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Abstract
This article builds a historical review of the emergence of thermodynamics, its historiographical approaches, and its links with the late 19th-century cosmological and religious debates. The conceptual developments that lead to the formulation of energy conservation and to the concept of entropy are discussed in the first part of the article. The second part depicts briefly the historiographical panorama of thermodynamics, focusing on the several historical meanings that were ascribed to the concepts of energy and entropy and their respective influence on the cultural and social milieu. A key aspect of the society-thermodynamics interaction is analyzed in the last part of the article: the way in which the laws of thermodynamics were influenced by theological views and how, concurrently, these laws enabled the construction of materialistic, naturalistic and Christian apologetic discourses.
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