This paper offers personal reflections on the fashioning of the history of science in Europe. It presents the history of science as a discipline emerging in the twentieth century from an intellectual and political context of great complexity, and concludes with a plea for tolerance and pluralism in historiographical methods and approaches.

While the history of science in Polish language has a long history, both intellectual and institutional, it became less visible internationally following the fall of the Iron Curtain. This article looks into the institutional state of history-of-science writing in Poland, and discusses several key focal points that emerged in recent years. By distinguishing between the core history of science, written at institutions devoted to this discipline, and broader academic discussions concerning science's (...) past, I claim that, in recent decades, more important topical and theoretical innovation has come from what we can term the “esoteric” circle (referring to Ludwik Fleck)—that is, scholars who do not identify themselves as historians of science. Given that those scholars from abroad who are interested in Polish history of science are in fact general historians, we get a strong impression that we are witnessing a deeper turn in the field, one with diminishing specialization and greater attention paid to situating science in a broader range of societal processes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Histories of Science in Early Modern Europe:IntroductionRobert GouldingIn 1713, Pierre Rémond de Montmort wrote to the mathematician Nicolas Bernoulli:It would be desirable if someone wanted to take the trouble to instruct how and in what order the discoveries in mathematics have come about.... The histories of painting, of music, of medicine have been written. A good history of mathematics, especially of geometry, would be a much more (...) interesting and useful work.... Such a work, if done well, could be regarded to some extent as a history of the human mind, since it is in this science, more than in anything else, that man makes known that gift of intelligence that God has given him to rise above all other creatures.1Such a history of mathematics was attempted by Jean-Etienne Montucla in his Histoire des mathématiques (first printed in 1758, and reissued in a [End Page 33] greatly expanded form in 1799).2 Montucla's great work is generally acknowledged as the first genuine history of mathematics. According to some modern historians, previous attempts at such a history had amounted to little more than collections of anecdotes, biographies or exhaustive bibliographies: "jumbles of names, dates and titles," as one writer in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography characterized them.3 Montucla, on the other hand, was thoroughly animated by the Enlightenment project expressed in Rémond's letter, and his Histoire was a philosophical history of the "development of the human mind," as he himself described it.4 It was precisely Montucla's vision of what mathematics meant and his conviction that mathematics itself must change in order to reflect the historical elevation of the human intellect, that allowed him to transform the scattered dates and anecdotes of his predecessors into a genuine history. All subsequent histories of mathematics—until the most recent social histories5 —have been in a sense "footnotes to Montucla."The papers here argue that there were indeed histories of mathematics before Montucla which are worthy of scholarly attention, and that the dismissal of Renaissance histories of science as nothing more than a "cloud of fine adjectives and metaphors" is unfair (although it contains a germ of truth). Anthony Grafton has argued in an article on the historical writings of Cardano, Rheticus, and Kepler, that the purpose of such texts was not so much to trace what actually happened, as to justify the study of a subject often derided—by both humanist and scholastic writers—as obscure, useless and undignified.6 The following four papers go further in arguing that writings in this genre (or, at least, some writings in this genre) were not limited to this characteristically humanist objective. Authors did not just use their histories to persuade others. They themselves relied on historical narratives in order to think about their discipline, define its parts, distinguish among its acceptable and unacceptable forms and prescribe its content [End Page 34] and method of teaching. By placing their discipline into a historical context shared by other, more mainstream humanistic arts, moreover, they could draw upon the large, narrative structures which Renaissance humanists had adapted to understand human intellectual and cultural development, origins, progress and decline.James Byrne's article highlights a disparity of vision between those humanists who treated the origin of the arts as just another subject for humanistic display; and those (like Regiomontanus) who were invested in the arts and wrote their histories from an insider's perspective. Alongside Regiomontanus, one could include several other authors treated in this collection, such as Thomas Vaughan, Peter Ramus, and Henry Savile. In each case, history provided a means for working through problems of the legitimacy and nature of their disciplines. While their writings are not "histories of the human mind," their interests went beyond mere rehearsal of anecdotes. Ramus's histories, for instance, written 200 years before Montucla's Histoire, had the kind of unifying vision which de Montmort demanded, and shared Montucla's concern to find a meaning in the development of mathematics. Ramus, and the supporters and detractors he spawned, were convinced that constructing the history of this science was crucial to understanding how and why human beings have... (shrink)

Summary Historians of science in Britain lack a firm institutional base. They are to be found scattered around in various departments in universities, polytechnics and museums. Their history over the last thirty-five years can be seen as a series of flirtations with those in more-established disciplines. Beginning with scientists, they then turned to philosophers, moving on to historians and then to sociologists: from each of these affairs something was learned, and the current interest determined which aspects of the (...) history of science were seen as most interesting. At first it was settling who really discovered what; then an interest in concepts, methods and case-studies; then understanding the broader historical context of science; and after that seeing science in its social context, with special emphasis on institutions and professionalization. Where we shall go next is unclear: these vagaries may be no more than examples of intellectual fashion, but we may hope that they represent a zig-zag route towards deeper understanding. (shrink)

