Schaffer and Golinski on Enlightenment and Genius November 4, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Edmund Burke, Humphry Davy, Immanuel Kant, Jan Golinski, Jeremy Bentham, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Joseph Priestley, Simon Schaffer, Thomas Beddoes
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This post looks at two articles by Simon Schaffer:
“States of Mind: Enlightenment and Natural Philosophy,” in The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, ed. G. S. Rousseau, 1990, pp. 233-290.
“Genius in Romantic Natural Philosophy,” in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, 1990, pp. 82-98.
It makes comparison with some related points in Jan Golinski’s book Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820, 1992. Unlike the last post integrating Schaffer’s and Golinski’s analysis of eudiometry, this one distinguishes the (complementary) positions of the two authors.
Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon" prison
Since his earliest pieces (especially his 1983 piece on natural philosophy and spectacle), Schaffer had been exploring the tensions between natural philosophical inquiry and the forces leading to professionalized specialties. In pieces circa 1990, Schaffer further explored the relationship between enlightenment political ideals—which stressed rational assent as a path away from enthusiasm and despotism toward a proper polity—and natural philosophy and the political pressures it created and to which it was subjected.
In “States of Mind”, in a move not unlike his and Steven Shapin’s analysis of Hobbes’ critique of experimental philosophy, Schaffer stresses objections, particularly that of Edmund Burke (1729-1797) that the politics of rational assent proffered by people like Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) simply cloaked alternative religion-like claims to political authority.
The transformation of politically important elements of cosmology—rather than the elimination of their significance—is once again central to Schaffer’s argument (see also the transformation of comets from omens to source of physical disaster). Here Priestley’s objection to the pneumatic philosophy of souls and spirits (as in Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, 1777) brushes away the idea of
mind as guided by spirit to allow the mind to be seen as a material organ with its own relationship (more…)
The 20th-Century Problem: Needell and Biography November 2, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Methods.Tags: Allan Needell, Lloyd Berkner
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In the history of science, the 20th century is unique in terms of the sheer scale, social importance, and intellectual diversity of the scientific enterprise, and the closeness of its relationship to the development and design of technology. This can create some intimidating historiographical challenges.
For example, as National Air and Space Museum historian Allan Needell observes in his 2000 book, Science, Cold War, and the American State: Lloyd V. Berkner and the Balance of Professional Ideals, “the Cold War relationships among scientists, politicians, the expanding national security bureaucracy, and advocates of more broadly based technocratic initiatives are extraordinarily complex” (3). It sounds obvious enough, but it resonates with me—I think it’s that “extraordinarily” that speaks to the sense of confusion following the sobering encounter with the archive, particularly a major one, such as the US National Archives here in College Park, Maryland. Having seen reams of committee minutes, reports, and correspondence documenting the (often painfully mundane) organizational details of a seemingly endless stream of institutions and initiatives, I know that the question inevitably arises: “What in the hell am I going to do with all this?”
Figuring out what is to be done demands a set of historiographical tools capable of analyzing scientific and engineering work in general ways: it can be extremely limiting to concentrate on singular narratives of significance (say, the history of DNA or elementary particle theory), because it would ignore entire categories of important work that can only be fruitfully analyzed in terms of the evolution of research programs or other general trends, instead of great breakthroughs. It can feel like—indeed, it is—a real accomplishment to reassemble even a single strand of narrative from the archival morass. But faced with the insignificance of any individual narrative, it can be depressing to consider the fact that hundreds of similar narratives are playing out at the same time.
A key strategy is to take hold of certain life preservers that pop out of the depths of the archival record, such as familiar players. (more…)
Imperial Nature, by Jim Endersby October 26, 2009
Posted by Christopher Donohue in Book Club.Tags: Dorinda Outram, Jim Endersby, Joseph Hooker
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Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science is a study of late Victorian botany and natural history centered around the career and practices of naturalist Joseph Hooker (1817-1911). Endersby avows to be less interested in the structures or mentalities which informed Hooker’s long career in botany, ending as director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, than in “considering his material practices and the objects they involved” (312.) By analyzing practices, Endersby “sets” Hooker back “on his feet,” while previous accounts, by beginning with ideas, have stood him “on his head.” Much like Marx’s purported inversion of Hegel’s philosophy into the realm of social action and into praxis, the result of Endersby’s book, is, in many ways, as concerned with ideas as those histories he is writing against.
