Schaffer on the Politics of Inquiry March 29, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Archibald Pitcairne, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Isaac Newton, John Locke, John Wallis, Rene Descartes, Simon Schaffer, Thomas Hobbes
add a comment
.jpg)
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
One of the ongoing themes in Schaffer’s work—perhaps the primary theme—is his commitment to the detailed investigation of the relationship between political ideology and natural philosophical inquiry from the 17th to the 19th centuries. It was at the center of Leviathan and the Air Pump, was central to his work on Priestley in the Enlightenment era, and his concern with the relationship between the natural philosophy of pneumatics and spirits (same post as Priestley).
Schaffer took pains to discuss politics as not simply something that interferes with inquiry, or as something that motivates inquiry, or something for which inquiry has implications. For Schaffer, both the subject and manner of inquiry were understood as being political themselves, linked intimately with principles of good governance. Politics not only defined what arguments one could make without incurring charges such as atheism, but, because these convictions were also held by natural philosophers, politics went so far as to define what kinds of questions and manners of inquiry made sense.
Today I’d like to do some sweeping up on this subject from Schaffer’s 1980s writings:
(1) “Occultism and Reason in the Seventeenth Century,” in Philosophy: Its History and Historiography (1985), edited by A. J. Holland. (Schaffer’s entry is available in full through Google Books.)
(2) “Wallification: Thomas Hobbes on School Divinity and Experimental Pneumatics,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science (1988): 275-298.
(3) “The Glorious Revolution and Medicine in Britain and the Netherlands,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 43 (1989): 167-190.
There is also one article I do not have easy access to that looks relevant:
(*) “The Political Theology of Seventeeth-Century Natural Science,” Ideas & Production 1 (1983): 1-43.
What must be the most interesting thing about being a historian of seventeenth-century natural philosophy is the sheer number of epistemological flavors deployed to address the same problems. In the 1980s, conscientious historians took it upon themselves to sort out different epistemological commitments, rather than to rely on wholly (more…)
Primer: The Soviet Bomb March 25, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer.Tags: Andrei Sakharov, Edward Teller, Igor Kurchatov, Igor Tamm, Iulii Khariton
add a comment
Igor Vasilevich Kurchatov, Photo Credit: Ioffe Physical Technical Institute, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives
The early history of the atomic bomb is necessarily a part of the history of physics, because in less than a decade what was an entirely novel physical phenomenon—the splitting of certain atomic nuclei when struck by neutrons—had been engineered into a military weapon with unprecedented destructive power.
The key experiments had been conducted in Germany at the end of 1938, but once the mechanism had been interpreted by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch (both of whom had fled the Nazis), its implications were appreciated across the world of nuclear physics, including in the Soviet Union.
Like the United States, the Soviet Union was not a traditional leader in physics, but, like the United States, the physics community was respected and had a burgeoning nuclear physics community. This community, like others across the world, fully recognized the implications of nuclear fission before nuclear research went secret after the war began, and members of it played a leading role in the research and development of nuclear weaponry and energy.
During the war, because the Soviet Union quickly became embroiled in an epic ground war with the Nazis, Soviet nuclear research did not receive as strong a priority as it ultimately did in the United States, though a research project was established in the winter of 1942-43 once it was learned from spies that the Germans, British, and Americans had established their own programs. The (more…)
Orchids! (And Enthusiasts) March 24, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.add a comment
Regular updates to continue tomorrow. Today I just thought I’d mention that on a springtime trip to the National Mall, my girlfriend and I took a quick swing through the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. This was sort of a getting-from-Constitution-Ave-to-the-Mall kind of swing-through (bless the free-of-charge Smithsonian!), but it did afford an opportunity to catch the Orchids Through Darwin’s Eyes exhibit, which is being put on by the Smithsonian’s Horticultural Services Division. (We later took a stroll through the United States Botanic Garden, which is also a a really attractive place).
I hardly ever go downtown (the crowds!), but I should, because I am spoiled with all the incredible curatorial and historical talent right here. As I weave my way through tourists, what I usually think about is the sheer amount of expertise that must go into crafting this stuff, when most people passing through must think, “Ooh, orchids!” if not, “How can we hit three more museums before dinner? C’mon kids, culture! Appreciate! Quicker!” The museum folks have always struck me as having a sort of bizarre, and slightly depressing, role to play.
But I’m probably wrong about that, because there’s also the enthusiasts, who, if nit-picky at times, are surely the most rewarding audience with whom to interact. In the future I’d like to go into a little bit more detail about history written by and for enthusiasts, as opposed to pop history. I get the impression academics who deal regularly with neither tend to conflate the groups, even though they couldn’t be more different.
One of these days we’ve got to get a curator over here to do a Q&A to talk about being spanned between the general public, enthusiasts, and academics. I know academics generally don’t like to get into the kinds of nitty-gritty issues that enthusiasts love (this would be background research, not publishable stuff), but it’s worth considering how historians might identify and serve this audience’s needs better, possibly improving scholarship in the process. I’m thinking here of something between the educational exhibit and the a-to-z reference resource, but I’ll have to come back to this thought later. Got to get home!
Less musing, more substance tomorrow. Promise!
1600: Impressions and Questions March 15, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.4 comments
OK, we know him, but what else?