The question, how is profound intellectual disagreement possible, even when addressed toward the paradigmatically reasonable activity of scientific communication, has generated a number of puzzling responses. On a response attributed to Thomas S. Kuhn, some episodes in the history of science don't allow for meaningful disagreement. In such situations, the adversaries talk at cross purposes until one side is either "converted" or dies off. ;This skeptical prospect has also been considered by those who study the differences between (...) natural languages, and the misunderstandings which punctuate a child's first language acquisition. I investigate theories of concepts in search of one capable of illuminating the apparent gaps in communication between scientists, between speakers of different languages, and between infants and adults. I begin by showing that the antipsychologist efforts of post-Fregean philosophers of language, in particular those built on a causal theory of reference, fail to explain either how communication is possible when it is, or why it isn't otherwise. Nor does recourse to a principle of charity or humanity help them in this regard. I conclude that such attempts can't ground an account of communication. ;I argue that an account of concept learning drawn in part from recent work in developmental psychology can explain both the possibility of serious disagreement, as well as the possibility of overcoming it reasonably. I urge that the revival of psychologism in the philosophy of language follows. Semantic psychologism is semantics informed by empirical psychology, not by the phenomenology Frege attacked. I explore the consequences of this doctrine for the philosophy and history of science. These include a rejection of the common philosophical assumption that all meaningful communication can be reduced to a form of translation, and renewed emphasis on the importance of analogy in communication. ;Finally, I apply this new semantic psychologism toward the historical interpretation of science. If the program is right, it should provide insight into the communicative dimensions of important episodes in the history of science. While a full exploration of this historical method lies beyond the scope of my thesis, two preliminary case studies indicate its fruitfulness. (shrink)

In Riches and Poverty, Donald Winch explores the implications of a fundamental and influential idea in political economy. Adam Smith's science of the legislator provided a key to studying the rich and poor in commercial societies, transformed an ancient debate on luxury and inequality, and furnished a basis for assessing the American and French revolutions. Against this background, Britain embarked on its career as the first manufacturing nation, and Malthus made his first contributions to a debate which concluded with (...) the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Malthus provoked fierce opposition from the Lake poets, opening an intellectual rift that persisted throughout the nineteenth century and continues to influence our perceptions of cultural history. Donald Winch has written a compelling and consistently-argued narrative of these developments, which emphasises throughout the moral and political bearings of economic ideas. (shrink)

Biology is the study of life, psychology is the study of mind, and medicine is the investigation of the causes and treatments of disease. This chapter describes how the central concepts of life, mind, and disease have undergone fundamental changes in the past 150 years or so. There has been a progression from theological, to qualitative, to mechanistic explanations of the nature of life, mind and disease. This progression has involved both theoretical change, as new theories with greater explanatory power (...) replaced older ones, and emotional change as the new theories brought reorientation of attitudes toward the nature of life, mind, and disease. After a brief comparison of theological, qualitative, and mechanistic explanations, I will describe how shifts from one kind of explanation to another have carried with them dramatic kinds of conceptual change in the key concepts in the life sciences. Three generalizations follow about the nature of conceptual change in the history of science: there has been a shift from conceptualizations in terms of simple properties to ones in terms of complex relations; conceptual change is theory change; and conceptual change is often emotional as well as cognitive. The contention that historical development proceeds in three stages originated with the nineteenth-century French philosophers, Auguste Comte, who claimed that November 9, 2006 human intellectual development progresses from a theological to a “metaphysical” stage to a “positive” (scientific) stage (Comte, 1988). The stages I have in mind are different from Comte’s, so let me say what they involve. By the theological stage I mean systems of thought in which the primary explanatory entities are supernatural ones beyond the reach of science, such as gods, devils, angels, spirits, and souls. For example, the concept of fire was initially theological, as in the Greek myth of Prometheus receiving fire from the gods.. (shrink)

The article is preceded by “Introductory Remarks”, in which the author, for the sake of comparison, outlines the situation of Socinianism in Holland, England and France. The main part of the article is devoted to the discussion of the German scene, and describes the subject in seven points, namely: 1. The 17th century—the orthodoxy of the Protestant Germany in its fight against the Socinian phantom; 2. Leibniz; 3. The 18th century: orthodoxy and the Neologians; 4. The stance of Lessing; 5. (...) Socinianism as seen through Kantian-tinted spectacles; 6. Otto Fock: the first modern, scientific monograph of Socinianism; 7. Wilhelm Dilthey on the role of Socinianism in the intellectual history of Europe. (shrink)

