Fustel de Coulanges May 31, 2010
Posted by Christopher Donohue in History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, Reinhard Bendix, Steven Lukes, Henry Maine, Emile de Laveleye, Alfred Espinas, William Robertson Smith, W. H. R. Rivers, Edward Burnett Tylor, Catherine Bell
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Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889), according to the brief but sufficient biography supplied by Reinhard Bendix in State and Society: A Reader in Comparative Political Sociology (1973,) was “Professor of History at Strasbourg and at the Sorbonne in Paris.” Coulanges’ The Ancient City (1864), Bendix declared, was “a pioneering analysis of the role of religion in classical antiquity.” Coulanges was the author of a number of other works on early French history but is remembered, if at all, as a persistent influence on Emile Durkheim.
According to Steven Lukes, Durkheim praised Coulanges, along with the French historian Gabriel Monod, for his rigorous historical method, but criticized the former for his lack of attention to the “comparative method” (Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, 58.)
Lukes is quick to point out that Durkheim’s criticism only referred to Coulanges’ account of the Roman family or gens in The Ancient City, as Coulanges’ 1889 essay, “The Origin of Property in Land,” has a section entitled “On the application of the comparative method to this problem.” This essay contains an interesting summation of the status quo of economic sociology in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Coulanges’ notes Henry Maine’s use of the Indian village to inquire into the original constitution of Western property as well as Emile de Laveleye’s theory of the original communal ownership of the soil.
The Newman-Chalmers Dispute, Pt. 2: History, Philosophy, and Demarcation May 31, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Chymistry.Tags: Alan Chalmers, Deborah Harkness, Harold Cook, Robert Boyle, Steven Shapin, Thomas Kuhn, William Newman
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Pt. 1 of this post discussed the latest entries in a dispute, which appear in the current and upcoming issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. The papers are by Alan Chalmers and Bill Newman, and they argue over whether Robert Boyle’s “chymistry” could have proceeded without being framed within his mechanical philosophy. The immediate issue, the nature of Boyle’s work, seems ultimately to turn on fairly subtle points about how, in the 17th century, experiment was understood to relate to natural philosophy, and how knowledge of chemical phenomena related to natural philosophy and other orders of knowledge. As I understand this issue, one would not have thought at that time that one could understand “chemistry” to be a self-contained body of knowledge, a fundamental way of looking at nature. While one certainly could develop a practical understanding of chemical transformations at that time, such a knowledge would not have been thought relevant to the higher natural philosophical questions that most concerned Boyle.
Outside of this main historical issue, Newman stresses the importance of reading Chalmers’ particular claims in light of his “larger agenda … concerning the nature of scientific knowledge as a whole, an agenda I do not share.” Chalmers is primarily interested in the ability to demarcate “science”, which founds knowledge on an experimental basis, from “philosophy”, which accommodates experiment into its theoretical schemes. While Newman waxes skeptical about the philosophical project’s validity for even the most recent period of history, in his response (entitled “How Not to Integrate the History and Philosophy of Science”), he concentrates on the ways this philosophical lens affects historiography, claiming it narrows the scope of possible questions to those that can be framed within the structure of the central demarcationist concern. Chalmers’ approach is “binary,” a “dualist methodology”, a “toggle-switch model” of history: if a historical event cannot be classified as proper “science”, it is of no further historical concern. This methodology “allows for no gradual development or nuance over the course of history”, it “does not give sufficient credence to reorientations in scientific reasoning and experimental practice that laid the groundwork for later fruitful developments,” and it does not “allow for any significant heuristic application of theory”. Chalmers’ evaluative rubric allows “little room indeed for disinterested analysis of arguments, determination of the real issues at stake, or the tracing of sources and intellectual traditions, which I view as the historian’s primary responsibilities.”
