Clericuzio on Alchemy, Chemistry, Medicine, and Natural Philosophy December 26, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Chymistry.Tags: Agricolia, Albertus Magnus, Andreas Libavius, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Antonio Clericuzio, Guy de la Brosse, Nicaise Le Fèvre, Paracelsus, Rene Descartes, Robert Boyle, Thomas Aquinas, Vincent of Beauvais, Werner Rolfinck
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First off, for readers interested in current efforts to refine historical knowledge about early modern natural philosophical programs: there is a project blog, founded this past August, being run out of the University of Otago in New Zealand, called Early Modern Experimental Philosophy. Do read.
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Andreas Libavius (1555-1616)
This post is a further look at intellectual issues surrounding the relationship between early modern “chymistry” and the pursuit of natural philosophy, as discussed in a much earlier post on the dispute between Bill Newman and Alan Chalmers concerning the nature of Robert Boyle’s chymistry. There I understood Newman to argue that, to Boyle, philosophically important chemical knowledge deriving from experiment would have had to be fit within his mechanical philosophical framework, and that chemical taxonomies would not have fit that bill. Of course, in the seventeenth century, natural philosophy occupied one niche amid a full array of agendas to which chemistry was relevant. Many of these are dealt with in a recent article by the University of Cassino’s Antonio Clericuzio: “‘Sooty Empiricks’ and Natural Philosophers: The Status of Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century,” Science in Context 23 (2010): 329-350.
On the Beeb: Lisa Jardine on Jacob Bronowski December 12, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Jacob Bronowski, Lisa Jardine, Ralph Desmarais
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Update. Apparently the film is now available for a further week, through the 23rd
One position I hold on this blog is that historians need to worry less about their engagement with the realm of public ideas. The main reason I hold this position is that I think there is a tendency — albeit by no means a necessary one — to measure the quality of professional work in term of what qualities it possesses that public ideas lack, rather than against its own internal standards. Another important reason, though, is that I am generally satisfied with the quality of public presentation of science and its history. Yes, there is much that is of low quality, but nothing I or my colleagues say is going to change that. In fact, though, here in the UK, rather good history of science seems to be in the media perhaps even more often than the subject actually warrants!
Lisa Jardine, notably, seems to be a very public figure, and, in general, I am a fan. (I thought this column for bbc.co.uk, wherein she argues that history “reminds us” that real people can get hurt by things, contrary to what budget-cutting politicians may think, was a particularly superficial case for the relevance of history.) My new fun fact learned this past week is that Jardine is the daughter of Jacob Bronowski. Bronowski was a mathematician who is best known for popular television programs on science, most notably The Ascent of Man. She has just made a film about him for the BBC entitled My Father, The Bomb, and Me, which is available online here — but only until December 16th, so hurry! (I’m not sure if it’s available outside the UK.) The video below is a hopefully more permanent clip of Bronowski, which I will discuss in conjunction with Jardine’s film after the jump.
Decision, Risk, and Values: The Philosophy of Churchman and Ackoff December 10, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Alan Richardson, Edgar Singer, Russell Ackoff, West Churchman, William James
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A couple of months ago, I suggested a possible conflict of interest between STS and the history of science. Effectively, the aspirations of STS to contemporary relevance is at least partially dependent on potential contributions arising from new research results. For these results to have impetus, conclusions should be novel. Historians of science usually see their own opportunities in confirming STS results by mining examples from history, which, as illustrative examples, are treated as effectively “lost” to the present.
However, novelty can be augmented by conveniently forgetting the history of the ideas underlying the conclusions on offer. By mining deep history for ideas that are, in some sense, to be considered “lost” (or by seeking evidence that the ideas have never existed at all), historians can inadvertently create an “anti-history” of the subsequent history of those ideas. A better opportunity, I would argue, is to be found in placing the claims of STS and philosophical peers within their historical traditions. Historians could keep track of who else is currently espousing these ideas based upon much fuller accounts of their history extending to the present.
Unfortunately, historians’ bookkeeping methodologies are woefully inadequate to this task. But it is still possible to fill in pieces of the history where the opportunity arises. This particular post is prompted by a recent post at The Bubble Chamber, which posits a recent move in the philosophy of science, which takes efficacy as a key criterion of knowledge. However, my own historical work on the figures of philosophers West Churchman and Russell Ackoff (who just died last year) suggests that the tradition is neither new nor lost — perhaps just misplaced by philosophers (though I trust philosophers can clarify this point). Neither was obscure: Churchman was actually editor of Philosophy of Science from 1948 to 1958. However, both turned from philosophy of science to operations research before ultimately winding up in the eclectic realm of “systems thinking”.
Toulmin on Cosmology and the “Theology of Nature” December 4, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Natural Philosophy/Anthropo-cosmology.Tags: Charles Darwin, Francis Bacon, Friedrich Hayek, Galileo Galilei, Geoffrey Cantor, Hannah Arendt, Immanuel Kant, Isaac Newton, Isaiah Berlin, Joseph Priestley, Karl Popper, Lorraine Daston, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mary Douglas, Max Weber, Michael Faraday, Nicolaus Copernicus, Noam Chomsky, Peter Galison, Rene Descartes, Simon Schaffer, Stephen Toulmin, Steven Shapin, William Paley, William Whewell
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In April I finished up a series of posts on the anthropological concept of “cosmology” (meaning a coherent system of thought), and the relationships historians of the 1980s were able to draw between it and the historical practice and fate of natural philosophy — including scientific cosmology — in the 18th and 19th centuries. (See especially Simon Schaffer’s clear 1980 argument on this point.)
In my last post in that series, I noted that in seeking to ground Michael Faraday’s (1791-1867) physical convictions in his Sandemanian religious beliefs, Geoffrey Cantor used the term “theology of nature” to distinguish ideas implicit in Faraday’s thought from a contemporaneous, but more explicitly reasoned “natural theology”. To quote the subtitle to William Paley’s (1743-1805) 1802 book, Natural Theology, natural theology sought “evidence of the existence and attributes of the deity” in the study of nature. For Faraday, though, only the certain revelation of the Bible could produce knowledge of God, making it necessary for historians to excavate his personal theology of nature.
Some time later, it occurred to me it might not be a bad idea to chase down this “theology of nature” term, which led me directly to Stephen Toulmin’s 1982 essay collection, The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature. Aha. Since today marks the first anniversary of Toulmin’s death, I thought it might be a good time to try to type something up that helps put Toulmin, a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, into our history of the history of science of the 1980s.
Will Thomas
Christopher Donohue
