The Origin of the History of Science in Classical Antiquity

Cambridge Companion to Ancient Science. Liba Taub, ed. Cambridge UP, 2020

The Making of the Humanities

2011

Critical Inquiry, 2009

The current relation between science studies and the history of science brings to mind the opening scenes of A Midsummer Night's Dream (or, minus the fairies, the high school comedy of your choice): Helena loves Demetrius, who used to love Helena, but now loves Hermia, who loves Lysander. A perfervid atmosphere of adolescence hangs over the play: rash promises, suicide threats, hyperbolic but sincere pledges of love and enmity, and, above all, the breathless sense of everything being constantly up for grabs. Transposed from the enchanted wood of Oberon and Titania to the disenchanted groves of academe, it is science studies that fancies itself in the role of the spurned Helena, once courted but now rejected by the history of science. Sheila Jasanoff, speaking qua president of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, recently complained of a "somewhat onesided love affair" with the history of science and a certain "jitteriness about being caught out in risqué company [that] marks the hiring practices of our major history of science departments." 1 While her society has awarded some of its highest prizes to historians of science, those ungrateful Demetriuses were off flirting with the discipline of history, which in turn was in hot pursuit of cultural anthropology. What fools these mortals be. Yet there was a time when Helena was wooed by Demetrius, and the history of science once was smitten by science studies. The story of infatuation and subsequent estrangement follows, I suspect, a more general pattern in the 1.

I International Scientific and Practical Conference “Modern science: actual problems” Manchester, UK, 2023

Mammadli B.A. The subject of historical science in antiquity and the Middle ages. I International Scientific and Practical Conference “Modern science: actual problems”, January 24-25, 2023, Manchester, United Kingdom, pp. 28-34.

This is a general paper dealing with the history of the history of science, with a special focus on historians and epistemologists who bolster their historiographic approach by making reference and/or relying on science, e.g. Popper, Bachelard, and Canguilhem

ORGANON, Vol:43, 2011

This paper examines the epistemological aspects of the course of development of the discipline of history of science in Greece focusing on three controversial themes: i) the Continuity with the ancients, ii) the reception of modern science both in the Greek–speaking communities in the 18 –19 centuries and in the modern Greek state in the 20 century and finally iii) the issue of teaching the history of science in the science classroom. Starting with the work of the first Professor of history of science in Greece, Michael Stefanides, this paper analyzes the transition from a discipline of history of science dominated by an attempt to establish the continuity of Greek Science from the ancients till the 20 the century. The new generation of historians of science, which appeared on the scene in the late 1970’s and prevailed in the cultural life of Greece, considered the argument for the Continuity as an ideological construction, and turned its attention in the study of the post–Byzantine era, to a period called Neo–Hellenic Enlightenment, and focused on the study of the reception and assimilation of the ideas of the 17 century scientific revolution in the Greek–speaking communities. The last 20 years or so, a new trend in the historiography of science in Greece turns up to focus interest on the reception of modern theories in Greece at the end of 19th century. Finally, this work examines the newly established relations between the historians of science and the historians of science education taking into account the fact that these two fields are closely linked to one another in the Greek context.

Isis, 2005

The mismatch between common representations of "science" and the miscellany of materials typically studied by the historian of science is traced to a systematic ambiguity that may itself be traced to early modern Europe. In that cultural setting, natural philosophy came to be rearticulated (most famously by Francis Bacon) as involving both contemplative and practical knowledge. The resulting tension and ambiguity are illustrated by the eighteenth-century views of Buffon. In the nineteenth century, a new enterprise called "science" represents the establishment of an unstable ideology of natural knowledge that was heavily indebted to those early modern developments. The two complementary and competing elements of the ideology of modern science are accordingly described as "natural philosophy" (a discourse of contemplative knowledge) and "instrumentality" (a discourse of practical or useful knowledge; know-how). The history of science in large part concerns the story of their shifting, often mutually denying, interrelations. THE HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY OF "SCIENCE" T HE QUESTION IN MY TITLE ARISES from an anxiety that the history of science as a scholarly specialty is less obviously self-defining than it once was. This essay

Isis, 2015

While both the sciences and the humanities, as currently defined, may be too heterogeneous to be encompassed within a unified historical framework, there is good reason to believe that the history of science and the history of philologies both have much to gain by joining forces. This collaboration has already yielded striking results in the case of the history of science and humanist learning in early modern Europe. This essay argues that first, philology and at least some of the sciences (e.g., astronomy) remained intertwined in consequential ways well into the modern period in Western cultures; and second, widening the scope of inquiry to include other philological traditions in non-Western cultures offers rich possibilities for a comparative history of learned practices. The focus on practices is key; by shifting the emphasis from what is studied to how it is studied, deep commonalities emerge among disciplines-and intellectual traditions-now classified as disparate.

Isis, 2008

History of science has developed into a methodologically diverse discipline, adding greatly to our understanding of the interplay between science, society, and culture. Along the way, one original impetus for the then newly emerging discipline-what George Sarton called the perspective "from the point of view of the scientist"-dropped out of fashion. This essay shows, by means of several examples, that reclaiming this interaction between science and history of science yields interesting perspectives and new insights for both science and history of science. The authors consequently suggest that historians of science also adopt this perspective as part of their methodological repertoire.