The Newman-Chalmers Dispute, Pt. 1: Chymistry and Natural Philosophy May 21, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Chymistry.Tags: Alan Chalmers, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Daniel Sennert, Lawrence Principe, Michael Hunter, Robert Boyle, William Newman
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Click to go to the excellent Robert Boyle Project site
I haven’t talked about it much here, but I’ve mentioned once or twice my admiration from afar of the recent revival of an alchemy/chymistry sub-historiography spearheaded by Indiana’s Bill Newman and Johns Hopkins’ Lawrence Principe. At a glance, this literature traffics in older methodological currents of intellectual history, but far from a musty antiquarian pursuit, those writing in it ask pointed, well-targeted questions and, sure enough, find revealing answers. I suspect a strong case could be made that this corner of the history of science literature has been the most intellectually productive one of the past decade.
One sign of liveliness is the prospect of dispute, and it turns out there is an interesting and current one between Newman and philosopher Alan Chalmers of Flinders University in Australia about the experimental and philosophical practices of Robert Boyle (1627-1691). The citations of present interest are at the end of this post, though the dispute has a longer historiography which you can find in the footnotes to those papers.
At one level this is a classical historian-philosopher conflict about how to read the historical record responsibly, but the dispute also has deeper currents that have a lot to say about a question in which this blog has recently dabbled: the historical characteristics of natural philosophy. While I programmatically agree with Newman here, and while I ultimately side with him on the specifics, the specific case is not open-and-shut, so I thought I’d discuss it as well as I can make it out here in Pt. 1 of this post. (more…)
Two Schaffer-Related Items May 16, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Franz Mesmer, John Harrison, Richard Mead, Robert Fludd, Simon Schaffer
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For fans of this blog’s Schaffer Oeuvre series, two fun bits of news.
First, by way of Advances in the History of Psychology, Simon Schaffer’s latest article, “The Astrological Roots of Mesmerism” is in preprint at Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. I’ll not do a full write-up now, but I will say that I was surprised to find that it is in his mid-’80s vintage style, which is to say, it is basically an intellectual history of the 18th-century natural philosophical ideas surrounding animal magnetism and a predecessor concept, animal gravity. This history is combined with searching observations about how natural philosophers began to construct their own histories of these natural philosophies so as to render some of Mesmer’s predecessors, notably Robert Fludd (1574-1637), progressive figures within their own historicized contexts, while rendering Mesmer himself a figure whose ideas were of the past. Schaffer also demonstrates interesting parallels with current historiography, which takes Mesmer’s ideas to have progressive components, while Mesmer’s key intellectual source, physician Richard Mead’s (1673-1754) use of astrological ideas is taken to make him a figure with backward-looking tendencies. Really a fun, informative, and unexpected piece.
I was likewise surprised to be reading an article at independent.co.uk for unrelated reasons, only to find that one of Schaffer’s most recent projects is a study of the work of the British Board of Longitude (1714-1828), which he is undertaking in collaboration with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Framed as a way of complicating the heroic story of humble clockmaker John Harrison’s solution to the longstanding problem of finding longitude at sea, I am looking forward to results coming from this study simply as an elucidation of the work of an important technical department of the British state. It is a direct ancestor of issues I will be studying when I move to Imperial College London this fall.
Bites of History May 14, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
One thing that I think is not appreciated enough is how much history is generally available for easy consumption. Working at the American Institute of Physics over the past few years, something that’s become increasingly clear to me is that the vast bulk of history of physics is produced by physicists. Generally it is well-written, and the interests and subject matter tend to be much more eclectic than in writing by professional historians. Pieces do not really communicate with each other, and so the historiography is hardly synthetic, but if new syntheses of 20th-century physics were ever to be constructed, they would do well to draw heavily on these scattered bites of history.
Letter from George Washington to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Increasingly, professional organizations are making these bites more systematically available. This week I was contacted by the communications officer from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, who informed me that the Academy is now presenting a weekly “From the Academy Archives” feature on its home page, highlighting items from its archival collection, which dates back to the 18th century. An archive of these posts will soon be available. The official press release is below the jump.