This paper aims to map out the links between style and science. Two moments mark the migration of style from the discursive field of the arts to that of the history and philosophy of science: the first occurred in the German-speaking world during the first decades of the twentieth century; the second appeared in an Anglo-American context between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, when the category of style became involved in the so-called “pluralist turn” in (...) the history and philosophy of science. Taking this framework as its point of departure, the paper uncovers neglected contributions to the epistemology of style in order to foreground the concept of style as both a vector of inclusion (highlighting the plurality, historicity, and locality of scientific ways of knowing) and of exclusion (by generalizing the most correct ways of doing science and side-lining alternative ways of knowing). (shrink)

There were three broad categories of academic responses to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male : method; findings; and broader reflections on the book’s place in American social life and democracy. This article focuses primarily on archival academic responses to Kinsey’s work that appeared in the year following the book’s publication. Many academics agreed that some aspects of Kinsey’s method were flawed and that his interpretations sometimes overreached his raw data. Nonetheless, they also agreed that no one else (...) had gathered such a diverse sampling of interviewees whose behaviors Kinsey could use to create new interpretive models of human sexuality. As Kinsey’s research was deliberately interdisciplinary, his research and statistical methodologies began to catch on in the human sciences and to encourage academics and intellectuals to rethink their human science practices. As academics reflected on the volume’s larger meaning in American life, several of them thought it exemplified the worst American values while others saw the very existence of the Male volume as an excellent example of the ability of free citizens to pursue and to publish research on any topic. While members of the American intelligentsia championed the Male volume and its findings as democratic, the reception of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published at an intense moment of the cold war, was viewed as a communist threat to American security for revealing the sexual secrets of the public. (shrink)

This article addresses the ideological context of twentieth-century history of science as it emerged and was discussed at the threshold of the Cold War. It is claimed that the bifurcation of the discipline into a socio-economic strand and a technical-intellectual one should be traced back to the 1930s. In fact, the proposal of a Marxist-oriented historiography by the Soviet delegates at the International Congress of History of Science and Technology led by Nikolai Bukharin, set off (...) the ideological and methodological opposition that characterised the later years. Bukharin’s views on science are closely considered, as well as those of his Marxist critics, György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci. It is argued that, despite the fluidity of the positions of the 1920s and 1930s, these theories soon crystallized as demonstrated by the leftist reception of Bukharin’s and his associates’ perspective in the history of science, especially in Great Britain, as well as by the anti-communist reactions. Intellectualist approaches renouncing socio-economic factors, typically those by Alexandre Koyré and Thomas Kuhn, are reconsidered in the light of the ideological confrontation of the Cold War era. Reflection on the political-cultural embedding of the history of science has often been overshadowed by claims about the objectivity and neutrality of science and its historiography. Thus, the seminal discussion of the 1930s remains one of the most lucid moments of reflection about the role of science and history of science as cultural phenomena shaped by political struggles. (shrink)

A vital and timely reminder that modern life owes as much to outlandish thinking as to dominant ideologies What do the Nag Hammadi library, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, speculative feminist historiography, Marcus Garvey’s finances, and maps drawn by asylum patients have in common? Jonathan P. Eburne explores this question as never before in Outsider Theory, a timely book about outlandish ideas. Eburne brings readers on an adventure in intellectual history that stresses the urgency of taking seriously—especially (...) in an era of fake news—ideas that might otherwise be discarded or regarded as errant, unfashionable, or even unreasonable. Examining the role of such thinking in contemporary intellectual history, Eburne challenges the categorical demarcation of good ideas from flawed, wild, or bad ones, addressing the surprising extent to which speculative inquiry extends beyond the work of professional intellectuals to include that of nonprofessionals as well, whether amateurs, unfashionable observers, or the clinically insane. Considering the work of a variety of such figures—from popular occult writers and gnostics to so-called outsider artists and pseudoscientists—Eburne argues that an understanding of its circulation and recirculation is indispensable to the history of ideas. He devotes close attention to ideas and texts usually omitted from or marginalized within orthodox histories of literary modernism, critical theory, and continental philosophy, yet which have long garnered the critical attention of specialists in religion, science studies, critical race theory, and the history of the occult. In doing so he not only sheds new light on a fascinating body of creative thought but also proposes new approaches for situating contemporary humanities scholarship within the history of ideas. However important it might be to protect ourselves from “bad” ideas, Outsider Theory shows how crucial it is for us to know how and why such ideas have left their impression on modern-day thinking and continue to shape its evolution. (shrink)

