How to Accurately Account for Astrology’s Marginalization in the History of Science and Culture: The Central Importance of an Interpretive Framework

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 217-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Darrel Rutkin
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Science And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Knowledge And Practice ◽  
Medieval Universities ◽  
Interpretive Framework

Abstract Astrology is a complex, multifold and long-lived subject that has been approached from many different perspectives in a broad range of scholarly disciplines. In order to understand its many roles within the history of science, theology, and culture, one needs a well-articulated historically and conceptually sound interpretive framework. In this article, a framework is proposed based on the curricular structures at medieval universities by which fundamental conceptual patterns and practices were passed down from generation to generation. It is argued that this will be helpful both for framing answerable questions, and for approaching their solutions. This goes particularly for the complex long-term patterns of astrology’s marginalization from the domain of legitimate knowledge and practice during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.

The History of Science as European Self-Portraiture

2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-536 ◽  
Author(s):  
LORRAINE DASTON
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
World History ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Image ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of

Since the Enlightenment, the history of science has been enlisted to show the unity and distinctiveness of Europe. This paper, written on the occasion of the award of the 2005 Erasmus Prize to historians of science Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, traces the intertwined narratives of the history of science and European modernity from the 18th century to the present. Whether understood as triumph or tragedy (and there have been eloquent proponents of both views), the Scientific Revolution has been portrayed as Europe's decisive break with tradition – the first such break in world history and the model for all subsequent epics of modernization in other cultures. The paper concludes with reflections on how a new history of science, exemplified in the work of Shapin and Schaffer, may transform the self-image of Europe and conceptions of truth itself.

Renaissance Representations of Islamic Science: Bernardino Baldi and His Lives of Mathematicians

1999 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-484
Author(s):  
Ann Moyer
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
History Of Mathematics ◽  
Long Term Effects ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
History Of ◽  
Islamic Science ◽  
Scientific Scholarship ◽  
European Renaissance

The ArgumentDuring the later European Renaissance, some scholars began to write about the history of scientific disciplines. Some of the issues and problems they faced in constructing their narratives have had long-term effects on the history of science. One of these issues was how to relate scholars from the Islamic traditions of scientific scholarship to those of antiquity and of postclassical Europe. Recent historians of science have rejected a once-common Western opinion that the contribution of these Islamic scientists had lain mainly in their preservation of ancient texts that were then handed over to Western scholars, who mastered them and then moved beyond them as part of the scientific revolution. This article examines the first effort to write a history of mathematics, the Lives of the Mathematicians by Bernardino Baldi (1553–1617), to determine how he treated this issue in his work. Baldi's efforts are especially important here because he was also an early European scholar of Arabic.An examination of the work shows that Baldi did not share the negative views held by later Europeans about these non-European scientists. However, despite his knowledge of Arabic he had no active contacts with ongoing mathematical scholarship in Arabic. As a consequence, his narrative does follow the chronology of those later Europeans who would limit consideration of these mathematicians to approximately the ninth to the fourteenth centuries. In Baldi's writings, then, we can see the later narrative shape used by Western historians of science until recent years, but not the subsidiary role accorded to non-European scholars.

The Dawn of Scientific Biography

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 207-230
Author(s):  
Michael Segre
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Scientific Biography ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Model

Abstract This article endeavors to contribute to a better understanding of the literary contexts of early biographies of scientists written during the Scientific Revolution. To what extent are these biographies influenced by stereotypes that are an inadequate fit for modern history of science? Its claim is that there was, indeed, a literary model for biographies of scientists, and that this model had deep roots in Biblical and classical literature. While the model was similar to that used in Renaissance biographies of artists, it did not fully emerge until as late as the seventeenth century.

Facing Historical Challenges: the Work of Soviet Philosophers During the Great Patriotic War

2020 ◽  
pp. 175-181
Author(s):  
Anatoly V. Chernyaev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Work ◽  
Research Activity ◽  
State Identity ◽  
Great Patriotic War ◽  
Science And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Heritage ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
The Military

The Great Patriotic War was a decisive challenge not only for the military power and material and technical base of our country, but also for its spiritual, cultural and ideological foundations. Many Russian philosophers became participants in the hos­tilities, but the role of philosophers who continued scientific work was no less im­portant, the plans of which were adjusted and aimed at implementing projects re­lated to the strengthening of patriotism, the development of national identity, the revival of the classical forms of science and culture, consistent with historical heritage of Russia. This scientific work was in the context of the socio-cultural and spiritual processes that intensified in the USSR during the war and responded to the tasks of strengthening defense capability and the formation of a new socio-state identity. The main undertakings implemented in this connection by the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences were the development of the history of Russian philosophical thought and the creation of a new textbook of formal logic. These areas of research activity have shown their relevance in the light of the chal­lenges of wartime and prospects in terms of the long-term development of science.