Things are moving slowly around here what with the book and all, but a while ago in attempting to organize “what I think I know” about sciences-related things from a prior era well outside my expertise, I put together a snazzy little sketch of relations between areas of interest to historians of science and historians of ideas and creative practices more generally. The idea is that you could make the diagram into some computer 3-D ball-like model and rotate it around and look at various areas. Failing having a snazzy 3-D model complete with pull-up bibliographies, pictures, biographical databases, time-lines, and the like (but, seriously, how awesomely useful would that be?) I thought it would be of interest to toss out a few areas and connections between them that I am under the impression people who work on the pre-1600 period care about. The idea is to have a sort of first approximation of what a historiographical synthesis would look like, and then figure out how the picture is right and wrong. So, in no real order, the following represent chains of connections, rather than homogeneous categories….
1. Astronomy-mathematics/geometry: Big area of interest, classically on account the the exalted place of astronomy in the scientific revolution, but c. 1600 is mainly a wonky area of table-making, useful for calendars, astrology. Big specialist historiography.
2. Mathematics/geometry-mechanics-optics-music theory: The “other” mathematical fields. I really have no idea to what extent interest in these areas overlapped with interest in professional astronomy. Obviously some people had wide interests, but if you were to take a survey how deep would it run, I couldn’t make a good guess of what the results would be.
3-19 after the jump. (more…)
Punt! March 11, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
Finishing book manuscript… no time to deal with Hump-Day History this week… must fill in footnotes…. so very many footnotes….
The Scientific Revolution vs. Scientific Revolutions March 8, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Thomas Kuhn
1 comment so far
I’m not really all that sure what the “history of science community” thinks these days about “The Scientific Revolution” vs. “scientific revolutions” in the sense offered in Thomas Kuhn’s landmark book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). I know I have my own notions about the relationship between the two, but, reading Harkness’ book on Elizabethan sciences, I have to admit that I don’t know whether everyone’s on the same page—or even in the same chapter—on the question, so I thought I might want to expand on my quick gloss on the issue featured in my last post.
As I mentioned in my “pocket history” of the profession, Kuhn’s work came at a point in the history of science when some historians of the modern sciences started to see it as necessary to make sense of old ways of seeing the world, rather than just explaining their falsehoods away as superstitions or vestiges from a primeval confusion or “error”. To set up such a history, Kuhn imagined that there were periodic “revolutions” wherein one system of knowledge, or “paradigm”, was replaced by another. Kuhn’s scientific revolutions were clearly intellectual, and they occurred periodically. In the 1960s, it was still common for historians to suppose the existence of sequential “revolutions” , with a second revolution occurring in the nineteenth century, and maybe a third in the twentieth.
This Kuhnian idea of “scientific revolutions”, and particularly the first, could then hold sway over historical periodization. In particular, one might suppose that “The Scientific Revolution” represented an obvious sea change in natural inquiry. By extension, one might say that The Scientific Revolution “came late” to fields such as chemistry. (more…)
What was the Scientific Revolution? March 5, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club.Tags: Carl Linnaeus, Deborah Harkness, Francis Bacon, Harold Cook, John Ray, Nicolaus Copernicus
add a comment
So, I got Deborah Harkness’ The Jewel House in the mail yesterday. The book is about “the sciences” in London circa 1600, and won last year’s Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society. So far I like it a lot. Essentially, it’s kind of up the same alley as Cook’s Matters of Exchange with some key stylistic differences that I want to discuss later.
What I’d like to discuss now is a sort of uncomfortable relationship writers on early modern natural history seem to have with the idea of the Scientific Revolution. I keep getting this Rodney Dangerfield “I don’t get no respect!” vibe from the literature, which seems to be born out of this idea that the Sci Rev (as we in the biz call it) was this physics-driven shift in “the way people thought” and a rejection of Ancient authority concerning natural knowledge, or something like that.
Thus we seem to have this burgeoning literature of the “big science” of the 1500s and 1600s (again, a sort of “us too!”, this time against 20th-century (more…)
Primer: American Functionalist Psychology March 4, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Charles Darwin, Charles Sanders Peirce, Chauncey Wright, Chris Green, James Mark Baldwin, James McKeen Cattell, James Rowland Angell, JOhn Dewey, Thomas Henry Huxley, Wilhelm Wundt, William James
add a comment
Today’s video Hump-Day History lesson was originally posted at the Advances in the History of Psychology blog and is embedded from YouTube. The creator of the video, Chris Green, professor of psychology at York University, has given us kind permission to repost it here as part of this series.
After the jump, a mega-fast primer on ideas about the psyche from Aristotle to the 19th century (we love mega-fast primers here), plus links to longer documentaries of which these are quick recaps. (more…)
Onwards! March 3, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.add a comment
Here at EWP, we feel we’re turning a bit of a corner. A good portion of our posts to this point have consisted of honing our methodological sensibilities. We don’t really imagine that we’ve convinced anybody of much of anything they don’t already know, but it’s been very useful to us to get our heads around the mechanics of historiography, as well as to get a general sketch of the historiography’s own history. What this does is let us start moving forward constructively. In the spirit of practicing what we preach: rather than harp on the same things ad infinitum, it’s time to move on to the next phase of the project, though I’m sure we’ll be unable to resist returning to methodology from time to time.
First, we’ll probably be posting a little bit less. Methodology is kind of easy, because it’s impressionistic and requires introspection rather than extensive research. Now we’ll be doing more “Canonical”, “Oeuvre”, as well as what we hope will be a fun new series: “Ancient History”, examining stuff written (more…)
Will Thomas
Christopher Donohue