A vital and timely reminder that modern life owes as much to outlandish thinking as to dominant ideologies What do the Nag Hammadi library, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, speculative feminist historiography, Marcus Garvey's finances, and maps drawn by asylum patients have in common? Jonathan P. Eburne explores this question as never before in Outsider Theory, a timely book about outlandish ideas. Eburne brings readers on an adventure in intellectual history that stresses the urgency of taking seriously--especially (...) in an era of fake news--ideas that might otherwise be discarded or regarded as errant, unfashionable, or even unreasonable. Examining the role of such thinking in contemporary intellectual history, Eburne challenges the categorical demarcation of good ideas from flawed, wild, or bad ones, addressing the surprising extent to which speculative inquiry extends beyond the work of professional intellectuals to include that of nonprofessionals as well, whether amateurs, unfashionable observers, or the clinically insane. Considering the work of a variety of such figures--from popular occult writers and gnostics to so-called outsider artists and pseudoscientists--Eburne argues that an understanding of its circulation and recirculation is indispensable to the history of ideas. He devotes close attention to ideas and texts usually omitted from or marginalized within orthodox histories of literary modernism, critical theory, and continental philosophy, yet which have long garnered the critical attention of specialists in religion, science studies, critical race theory, and the history of the occult. In doing so he not only sheds new light on a fascinating body of creative thought but also proposes new approaches for situating contemporary humanities scholarship within the history of ideas. However important it might be to protect ourselves from "bad" ideas, Outsider Theory shows how crucial it is for us to know how and why such ideas have left their impression on modern-day thinking and continue to shape its evolution. (shrink)

Every year since 1933 many of the world's leading intellectuals have met on Lake Maggiore to discuss the latest developments in philosophy, history, art and science and, in particular, to explore the mystical and symbolic in religion. The Eranos Meetings - named after the Greek word for a banquet where the guests bring the food - constitute one of the most important gatherings of scholars in the twentieth century. The book presents a set of portraits of some of (...) the century's most influential thinkers, all participants at Eranos: Carl Jung, Erich Neumann, Mircea Eliade, Martin Buber, Walter Otto, Paul Tillich, Gershom Scholem, Herbert Read, Joseph Campbell, Erwin Schrodinger, Karl Kereyni, D.T. Suzuki, and Adolph Portmann. The volume presents a critical appraisal of the views of these men, how the exchange of ideas encouraged by Eranos influenced each, and examines the attraction of these esotericists towards authoritarian politics. (shrink)

I make a large claim for the intellectual and institutional centrality of the history of science as critical reason. The reality on the ground, of course, does not always exhibit this. I trace the vicissitudes of my own way of thought in relation to developments in the field, leading to an interest, first, in relating intellectual history (with its philosophical orientation) to mainstream (evidence based) history, and second, to finding a place for the human (...) sciences in the history of science. The latter area, which involves questioning the nature of science as knowledge, leads to an engagement with notions of being human. It is an interest which potentially makes the history of science a boundless field, and it is necessary to comment on the questions, both intellectual and practical, that this raises. I welcome a notion of the history of science as a family of activities, and I relate this to practices which seek models of good history rather than explicit methods. (shrink)

Forty-two essays by authors from five continents and many disciplines provide a synthetic account of the history of the social sciences-including behavioral and economic sciences since the late eighteenth century. The authors emphasize the cultural and intellectual preconditions of social science, and its contested but important role in the history of the modern world. While there are many historical books on particular disciplines, there are very few about the social sciences generally, and none that deal with (...) so much of the world over so long a timespan. (shrink)

Every year since 1933 many of the world's leading intellectuals have met on Lake Maggiore to discuss the latest developments in philosophy, history, art and science and, in particular, to explore the mystical and symbolic in religion. The Eranos Meetings - named after the Greek word for a banquet where the guests bring the food - constitute one of the most important gatherings of scholars in the twentieth century. The book presents a set of portraits of some of (...) the century's most influential thinkers, all participants at Eranos: Carl Jung, Erich Neumann, Mircea Eliade, Martin Buber, Walter Otto, Paul Tillich, Gershom Scholem, Herbert Read, Joseph Campbell, Erwin Schrodinger, Karl Kereyni, D.T. Suzuki, and Adolph Portmann. The volume presents a critical appraisal of the views of these men, how the exchange of ideas encouraged by Eranos influenced each, and examines the attraction of these esotericists towards authoritarian politics. (shrink)

The watershed for the latter discipline was the establishment of the Hegelian philosophy, with its thesis that the history of philosophy was philosophy itself. Hegel's lectures on the history of philosophy appeared posthumously but his influence was already confirmed. The first really inclusive history of science which is of more than antiquarian interest, William Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences, was published almost simultaneously in 1837. For Whewell as well as for Hegel, history and (...) philosophy were connected; Whewell's History was written in close relation to his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, which he in one place called the "moral" of the other work. Surveying the astonishing advances of science, especially in the previous century and a half, he expressly aimed to clarify the method responsible for them. Philosophically, he was a curious hybrid between Kant and Francis Bacon, seeing in scientific development the progressive articulation of certain a priori "Ideas." But despite these early and vigorous beginnings, the study of the history of science has generally lagged behind that of its sister study, perhaps because the impetus of scientific expansion and specialization has discouraged scientists from examination of their own intellectual antecedents, and at the same time has debarred non-scientists from sufficient technical understanding to perform the task adequately. The edges of the old wound between the Natur- and the Geisteswissenschaften healed apart rather than together, to the detriment of both. (shrink)

Weaving together intellectual history, philosophy, and social studies, Sean Johnston offers a unique appraisal of the history of science and the nature of this evolving discipline. Science is all-encompassing and new developments are usually mired in controversy; nevertheless, it is a driving force of the modern world. Based on its past, where might it lead us in the twenty-first century?