Long-Term Ecological Research Over the Long Term: A Historian’s Perspective

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Hamlin
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Environmental Research ◽  
Ecological Research ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Long Term Ecological Research ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ecological Science

There are many precedents for long-term research in the history of science. Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program’s current identity reflects significant change—intended and accidental, both consensual and conflictual—from research concerns that were prevalent in the 1980s. LTER program has pioneered modes of research organization and professional norms that are increasingly prominent in many areas of research and that belong to a significant transformation in the social relations of scientific research. The essays in this volume explore the impact of the LTER program, a generation after its founding, on both the practice of ecological science and the careers of scientists. The authors have applied the agenda of long- term scrutiny to their own careers as LTER researchers. They have recognized the LTER program as distinct, even perhaps unique, both in the ways that it creates knowledge and in the ways that it shapes careers. They have reflected on how they have taught (and were taught) in LTER settings, on how they interact with one another and with the public, and on how research in the LTER program has affected them “as persons.” A rationale for this volume is LTER’s distinctiveness. In many of the chapters, and in other general treatments of the LTER program, beginning with Callahan (1984), one finds a tone of defensiveness. Sometimes the concerns are explicit: authors (e.g., Stafford, Knapp, Lugo, Morris; Chapters 5, 22, 25, 33, respectively) bemoan colleagues who dismiss LTER as mere monitoring instead of serious science or who resent LTER’s independent funding stream. But more broadly, there is concern that various groups, ranging from other bioscientists to the public at large, may not appreciate the importance of long-term, site-specific environmental research. Accordingly, my hope here is to put LTER into several broader contexts. I do so in three ways. First, to mainstream LTER within the history of science, I show that the LTER program is not a new and odd way of doing science but rather exemplifies research agendas that have been recognized at least since the seventeenth century in the biosciences and beyond.

History of Science and Medicine

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Staffan Müller-Wille
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Medical Sciences ◽  
Growth Of Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores what both historians of medicine and historians of science could gain from a stronger entanglement of their respective research agendas. It first gives a cursory outline of the history of the relationship between science and medicine since the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. Medicine can very well be seen as a domain that was highly productive of scientific knowledge, yet in ways that do not fit very well with the historiographic framework that dominated the history of science. Furthermore, the article discusses two alternative historiographical approaches that offer ways of thinking about the growth of knowledge that fit well with the cumulative and translational patterns that characterize the development of the medical sciences, and also provide an understanding of concepts such as ‘health’ and ‘life’.

scholarly journals The Roles of Mathematics in the History of Science: The Mathematization Thesis

2020 ◽  
pp. 6
Author(s):  
Ciro Tomazella Ferreira ◽  
Cibelle Celestino Silva
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Scientific Development ◽  
Mathematical Approach ◽  
New Science ◽  
History Of

In this paper, we present an analysis of the evolution of the history of science as a discipline focusing on the role of the mathematization of nature as a historiographical perspective. Our study is centered in the mathematization thesis, which considers the rise of a mathematical approach of nature in the 17th century as being the most relevant event for scientific development. We begin discussing Edmund Husserl whose work, despite being mainly philosophical, is relevant for having affected the emergence of the narrative of the mathematization of nature and due to its influence on Alexandre Koyré. Next, we explore Koyré, Dijksterhuis, and Burtt’s works, the historians from the 20th century responsible for the elaboration of the main narratives about the Scientific Revolution that put the mathematization of science as the protagonist of the new science. Then, we examine the reframing of the mathematization thesis with the narrative of two traditions developed by Thomas S. Kuhn and Richard Westfall, in which the mathematization of nature shares space with other developments taken as equally relevant. We conclude presenting contemporary critical perspectives on the mathematization thesis and its capacity for synthesizing scientific development.

scholarly journals Global History, Area studies, and the Idea of Europe

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Stanziani
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Global History ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
European Continent ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Image Caption

In most history departments on the European continent Europe is History while the history of other regions only can be described as “area studies.” This paper investigates the long-term origins of these attitudes, since Humanism and the Enlightenment, down to Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries forms of history writing. It finally suggests to overcome area studies and decentralise social sciences.   Image Caption: Giovanni Maria Cassini, Globo terrestre, in Nuovo atlante geografico universale delineato sulle ultime osservazioni (Rome, 1790). © 2000 by Cartography Associates, under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence.

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