The Center for History of Physics, where I work, is the history arm of the American Institute of Physics, but “member societies”, which include the American Physical Society, sometimes also undertake their own historical work, such as through the APS Forum for the History of Physics. The APS has a similar feature to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “This Month in Physics History”, which has an archive going back to 2000. The APS is also making the audio and slides of history presentations at APS meetings available on their website, which is another resource from which professional historians might be able to gain if they actively try and integrate this material into what they already know.
Historians need not feel that this sort of work totally fulfills their nutritional historiographical requirements in order to gain from it. Now that this work is coming out in small, regular portions, there is no reason for historians not to take advantage of its ready availability to help round out their personal knowledge of history.
Schaffer on Metrology May 10, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Bruce Hunt, Charles Piazzi Smyth, Graeme Gooday, Harry Collins, Horace Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, John Herschel, Lord Rayleigh, Norton Wise, Richard Glazebrook, Simon Schaffer, Thomas Henry Huxley, Werner Siemens, William Clifford
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This post discusses four articles that Simon Schaffer published in the 1990s on the development of standards of measurement in Victorian Britain, focusing especially on work done at Cambridge University:
1) “Late Victorian Metrology and Its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms,” in Invisible Connections: Instruments, Institutions, and Science, ed. Bud and Cozzens (Bellingham: SPIE, 1992).
2) “Rayleigh and the Establishment of Electrical Standards,” European Journal of Physics 15 (1994): 277-285.
3) “Accurate Measurement is an English Science,” in Values of Precision, ed. M. Norton Wise (Princeton UP: 1995).
4) “Metrology, Metrication, and Victorian Values,” in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (University of Chicago Press: 1997).
The rise of metrology at Cambridge coincided with the establishment of the Cavendish Laboratory in 1871 (beginning work in 1874). Schaffer emphasizes the importance of accepted standards for industrial development, the creation of telegraph networks, the fostering of trade, and the growth of Empire. However, he also places special emphasis on the specific questions involved in the particular history of the Cambridge standards program. When James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) became the first director of Cavendish, the use of the laboratory to develop precision instrumentation required strict group discipline from students, which ran against the grain of the liberal intent of Cambridge’s mathematical tripos, then in its heyday, as discussed in the video above.
Married Physicist Couples May 5, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Cécile Dewitt-Morette, Chien-Shiung Wu, Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber, Margaret Murnane, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Marie Curie, Mildred Dresselhaus
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Joseph and Maria Goeppert Mayer; AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
I’ve been away from the blog for some time now, which mainly has to do with the fact that I just got married. Thus activities surrounding this event went to the top of my agenda, bumping ordinary work down into the space usually occupied by supplying content to EWP. This post is inspired by my recent bout of marriage on the brain.
A bit of background: I nabbed some funding for putting together ACAP on my first try, but barely. One thing that almost derailed the proposal was some anxiety that this would be yet another dead-white-male hall of fame. That outcome is sort of inevitable: to this day, the physics profession suffers from a pronounced gender skew, albeit not so bad as in prior decades. If one is to study physics history, one is going to end up studying a lot of white males, unless one specifically sets out to do a sociological or anthropological analysis of gender and minority relations in the profession.
I argued at the time that ACAP’s scale and reach to the present would almost certainly allow it to include women and minorities with whom professional historians rarely bother, but who have been well-known to physicists themselves. This turned out to be correct. On account of the historical bias of the physics profession against female and minority participation, only a small percentage of people in ACAP are women and minorities, but they are nevertheless there, and this allows the beginnings of a conversation about their history in the American physics profession—with certain important caveats, most notably that ACAP can analyze only the careers of those who have made it to the upper echelons of professional recognition. ACAP must not be taken as a reliable sample from which to draw general conclusions about “women and minorities in physics”, since professional advancement has been one of the greatest challenges facing these groups in the profession.
One notable trend that we can look at is the prevalence of physicist married couples in the history of physics. (more…)
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