Primer: Charles Fourier and the Gravity of the Passions in the Wake of Revolution April 30, 2009
Posted by Christopher Donohue in EWP Primer, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Charles Fourier, Comte de Saint-Simon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Keith Taylor, Robert Owen
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Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was the son of successful cloth merchant whose fortune was lost in the Revolution. Fourier himself was almost executed in the Terror. Like Maistre, his philosophy was a response to the failure of the revolutionary project as well as an inquiry into the universality of reason and the problem of the good society. Fourier’s solution to the problem of the ‘good society’ was indeed novel: the ideal state would be brought about by the supremacy of the natural passions. This was an inversion of the traditional order between the regulative capacity of reason and the sublimation of sentiment. Society was to be regulated, in Fourier’s view, not through reason, but through the harmony of natural passion and action.
In 1808, Fourier published the Theory of the Four Movements and the General Destinies, (Cambridge ed.) which presented his vision of the universal history of humanity, the cosmos, and the prospects for a new order. Fourier presented his study as an inquiry into “the General System of Nature.” Such an inquiry was not only prudent but necessary as true happiness was impossible without a complete understanding of the General System. Fourier believed the first branch of the theory, the material, to be “unveiled” by Newton and Leibniz (3.) Fourier cautioned his reader in the preface , “It should be borne in mind that because the discovery announced is more important than all the scientific work done since the human race began, civilized people should concern themselves with one debate only: whether or not I have really discovered the Theory of the Four Movements.” If the answer was in the affirmative then “all economic and moral theories need to be thrown away” and preparations were to begin for the transition “from social chaos to universal harmony” (4.) Fourier’s universal history had thirty-two stages, all ordained by God, which began in savagery and which led, through the phase of civilization, to the subsequent stage of ‘socialism,’ and finally, Harmony. This highest stage would last for 70,000 years, after which humanity would descend back into the savage state and the world would cease to be. (more…)
Kjeldsen on Rheinberger via Epple April 28, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Methods.Tags: Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Henk Bos, Hermann Minkowski, Karl Hermann Brunn, Moritz Epple, Tinne Hoff Kjeldsen
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Continuing on last week’s discussion about the sufficiency of current methodology, I’d like to take a look at Tinne Hoff Kjeldsen’s piece, “Egg-Forms and Measure-Bodies: Different Mathematical Practices in the Early History of the Modern Theory of Convexity,” from the latest Science in Context (free issue!), and particularly the function of her invocation of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s array of “epistemic things”.
For those not familiar with the modern theory of convexity, fear not. I’m mainly interested in the topic because it is central to the mathematical theory of linear programming, which is an important part of the canon of operations research techniques, and Kjeldsen, a historian of mathematics, is the top expert on the subject. She has a long line of papers explaining how the rather discontinuous history of convexity theory can be understood in terms of its development as parts of mathematicians’ varying projects—what she has previously referred to as different “tasks”. Her work is extremely useful to people like me who need to figure out what any of this has to do with military doctrine-building and radical British scientists—you’d be surprised—and are reluctant to spend too much time on the nitty-gritty details on the history of things like convexity theory.
The history of mathematics is a nice place to address this issue, because this history is relatively coherent from antiquity to the present in comparison to other fields of study. As a consequence, historians of mathematics have found it to be more legitimate to address transhistorical mathematical problems as addressed across large gaps of time. In venues such as the Archive for History of Exact Sciences, history maintains a sort of unusual (more…)
Projects and Problems as Elements of History April 24, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Methods.Tags: Andrew Warwick, Augustin Jean Fresnel, David Brewster, Jed Buchwald, Lev Tolstoy, Lorraine Daston, Martin Kusch, Marxist historiography, Michel Foucault, Peter Galison, Sigmund Freud
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One important theme in the history of science profession is that there is a perceived need for increased methodological sophistication. “We” (as a profession, and as a society) need to “think about science”, or more broadly, “think about knowledge and practice” in different and exciting new ways in order to really get at the history of science, and the relationship between science, technology, and society, and to avoid being misled by dubious scientific or anti-scientific claims.
Methodological sophistication is important. It has only been methodological reflection that warns us against, for example, necessarily regarding “religion” as a “constraint” on “science”, when, for example, theological issues might have been a “resource” in a natural philosophical cosmology. Or, we can now appreciate that the world did not “resist” Einstein’s relativity for some years, but rather that different communities did not understand it as important or germane to their physical projects (following Andrew Warwick on Cambridge physicists, or Peter Galison on Poincaré).
In my opinion, though, methodologically we are generally pretty sound, and have been for at least two decades, if not longer. To continue to act as though methodology were still our most pressing problem is to ignore the question of how we might attain and retain understanding through better historiographical craft. In this respect, there are some areas where we are doing very well, which need to be highlighted for those not working in them, and there are areas where we seem to be actually losing knowledge (as a community, anyway).