The practices of Victorian botany in Endersby’s narrative helps to narrate the interaction between “apparently esoteric matters, like theories of geographical distribution” and “mundane matters like the practicalities of earning a living” (313.) As importantly, an emphasis on the minutiae of daily practice, for Endersby, helps underscore how Hooker’s botanical work “remade nature in empire’s image.” Hooker, Endersby details, though only briefly visiting colonial spaces- New Zealand, Tasmania, and British India-, was keen to persuade his network of colonial botanists, whose samples his work depended upon, “that he alone knew how many species of plants their land held and what each were called” (314.)
Endersby’s discussions of taxonomy and the species question in Hooker’s writing as well as his account of Hooker’s efforts to render his botany more philosophical in response to the pressures of distinguishing himself in a crowded field depend upon the situation of Hooker in the history of ideas as well as concrete daily practices. (more…)
Chris Renwick on the History of Thinking about Science October 21, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Ashley Montagu, Charles Darwin, Chris Renwick, Patrick Geddes, Peter Dear, Steve Fuller
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Today we have the second guest post by Chris Renwick, who starting in January will be a lecturer in modern British history at the University of York.
In one way or another, most approaches to history of science share a common intellectual assumption: that science can be related to the contexts in which it is produced, even if historians can’t agree about what’s important when talking about those contexts. Indeed, such is the importance of this contextualist point that it is often seen as a crucial moment in moving history of science away from the wholly discredited study of great men and their ideas. When, though, did this shift take place and who was responsible for it?
Ever since I started out as graduate student, I’d assumed, like many others, that the effort to relate science and its contexts was originally the gift of Karl Marx and Marxism. After all, who doesn’t know the story of the letter in which Marx explained how Charles Darwin had transplanted Victorian society onto the natural world (though, for the record, the letter we always attribute to Marx was actually written by Engels) or the legend of Russian physicist Borris Hessen’s presentation on Isaac Newton to the Second International Congress of the History of Science at the Science Museum in London in 1931? However, in considering this issue recently I’ve come to the conclusion that something is missing from our understanding of the history of history of science and that it tells us something important about the intellectual trajectory of the field.
Ashley Montagu (1905-1999)
Part of what sparked my interest in this issue was a 1952 book, entitled Darwinism: Competition and Cooperation, by the British-American anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who played a leading role in the production of the famous 1950 UNESCO statement on race. In that book, Montagu argued that it wasn’t Marx or Marxists who first grasped how to relate science to its socioeconomic contexts but Patrick Geddes—the Scottish biologist, sociologist, and town planner whom I’ve spent a great deal of time studying (see pages 29 to 31 in particular). To illustrate his point, Montagu picked out a passage from Geddes’ late 1880s article on “Biology” for Chamber’s Encyclopaedia:
The substitution of Darwin for Paley as the chief interpreter of the order of nature is currently regarded as the displacement of an anthropomorphic view by a purely scientific one: a little reflection, however, will show that what has actually happened has been merely the replacement of the anthropomorphism of the eighteenth century by that of the nineteenth. For the place vacated by Paley’s theological and metaphysical explanation has simply been occupied by that suggested to Darwin and Wallace by Malthus in terms of the (more…)
Simon Schaffer and Jan Golinski on Eudiometry October 17, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Alessandro Volta, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Felice Fontana, Jan Golinski, Joseph Priestley, Marsilio Landriani, Simon Schaffer
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Diagram of a eudiometer, from the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence
First off, apologies for slow posting—things have been too bananas recently to indulge blog-related side interests. I’m hoping things clear up soon, but I’m presenting my research on Antarctic research at 4S here in DC at the end of the month, so things may remain at a trickle until November. However, before it got too desolate around here, I did want to parachute in and do a quick write-up on eudiometry. Our article is: Simon Schaffer, “Measuring Virtue: Eudiometry, Enlightenment, and Pneumatic Medicine” in The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, Andrew Cunningham and Roger French, eds., 1990, pp. 281-318. A close companion work is Jan Golinski’s Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820, Cambridge UP, 1992, esp. pp. 117-128. I won’t try and distinguish the two treatments here.