The title of Outsider Theory is artfully contrived. By the end of the book, it figures as a near tautology, for Jonathan Eburne here contributes to the study of knowledge production a disclosure of high theory’s intimacy with unrespectable systems of ideas. These systems include the outsider science of Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision, the amalgam of outsider science and the pick’n’mix theology that is Scientology, and gnostic fictions that tease with a key to all mysteries such as The (...) Da Vinci Code. The book’s first origin story, one out of many, is related in its Preface, with Eburne’s purchase of a large library of popular esoterica, “hundreds upon hundreds of titles” found on Craigslist; this library was... (shrink)

The paper is devoted to an overview of Cassirer’s work both as historian of philosophy and historian of science. Indeed, the “intelletcual cooperation” between history of philosophy and history of science represents an essential feature of Cassirer’s style of philosophizing: while the roots of a wide exploration stretching from Renaissance thought to modern physics go back to the Neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School, the results of a similar cross-fertilization of research fields have deeply contributed to shaping (...) new standards of inquiry. Cassirer’s relationship with the Warburg milieu in Hamburg and late in his life with the American intellectual scenario are surely worthy of closer investigation. Distinguished scholars such as Meyerson, Brunschvicg, Burtt, Koyré, Metzger, Lovejoy, Kristeller, have disussed, appreciated, critizised Cassirer’s still today fascinating studies devoted to Pico della Mirandola, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, to mention but a few. To explore some of these aspects focusing both on affinities and differences within a cosmpolitian intellectual community can provide a better understanding of philosophy and history of science in the first half of 20th century. Cassirer’s legacy requires, therefore, a new assessment. (shrink)

Nineteenth century hygiene might be a confusing concept. On the one hand, the concept of hygiene was gradually becoming an important concept that was focused on cleanliness and used interchangeably with sanitation. On the other hand, the classical notions of hygiene rooted in the Hippocratic teachings remained influential. This study is about two attempts to newly theorise such a confusing concept of hygiene in the second half of the century by Edward. W. Lane and Thomas R. Allinson. Their works, standing (...) on the borders of self-help medical advice and theoretical treatises on medical philosophies, were not exactly scholarly ones, but their medical thoughts - conceptualised as _hygienic medicine_ - show a characteristically holistic medical view of hygiene, a nineteenth-century version of the reinterpretation of the nature cure philosophy and vitalism. However, the aim of this study is to properly locate their conceptualisations of hygienic medicine within the historical context of the second half of the nineteenth century rather than to simply introduce the medical ideas in their books. Their views of hygiene were distinguished not only from the contemporary sanitary approach but also from similar attempts by contemporary orthodox and unorthodox medical doctors. Through a chronological analysis of changes in the concept of hygiene and a comparative analysis of these two authors’ and other medical professionals’ views of hygiene, this paper aims to help understand the complicated picture of nineteenth-century hygiene, particularly during the second half of the century, from the perspective of medical holism and reductionism. (shrink)

There is a crisis of readership for work in our field, as in many other academic disciplines. One of its causes is a pathological form of the professionalism that we so greatly value. “Hyperprofessionalism” is a disease whose symptoms include self‐referentiality, self‐absorption, and a narrowing of intellectual focus. This essay describes some features and consequences of hyperprofessionalism in the history of science and offers a modest suggestion for a possible cure.

Historians of science have a lingering Europe (and U.S.) problem, even as the field has undergone its own transnational, imperial, and global turns that have broadened its scope. Likewise, area studies scholars have a lingering science problem, in spite of the growing chorus of voices insisting that non-European peoples’ knowledge and innovations warrant a place in global histories about science, technology, and medicine. This essay examines these two fault lines using the biochemist-turned-historian Joseph Needham as a point (...) of departure. Needham’s studies of science in China not only decentered Europe but also raised central questions about how science and its companions, reality and reason, would be defined. The essay takes a closer look at debates arising from these fault lines and urges scholars to experiment with polycentric histories of science that are coterminous and intersecting. It also underscores the need for new syntheses of research on the ways intellectuals, bricoleurs, and polities the world over have generated and transformed ideas and tools, and set them in motion. (shrink)

The topic of history-of-science explanation is first briefly introduced as a generally important one for the light it may shed on action theory, on the logic of discovery, and on philosophy''s relations with historiography of science, intellectual history, and the sociology of knowledge. Then some problems and some conclusions are formulated by reference to some recent relevant literature: a critical analysis of Laudan''s views on the role of normative evaluations in rational explanations occasions the result (...) that one must make aconceptual distinction between evaluations and explanations of belief, and that there are at leastthree subclasses of the latter, rational, critical, and theoretical; I then discuss the problem of whether explanations of discoveries are self-evidencing and predictive by focusing on views of Hempel and Nickles, and I attempt a formalization of some aspects of the problem. Finally, a more systematic and concrete analysis is undertaken by using as an example the explanation of Galileo''s rejection of space-proportionality, and it is argued that the historical explanation of scientific beliefs is a type of logical analysis. (shrink)