Rather than go into specific examples in this post, I would like to lay out what I view as the essential problems of good historiographical craft—the charting of the relationship between historical projects, “problems” in those projects, and the proper handling of the nature and role of context. (more…)
Primer: Plate Tectonics April 22, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer.Tags: Alfred Wegener, Drummond Matthews, Edward Bullard, Frederick Vine, Homer LeGrand, John A. Stewart, Keith Runcorn, Lawrence Morley, Lynn Sykes, Naomi Oreskes, Patrick Blackett, Tuzo Wilson
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A map showing differing magnetic polarizations in rock on the Juan de Fuca plate with colors indicating age; from the United States Geological Survey.
During the 18th century, broad theories of the earth (such as that proposed by Jean-André de Luc, which I discussed a few weeks ago), attempted to account for a wide array of phenomenona, such as the origins of mountains, the origins of different rock strata, the presence of marine fossils on land, and so forth. By the end of that century such wide-ranging and speculative theoretical “systems” had fallen into a degree of disrepute as a useful learned activity, and a more disciplined and less narratively ambitious geology slowly gained precedence. Nevertheless, the questions asked by 18th-century savants remained valid, and varying theories of the earth’s history remained in circulation, with answers to many key questions remaining in flux until well into the 20th century.
Following World War II, the theory of the German meteorologist and paleoclimatologist Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), that continents drifted over the face of the globe, had fallen largely by the wayside. Wegener had proposed his theory early in the 20th century to account for climatic changes in the earth’s distant past, for fossil similarities across continents, and for mountainous features of the earth’s crust, which required a new explanation after the decline of the cooling earth theory circa 1900. Wegener’s theory—the most prominent of several proposed drift theories—had its sympathizers, some very well-respected, but the theory was not widely accepted, and geologists in North America were outright hostile to it, many assuming by mid-century that it had disappeared into the realm of crank science.
In fact, continental drift was never fully given up to the cranks, and in the 1950s and 1960s, new evidence and mechanisms for it were developed, which made a convincing enough case that it not only revived the fortunes of continental drift, but swiftly overcame all competition. “Plate tectonics” arose at the confluence of a number of different (more…)
Claims, Authority, and Spheres of Practice, Pt. 2 April 20, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Methods.Tags: Christer Nordlund, Hunter Heyck, I. B. Holley, Jamie Cohen-Cole, Perrin Selcer
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On initially looking at the articles on sciences in North America that BJHS has made available for free, one possible exercise that occurred to me was to draw some links between the pieces. Perrin Selcer’s piece on “standardizing wounds” in World War I (“the scientific management of life in the First World War”), my piece on World War II operations research, Jeff Hughes’ review of recent a-bomb literature, and Jamie Cohen-Cole’s piece on Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies could conceivably be linked fairly easily.
On a closer look, this exercise seemed to be less potentially useful than I initially imagined. While it might conceivably be possible to connect World War I-era wound treatment standardization to OR’s contributions to military planning, or OR to cognitive science (via decision theory), or, to go down another branch, to connect the treatment standardization issue to Christer Nordlund’s piece on hormone therapies creating improved people, it might not be wise. It would be easy to wave one’s hands around about standardization, flexibility, knowledge, and large-scale practice, but the historical picture produced would, it seems to me, be more misleading than helpful.
Though these papers might all work their way into an edited volume with a sufficiently vague theme, none of them were written with the others in mind (for obvious reasons). Importantly, though, even if the papers were more closely related, it would still be difficult to forge connections between them, because (more…)
Claims, Authority, and Spheres of Practice, Pt. 1 April 18, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Methods.add a comment
By way of Advances in the History of Psychology, I just found out that, to advertise its articles of interest to historians of North American sciences, the British Journal for the History of Science has made relevant articles available for free [ed., June 2012: these are no longer available]. Among these, it turns out, is my 2007 article, “The Heuristics of War: Scientific Method and the Founders of Operations Research”. I had been thinking about discussing the problem of the authority of science as an issue in history of science writing, and it is actually a point I addressed in this article, so this seems like a good opportunity to talk about it.
My main point of contention in the article was that historiographical preoccupation with problems of boundary dispute and the authority of science had mischaracterized what is important and interesting about the history of wartime OR: “Whether the primary interest has been the deployment of scientific methodologies in new sorts of problems or else the cachet of scientific knowledge as key to scientists’ entry into new arenas of authority, a strong theme in the historiography is that (more…)
Primer: Joseph Marie Maistre and the Image of the Machine April 16, 2009
Posted by Christopher Donohue in EWP Primer, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Charles Baudelaire, Charles Fourier, Comte de Saint-Simon, Isaiah Berlin, Jean Marie Maistre, Owen Bradley
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Joseph Marie Maistre (1753-1821) , underscored the irredeemable fallenness of mankind, which was rooted in original sin and visible in the seemingly endless wars, conflicts, and revolutions in human history. The French modernist poet Baudelaire considered Maistre an antidote against the naive optimism of the eighteenth century. Like Chateaubriand in his Genius of Christianity (1802), Maistre was a defender of religious sentiment and its role in politics (Christopher John Murray, Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, pg. 707.) A staunch defender of the Catholic Church and strong governance, Maistre believed that providence was the active force behind universal history. Maistre defined human beings in this scheme according to their lust for power.