The technology of the eudiometer is based on Joseph Priestley’s “nitrous air test”, devised in 1772. A good explanation of the nitrous air test as well as a computer animation of how eudiometers worked are available from the Institute and Museum of the History of Science (IMSS) in Florence (for scientific explanation, see the animation here). The basic idea is that manufactured nitrous air (nitrogen oxide) is mixed with a sample of ambient air. Part of the mixture dissolves into water leading to a decreased volume of now-unrespirable air in the chamber, which can be measured. Priestley (1733-1804), understanding the respirability of air to be reflective of its virtue, and understanding respiration to transfer phlogiston from the body to the air, understood the remaining air to be phlogisticated by the test, and the test to be a measure of the “goodness” of the common air used.
Italian experimenters, beginning with Felice Fontana and Marsilio Landriani replicated the test, embodying it in an instrument that Landriani called a eudiometer, which taken from Greek literally means a measuring instrument of the goodness of the air. Through the (more…)
Schaffer on the Priestley Lit October 5, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Jan Golinski, John Christie, John McEvoy, Joseph Priestley, Simon Schaffer
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Getting back to the series on Simon Schaffer, we’re going to be looking at a series of articles on Enlightenment chemistry, which will hopefully give us the opportunity to discuss Jan Golinski’s book Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820, which expressly owes a lot to Schaffer’s work, and covers a lot of the same ground. First, though, I want to backtrack to jot down a few notes about the 1984 piece, “Priestley’s Questions: An Historiographic Survey,” History of Science 22: 151-183.
Joseph Priestley
At the end of last year, we discussed Schaffer’s 1987 piece, “Priestley and the Politics of Spirit”. To recap, Schaffer was calling attention to the connections some 18th-century natural philosophers made between pneumatic and electrical phenomena and the actions of spirit, and Priestley’s desire to dissociate theological from natural philosophy. In the earlier piece, Schaffer was reviewing problems identified in the analysis of Priestley’s life and identifying historiographical strategies used to address those problems—a service that should be a much more common feature of our journals (and one also at work in his criticism of the Newton literature).
Priestley (1733-1804) was a dynamic figure of particular historiographical interest for a couple of reasons: first, he was an innovative chemical experimenter, making significant contributions to the chemistry of air that began to develop in the latter half of the 18th century, but also remaining a staunch proponent of the phlogiston theory even after most chemists accepted Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier’s chemistry of oxygen. Second, Priestley was a proponent of the Enlightenment project linking political authority to reasoned assent—a radical position at that time. Schaffer pointed out that the historiography of (more…)
Blog Watch: STS Observatory October 1, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.2 comments
A quick note to direct attention to Jon Agar’s rapid-fire series on science in 2008-2009 over at UCL’s STS Observatory. The blog was extremely quiet over the summer, so if you’re not a regular visitor, it’s worth checking back in. Essentially, Agar (who just took over editing the British Journal for the History of Science, by the way) is testing out material for the end of his new book on Science in the Twentieth Century (see his intro post here). It’s a useful exercise to see what one might imagine constitutes a snapshot of “science” at a point in time at this point in history. Early posts focused on headline-grabbers, but the last couple of posts are taking a bit more of a systematic or nuts-and-bolts approach to the subject matter.
Foucault, Ginzburg, Latour, and the Gallery September 30, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Bruno Latour, Carlo Ginzburg, Henrika Kuklick, Lorraine Daston, Michel Foucault, Robert Kohler
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This post is an expansion on my previous post on Lorraine Daston’s discussion of the proliferation of microhistories that are “archivally based and narrated in exquisite detail” but that seem to serve no clear end. I largely agree with her assessment of this trend as an unsatisfactory state of affairs, as well as with her linking of the trend to a divergence from a prior era of productive dialogue with the other fields of science studies. However, she makes two key claims with which I disagree:
- “…in large part because of the mandate to embed science in context, historians of science have become self-consciously disciplined, and the discipline to which they have submitted themselves is history” (808).