Commentators have often complained about specialization in the history of science. This essay discusses recent intellectual trends within our discipline in the light of significant changes in graduate training: both a relatively recent consensus as to the types of sources that are appropriate to analyze in a dissertation and the tremendous growth in the number of new dissertations completed each year in our field. It suggests that this kind of focus on pedagogical concerns provides useful analytic tools (...) for historians investigating other fields in various times and places. (shrink)

When introducing a collection of essays on Yiddish, Joseph Sherman asserted, among other things, that: Although the Nazi Holocaust effectively destroyed Yiddish together with the Jews of Eastern Europe for whom it was a lingua franca, the Yiddish language, its literature and culture have proven remarkably resilient. Against all odds, Yiddish has survived to become a focus of serious intellectual, artistic and scholarly activity in the sixty-odd years that have passed since the end of World War II. From linguistic (...) and literary research in the leading universities of the world to the dedicated creativity of contemporary novelists and poets in Israel and America, from the adaptation of Yiddish words and phrases to the uses of daily newspapers in English to the elevation of Yiddish as a new loshn koydesh by Hasidic sects, from the publication of new writing to the translation of its established canonical works into modern European languages, Yiddish is continually reminding the world of its vibrancy, relevance and importance as a marker of Jewish identity and survival. (shrink)

discipline a general science of our "intellectual faculties, their principal phenomena, and the more remarkable circumstances of their activities" (1801, p. 4). Convinced of the sensationalist epistemology of Locke and Condillac, Destutt de Tracy believed one could resolve all ideas into the sensations that produced them and thereby test their soundness. The sensationalist assumptions of his project led him to propose that "ideology is a part of zoology" (1801, p. 1), and he consequently paid close attention to the (...) way physiological.. (shrink)

For the history of science the 1940s were a transformative decade, when salient scholars like Herbert Butterfield or Alexandre Koyré set out to shape postwar culture by promoting new standards for understanding science. Some years ago I placed these developments in a tradition of enduring arts–science tensions and the contemporary notion that previous, “scientistic”, historical practices needed to be confronted with disinterested codes of historical craft. Here, I want to further explore the ideological dimensions of the (...) processes through which the academic study of science became institutionalized. Butterfield’s generation of science historians moulded perception of science in highly specific ways. Whereas the scientist-historians of the 1930s put scientific innovation into its socio-economic contexts, postwar accounts portrayed the birth of modern science as an intellectual revolution. Anti-Marxism formed a defining feature of the process by which the image of scientific work as a disinterested journey of the mind came to be institutionalized. Rather than spelling the end of ideology, appointments processes in the early Cold War years reveal disagreement about what science was to be invariably coextensive with dissent about social and political order. Rather than testifying to irreconcilable conflicts between interestedness and historical craft, the work of both the 1930s and 40s speaks of surprisingly productive relations between the two.Author Keywords: Author Keywords: Hessen; Bernal; Pagel; Needham; Butterfield; Cold War; Cambridge. (shrink)

Philosophy of science emerged as a distinctive part of philosophy in the twentieth century. Its defining moment was the meeting (and the clash) of two courses of events: the breakdown of the Kantian philosophical tradition and the crisis in the sciences and mathematics in the beginning of the century. But what we now call philosophy of science has a rich intellectual history that goes back to the ancient Greeks. It is intimately connected with the efforts made (...) by many thinkers to come to terms with the distinctive kind of knowledge (episteme; scientia) that science offers. Though science proper was distinguished from natural philosophy only in the nineteenth century, the philosophy of natural philosophy has had almost the very same agenda that current philosophy of science has. (shrink)

Eric Davidson, a passionate molecular developmental biologist and intellectual, believed that conceptual advances in the sciences should be based on knowledge of conceptual history. Convinced of the superiority of a causal-analytical approach over other methods, he succeeded in successfully applying this approach to the complex feature of organismal development by introducing the far-reaching concept of developmental Gene Regulatory Networks. This essay reviews Davidson’s philosophy, his support for the history of science, and some aspects of his scientific (...) personality. (shrink)

