scholarly journals Making History: Identity, Progress and the Modern-Science Archive

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 433-444
Author(s):  
Ahmed Ragab
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Global South ◽  
Colonial Education ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
History Of

Abstract The history of pre- and early-modern science, medicine, and technology in the Islamicate world has been traditionally charted around certain signposts: Translation, Golden Age, and Decline. These signposts tethered the history of Islamic sciences to a European story that culminates in the Scientific Revolution and that links European colonial expansion (causally and chronologically) to modernity. This article looks at the roots of the classical narrative of the history of Islamic sciences and explores its connections to the production of colonial sciences and the proliferation of colonial education. Moving beyond the validity or accuracy of the Golden-Age/Decline narrative, it asks about the archives that such a narrative constructs and the viability of categories and chronologies, such as the “early modern,” in thinking about histories of the Global South, in general, and of the Islamicate “world” in particular.

scholarly journals Making the History of Early Modern Science: Reflections on a Discipline in the Age of Globalization

2015 ◽  
Vol 70 (02) ◽  
pp. 307-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonella Romano
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Homogeneous Field ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
Anthropology Of Science ◽  
Change Of Scale ◽  
History Of

Abstract What kind of history is the history of science? To what extent does the academic research labeled as such delineate a homogeneous field? What are the current challenges that it faces? The recent translation of Simon Schaffer’s works into French, along with the publication of his 2014 Marc Bloch Lecture in the Annales, provides the framework for this article’s historiographical reflection on the profound changes that have taken place within the discipline over the last thirty years, particularly within a French context. The analysis is twofold. First, it aims to trace how new approaches to the sociology and anthropology of science have reconfigured the boundaries of the discipline. Second, it considers the effect of the abandonment of one of its major historiographical paradigms by most of the scholars currently working on early modern science: the scientific revolution as the rise of scientific modernity, underpinned by a Eurocentric vision of the production of knowledge. Although most research on the early modern period now strives to distance itself from this narrative, it must also face new challenges and questions—in particular the role of science in the processes of globalization and the multiplicity of sites and social configurations that participate in this change of scale. These challenges point towards new methods and styles in the history of science and, more broadly, the social sciences.

Not Dead Yet

Teleology ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 150-179
Author(s):  
Jeffrey K. McDonough
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Mathematical Physics ◽  
Main Section ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
Teleological Reasoning ◽  
New Science ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

It is often maintained that teleology was undermined in the early modern era by the scientific revolution. Hoping to correct this misperception, this essay looks at three areas in which teleology was upheld and developed by three pioneers of early modern science. The first main section argues that teleological reasoning is woven into the very fabric of William Harvey’s revolutionary work in biology. The second main section takes up Robert Boyle’s explicit and systematic defense of teleology and especially his effort to reconcile the methods and views of the new science with a deep-seated commitment to divine teleology. Finally, the last main section explores Pierre Maupertuis’s bold attempt to find a place for teleology in the heart of modern, mathematical physics.

scholarly journals Paying Attention: Early Modern Science Beyond Genealogy

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 459-470
Author(s):  
Carla Nappi
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Early Modern Science

Abstract To move away from histories of early modern science that are shaped by the notion of a Scientific Revolution, the essay proposes a historiographical methodology that moves away from genealogy and toward juxtaposition as a principle of storytelling. It briefly discusses the study of sound in early modern Manchu texts as an example of this #hashtag (or juxtapositional) history.

scholarly journals Thinking Without the Scientific Revolution: Global Interactions and the Construction of Knowledge

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 445-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kapil Raj
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Knowledge Domains ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intercultural Interactions ◽  
The Many

Abstract Amongst the many narrative strategies in the recent “global turn” in the history of science, one commonly finds attempts to complement the single European story by multiplying histories of knowledge-making in as many different regional and cultural contexts as possible. Other strategies include attempts to generalize the “Needham Question” of why the Scientific Revolution occurred only in early-modern Europe to the exclusion of other parts of the world, or to challenge the diffusionist vision of the spread of modern science from Europe by attempting to show that non-European scientific traditions already had an understanding of recent European discoveries. These latter strategies seek simply to pluralize the Scientific Revolution without actually unpacking the latter concept itself. This article seeks firstly to show that the “Scientific Revolution” was in fact a Cold War invention intended to bring the freshly decolonized world into the ambit of the West by limiting the conception of modern science to Europe-specific activities thus delegitimizing other knowledge domains and using the term as a spatially circumscribed chronological marker. Using a broader understanding of scientific activity in the early modern period, and mobilizing relational methodologies, such as circulatory and connected historiographies, the paper then re-examines the well-known history of the Hortus Malabaricus, one of the most celebrated seventeenth-century botanical works, to show the short- and long-range knowledge circulations, intercultural interactions and connections involved in its making to bring out the global nature of scientific activity of the period and illustrate relational approaches to global history.

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