Katharine Park, Mary Jo Nye, Lorraine Daston, Theodore M. Porter, Dorothy Ross, Lindberg is one of the editors of the eight-volume Cambridge History of Science, Cambridge University Press, from 2009
• with Ronald Numbers: God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounters between Christianity and Science , University of California Press 1986 (therein by Lindberg Science and the early church , pp. 19-48)
• with Robert S. Westman: Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution , Cambridge University Press, 1990 (in it by Lindberg with Westman the introduction and the article: Conceptions of the Scientific Revolution from Bacon to Butterfield: a preliminary sketch , pp. 1–26)
• with Ronald Numbers: When Science and Christianity Meet , University of Chicago Press 2003
• with Geoffrey Cantor: The discourse of light from the Middle Ages to the Enlightment , Los Angeles, William Andrew Clark Memorial Library 1985 (therein by Lindberg: Laying the foundations of geometrical optics: Maurolio, Kepler and the Medieval Tradition )

Web links

• Literature by and about David C. Lindberg in the catalog of the German National Library
• obituary