This is the first-ever critical history of sociology in Britain, written by one of the world's leading scholars in the field. Renowned British sociologist, A. H. Halsey, presents a vivid and authoritative picture of the neglect, expansion, fragmentation, and explosion of the discipline during the past century. He is well equipped to write the story, having lived through most of it and having taught and researched in Britain, the USA, and Europe.The story begins with L.T. Hobhouse's election to the (...) first chair in sociology in London in 1907, but traces earlier origins of the discipline to Scotland and the English provinces. There is a lively account of the nineteenth-century battles between literature and science for the possession of the third culture of social studies, setting the context for a narrative history of rapid expansion in the second half of the twentieth century. LSE had a virtual monopoly before World War II. The educational establishment of Oxford and Cambridge opposed its introduction into the undergraduate curriculum. Only the expansion of sociology to the Scottish, Welsh, provincial, and 'new' universities after the Robbins Report of 1963 brought reluctant acceptance of the subject to Oxford and Cambridge.The student troubles of 1968 are then described and the subsequent doubts, confrontations, and cuts of the 1970s and 80s. Then, paradoxically by a Conservative Government, there was a new university expansion incorporating polytechnics and other colleges, with a consequent doubling of both staff and students in the 1990s.Yet the end of the century left sociology riven by intellectual conflict. It had survived the Marxist subversions of the 70s and the feminist invasion. Yet the renewed challenges of various forms of relativism still threatened, and at root the war was, as it began, between a scientific quantifying and explanatory subject and a literary, interpretative set of cultural studies. (shrink)

This article examines the life and activities of the Italian intellectual Aldo Mieli as examples of the impact on intellectual agendas of interference by the authorities. Mieli is nowadays known as one of the founders of the history of science as an autonomous discipline and as a pioneer of gay rights. For most of his life he managed to further his activities related to the history of science. The political career that he started as (...) a young man, however, was cut short because the Italian Socialist Party could not accept his homosexuality. His first exile, and his leaving of one of the two journals he had founded, _Rassegna di studi sessuali_, in the hands of people close to the Fascist regime have been generally seen as Mieli’s free choice. But his private correspondence reveals that his hatred and fear of the regime left him with no option. In particular, the regime did not tolerate any opposition to its demographic policy and its own view of eugenics. As a consequence _Rassegna_ was brought into line and Mieli pushed aside. The Fascist regime thus covertly closed down a prominent forum for discussion of sexuality and homosexuality. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Alchemy is part of the cultural experience of early modern Europe and yet has had to overcome problems of demarcation to be considered relevant to the history of science. This essay considers historiographical and methodological issues that have affected the gradual demarginalization of alchemy among attempts to explain, and find things out about, nature. As an area of historical study, alchemy relates to the history of science as part of an ensemble of practices that explored (...) the natural world through natural philosophy and speculative traditions and by functioning as a nexus of social and intellectual life. (shrink)

Critically exploring medical thought in a cultural milieu with no discernible influence from the European Enlightenment, _Being Human_ reveals an otherwise unnoticed intersection of early modern sensibilities and religious values in traditional Tibetan medicine. It further studies the adaptation of Buddhist concepts and values to medical concerns and suggests important dimensions of Buddhism's role in the development of Asian and global civilization. Through its unique focus and sophisticated reading of source materials,_ Being Human_ adds a crucial chapter in the larger (...) historiography of science and religion. The book opens with the bold achievements in Tibetan medical illustration, commentary, and institution building during the period of the Fifth Dalai Lama and his regent, Desi Sangye Gyatso, then looks back to the work of earlier thinkers, tracing a strategically astute dialectic between scriptural and empirical authority on questions of history and the nature of human anatomy. It follows key differences between medicine and Buddhism in attitudes toward gender and sex and the moral character of the physician, who had to serve both the patient's and the practitioner's well-being. _Being Human_ ultimately finds that Tibetan medical scholars absorbed ethical and epistemological categories from Buddhism yet shied away from ideal systems and absolutes, instead embracing the imperfectability of the human condition. (shrink)

Cognitive science is the project of understanding the mind by modelling its workings. Its development is one of the most remarkable and fascinating intellectual achievements of the modern era. Mind as Machine is a masterful history of cognitive science, told by one of its most eminent practitioners.

Science lies at the intersection of ideas and society, at the heart of the modern human experience. The study of past science should therefore be central to our humanistic attempt to know ourselves. Nevertheless, past science is not studied as an integral whole, but from two very different and divergent perspectives: the intellectual history of science, which focuses on the development of ideas and arguments, and the social history of science, which focuses (...) on the development of science as a social undertaking within its broader contexts. There is almost universal agreement that this bifurcation of the field is lamentable, and nearly universal disagreement about where, exactly, the problem lies. In order to identify the difficulty, this paper examines the institutional histories and disciplinary philosophies that have constituted the study of past science. I argue that science history, eventually allied itself with either History or Philosophy in order to find institutional support, thereby suffering the artificial imposition of the disciplinary prejudices of its allied fields, which lead science historians to adopt either the intellectual or the social perspective. Science history must reconcile its distinctions on its own terms, as an integrated unity with its own disciplinary bounds, and apart from History and Philosophy. As a catalyst for rapprochement, the historical and philosophical examination also yields a mapping of the field of science history that can be used to locate the problematic divisions in present scholarship and to draw new disciplinary bounds. (shrink)