As Isaiah Berlin notes in his introduction to Maistre’s Considerations on France, Maistre “is painted, always, as a fanatical monarchist and a still more fanatical supporter of papal authority; proud, bigoted, inflexible…brilliant…vainly seeking to arrest the current of history….” Maistre, in Berlin’s view, is all of these things, and all the more interesting for them, “for although Maistre may have spoken in the language of the past, the content of what he had to say is the absolute substance of anti-democratic talk of our day” (Considerations on France, Introduction, xii, xiii.)
Like Hegel, Saint-Simon, and Schiller, Maistre was horrified by the excesses of the French Revolution and the Terror. The experience “turned him into an implacable enemy of everything that is liberal, democratic, high-minded, everything connected with intellectuals, critics, scientists, everything to do with the forces which created the French Revolution” (xiii) The Revolution and the Terror convinced him that the idea of progress was an illusion. Instead, Maistre underscored the sacred past, the “virtue, and the necessity, indeed, of complete subjugation.” In the place of scientific rationality, Maistre offered the alternative of “the primacy of instinct, superstition, and prejudice.”
More charitably, Owen Bradley notes that in Maistre’s critique of science, “his attack on the excesses of technical rationality raises the essentially modern question of the sociopolitical consequences of the scientific organization of (more…)
John Wheeler special issue of Physics Today April 14, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: John Wheeler
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For those interested in the history of recent physics, the April issue of Physics Today is dedicated to the career of John Wheeler (1911-2008), a major figure in the last 2/3 of 20th-century American physics. He worked on problems of the nucleus and in the design of thermonuclear weapons, and at the troublesome border between quantum physics and general relativity. The issue includes:
Ken Ford’s “John Wheeler’s work on ion particles, nuclei, and weapons” (available for free at the Physics Today website).
Charles Misner, Kip Thorne, and Wojciech Zurek’s “John Wheeler, relativity, and quantum information”.
Oregon State history of science graduate student (and former Merchant Marine captain) Terry Christensen’s, “John Wheeler’s mentorship: An enduring legacy”.
There are also two articles by Wheeler himself drawn from the archives: “Mechanism of fission” (1967), a retrospective on early fission research; and “Introducing the Black Hole” (1971, with Remo Ruffini), a semi-technical introduction to the physics of black holes.
The Niels Bohr Library and Archives, incidentally, has two transcripts of interviews with Wheeler online, one from 1967, and one from 1993, which served as notes for Wheeler’s autobiography (co-written with interviewer Ford).
Primer: Malinowski and the Problem of Culture April 9, 2009
Posted by Christopher Donohue in EWP Primer, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Audrey Richards, Bronislaw Malinowski, Edmund Leech, Emile Durkheim, Jerry Moore, Marvin Harris
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Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (1884-1942) was the founder of the branch of Social Anthropology known as functionalism. Functionalism maintains that every aspect of the culture of a people, past or present, serves a purpose for the long-term maintenance of that society. Malinowski inaugurated a new standard for field-work, and served as an exemplar of ethnographic observation and inference for a generation of anthropologists. As a theoretician and as a individual, opinion of Malinowski remains sharply polarized.
The British social anthropologist, Audrey I. Richards, as related in Jerry D. Moore’s Visions of Culture (2008), observed that Malinowski’s concept of culture was “one of his most stimulating contributions to the anthropological thought of his day.” Conversely, the anthropologist Edmund Leach opposed Malinowski’s contributions to ethnographic fieldwork to his dubious theoretical formulations. Leach noted that while Malinowski altered “the whole mode and purpose of ethnographic inquiry” he also made “numerous theoretical pronouncements of a general, abstract,sociological kind.” Malinowski’s conception of “Culture” amounted to a “platitudinous bore.” According to Malinowski’s former student, Raymond Firth, Malinowski the man was either loved or hated, lauded as an artist or derided as a “pretentious Messiah of the credulous.” (more…)
Schaffer Turns to Practice April 7, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Edwin Boring, Friedrich Bessel, George Biddel Airy, Harry Collins, Isaac Newton, Peter Galison, Richard Westfall, Robert Hooke, Simon Schaffer, Wilhelm Wundt
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The two articles we are looking at today are among the best-known works of Simon Schaffer:
(1) “Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation,” Science in Context 2 (1988): 115-145.
(2) “Glass Works: Newton’s Prisms and the Uses of Experiment,” in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences (1989), edited by David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer.
19th-century glass factory
The articles stand at an important turning point in Schaffer’s oeuvre, and their style should be very familiar to history of science professionals working in the last 20 years, because both depart from Schaffer’s early concern with the construction of systems of ideas, and both put a specific epistemic practice under the microscope, in this case: striving for precision in observation, and replicating experimental results. At the time, though, these kinds of studies were reasonably novel. The Uses of Experiment volume, in particular, was an (more…)
Ether Wave Propaganda 