- “Insofar as there has been a counterweight to these miniaturizing tendencies in recent work in the history of science, it has been supplied not by science studies but by a still more thoroughgoing form of historicism, namely, the philosophical history of Michel Foucault” (809).
I do not believe historians of science have in some way exchanged science studies for history, and I believe the historicism associated here with Foucault represents a continuity with the scholarship of the ’80s.
Let’s start with the intertwined set of highly productive conversations that took place around the ’80s (which we are beginning to revisit on this blog, and of which Daston was a part). Participants understood their gains to be generated by studying things like “practice not ideas”, “instruments”, “cultures of the fact” and so forth, which are slogans that make sense if you have a (more…)
Daston on the Current Situation September 24, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Bruno Latour, Donald MacKenzie, Harry Collins, Lorraine Daston, Michel Foucault, Simon Schaffer
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Cheers to Darin Hayton over at PACHSmörgåsbord for keeping his eye on Critical Inquiry, where, in a nicely timed coincidence, Lorraine Daston has a new article (paywall protected), “Science Studies and the History of Science,” dedicated to many of the same issues we regularly explore here. Take a look if you can.
Daston notes—and I concur—that after a brief period of lively interaction, history of science and science studies drifted apart in the 1990s. In the article, Daston portrays the science studies disciplines as listless and adrift, while the history of science has fled for the greener pastures of straight history, a move that has placed the history of science on safer, but tamer ground (the history of science now lacks “a certain yeastiness that at once intrigued and rattled the neighboring disciplines of history, philosophy, and sociology, as well as the sciences” p. 811, fn).
According to Daston (echoing a point made in Objectivity and in co-author Galison’s “Ten Problems”), “Gone are the case studies in support of one or another grand philosophical or sociological generalization about the nature of science; in their place a swarm of microhistories have descended, often archivally based and narrated in exquisite detail” (809). I agree with the sentiment, but Daston believes the current passion for archive-mongering indicates our dedication to historiographical methodology—she notes the “improved craftsmanship of [our] footnotes”. This serves mainly to (more…)
Cosmology and “Synoptic” Intellectual History September 23, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Methods.Tags: Arthur Stanley Eddington, Bronislaw Malinowski, Carlo Ginzburg, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Crosbie Smith, Donald MacKenzie, Geoffrey Cantor, Ian Hacking, Isaac Newton, Joseph Priestley, Katharine Park, Lorraine Daston, Matthew Stanley, Michael Faraday, Norton Wise, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Simon Schaffer, Ted Porter, Thomas Romney Robinson, William Thomson
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The influence of anthropological ideas on historiography is widely acknowledged, if too often boiled down to a slogan: “approach history as a stranger,” or “know the past on its own terms.” On this blog, Chris Donohue has been revisiting the problems informing the interpretive approaches of Malinowski’s “functionalism” and Lévi-Strauss’ “structuralism”. By grounding ritualistic behaviors in issues of social cohesion and cognitive strategy, these approaches bring sense to activities that, on their surface, seem arbitrary. Applied to familiar societies, they also form part of a trend stretching over a century that makes our own social behaviors seem less explicitly rational, if not altogether less rational. For historians of science, this is of great interest, because it helps reanalyze scientific practice in ways removed from overt scientific reasoning.
Moving beyond scientific practice as simply a particular mode of reasoning was part and parcel of the Great Escape from the philosophy of science. But I’d now like to move beyond the limitations of abandoning philosophy, to concentrate more on the generative ideas in the same historiographical period (roughly, the fabled ’80s), which have ceased to be articulated now that that period’s gains have themselves been boiled down to basic slogans.
The most important anthropological concept that has vaporized into the atmosphere is the cognitive cosmology, an idea which holds that every society, or really every individual, necessarily creates their own sense of what is in the world and how the world works, which allows people to cope with their surroundings. I’d like to very roughly sketch out a preliminary sense of how this idea worked in the historiography. (more…)
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