Feminist philosophy of science has led to improvements in the practices and products of scientific knowledge-making, and in this way it exemplifies socially relevant philosophy of science. It has also yielded important insights and original research questions for philosophy. Feminist scholarship on science thus presents a worthy thought-model for considering how we might build a more socially relevant philosophy of science—the question posed by the editors of this special issue. In this analysis of the history, (...) contributions, and challenges faced by feminist philosophy of science, I argue that engaged case study work and interdisciplinarity have been central to the success of feminist philosophy of science in producing socially relevant scholarship, and that its future lies in the continued development of robust and dynamic philosophical frameworks for modeling social values in science. Feminist philosophers of science, however, have often encountered marginalization and persistent misunderstandings, challenges that must be addressed within the institutional and intellectual culture of American philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter describes the discovery, perfection, and application of the scientific method as the Scientific Revolution happens. Bacon, Galileo, Harvey, Huygens, and Newton were singularly successful in persuading posterity that they contributed to the invention of a single, transferable, and efficacious scientific method. The treatment of Descartes' method by historians of science and historians of philosophy has been no exception to this pattern. The Discours de la methode has been seen as one of the most important methodological treatises in (...) the Western intellectual tradition, and the Cartesian method has been viewed as doubly successful and significant within that tradition. First, Descartes' method has been taken to mark an early stage in that long maturation of the scientific method resulting from interaction between application of method in scientific work and critical reflection about method carried out by great methodologists, from Bacon and Descartes down to Popper and Lakatos. Second, Descartes' considerable achievements in the sciences and in mathematics during a crucial stage of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century have been taken to have depended upon his method. This chapter discusses the tendency of historians and philosophers to create a cult of the thoughts of thinkers and revive the link between theorizing about the purported scientific method and requiring a method-centric history of science. It explains further that in all cults, there is a doctrine of truth and it informs us of what we already know and that there is an open ended set of rules. (shrink)

Text and context: two ways to Clausewitz -- A learned officer among others -- Frederick the Great and his interpreters Clausewitz and Schlieffen -- Phases in the history of strategy -- From ideal to ambiguity: Johannes von Miller, Clausewitz -- And the people in arms -- "Half against my will I have become a professor" -- Two historians on defeat and its causes.

For several decades historians of science have interrogated the relationship between empire and science, largely focusing on European imperial powers. At the same time, scholars have sought alternatives to an early diffusionist model of the spread of modern science, seeking to capture the multi-directional and dialogic development of science and its institutions in most parts of the globe. The papers in this special issue illuminate these questions with added attention to particular claims about the exceptionalism – (...) or not – of Islamic societies’ approach to science, modernity and politics. Each contribution centres individuals and groups who engaged with science theoretically or practically, taking seriously their analytical categories and how they understood and grappled with the social, economic and intellectual transformations happening around them. Collectively, these studies make the case for Middle Eastern and Ottoman history as useful sites for furthering our field's understanding of processes of the globalization of science and how authority, politics and science have been and continue to be interconnected. (shrink)

This manuscript, divided into two parts, provides a contextual and historiographical analysis of Edwin Arthur Burtt's classic The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science. My discussion corroborates the sparse technical literature on Burtt (Moriarty, 1994; Villemaire, 2002), positioning his work in the aftermath of American idealism and the rise of realist, pragmatist and naturalist alternatives. However, I depart from the existing interpretations both in content and focus. Disagreeing with Moriarty, I maintain that Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations is not an idealist (...) work. Moreover, I provide an alternative to Villemaire's mainly Deweyite/pragmatist reading, emphasizing the import of new realism and naturalism. Burtt's historical thesis should not be viewed as outlining a systematic philosophical position, but rather as a (coherent) culmination of numerous philosophical problematics. To support my conclusion, I provide a substantial summary of Burtt's text alongside a contextual analysis of the philosophical issues that preoccupied his teachers and peers in Columbia's philosophy department. I conclude with a historiographical section, rendering explicit the connections between Burtt's understanding of the scientific revolution, and his distinctive early 20th century American intellectual context. (shrink)

Intellectual history—the attempt to write the history of consciousness-in-general, rather than discrete histories of, say, politics, society, economic activity, philosophical thought, or literary expression—is comparatively new as a scholarly discipline; but it can lay claim to a long ancestry. It is arguable that intellectual history has its remote origins in the sectarian disputes of ancient philosophers and theologians, who, by constructing “histories” of their opponents’ doctrines, sought to expose the interests that had led them into (...) error or to locate the precise point at which they had strayed from the path of truth or righteousness. An especial interest in the history of thought and expression is, of course, characteristic of transitional ages in the lives of cultures; it arises when received traditions in thought and mythic endowments appear to have lost their relevance to current social problems or their presumed coherency, as in the Hellenistic age or the late Middle Ages. During such times, thinkers may try, by means of what is usually called “historical perspective,” to gain some purchase on their cultural legacy and to distinguish between “what is living and what is dead” within it. (shrink)