Why the history of 'the human sciences'?

The Making of the Humanities

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.

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

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.

Special issue of "Histories" (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/histories/special_issues/histories_of_science)), 2024

In this Special Issue, (New) Histories of Science, in and beyond Modern Europe, we do not attempt to provide an all-encompassing overview of all research areas, methodological and theoretical approaches, and narratives that constitute the histories of the various sciences. Instead, we present contributions on a broad spectrum of current research topics and (new) approaches, highlighting their ramifications and illustrating their ties to neighboring disciplines and (interdisciplinary) areas of research, e.g., philosophy of science, science and technology studies, gender studies, or intellectual history. Moreover, the contributions exemplify how histories of science can be written in ways that not only move across but also challenge temporal and spatial categories and categorizations, including hegemonic understandings of “modernity”, Eurocentric views of the development of science and the humanities, or certain notions of center-periphery. They deal with histories of specific disciplines, specific research objects and phenomena, and with specific practices, while they also explore the historicity of certain ideals of scientificity (in the sense of the German Wissenschaftlichkeit). Furthermore, some papers are dedicated to selected methods and perspectives of current approaches in the histories of science. Among them is a focus on practices, including the everyday actions involved in engaging in science, but also on the specific spaces and places of knowledge production, as well as on the media of knowledge transfer and communication.

Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum, 2014

The famous gulf between the arts and the sciences comes from the current pervasiveness of scientific illiteracy. The resultant increased fragmentation of science threatens scientific research; the resultant increase of the portion of the population of the advanced world that shows general ignorance of science threatens Western culture and democracy, and thus science itself. Historians and popularizers of science can help reduce this gulf. Introducing science historically can help solve many acute social and political problems. Historians of science can try to bring this about. Discussions of the social role of intellectuals (and of historians of science in particular) require a great deal of a sense of proportion, since most people are still barely educated, hardly familiar with science, much less with its history. Science nonetheless influences lives. Current increased inaccessibility of science boosts the prevailing excessive scientific specialization that scientific and technological progress have imposed. Consequently, the search diminishes severely for comprehensive overviews of the world and even of specific parts of it, leading to disorientation that imperils even the normal functioning of science. There is then a vital need for a search for remedy. Philosophers and historians and popularizers of science can help develop the tools necessary for this vital search.

Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science, 2021

This article aims to reflect on the place of history in the history of science from the perspective of Brazilian historiography of science, mainly according to the thought of the Brazilian physicist and historian of science, Carlos Alvarez Maia. Since the 1990s, Maia (2013) began to question why the history of science became (and still largely remains) a “history of absent historians” in the face of the predominance of history of science in the Natural Science Departments and the absence in History Departments. The dynamic and changing historiography of science itself reaffirms the lack of historical analyses using history’s methodological and conceptual apparatus. Thus, epistemological aspects appear interrelated to political-institutional issues. Consequently, one has a political-epistemological perspective for discussing the place – or non-place – of history in the history of science. The thought of Maia (2013) acts as an essential starting point for reflection. It constitutes a ...

This essay is a study of theories and perspectives on the human organism in the context of seventeenth and eighteenth century Western Europe. It looks at numerous apparatuses used to interpret the history of science, from the perspective(s) of individuals, and particular groups and sub-groups, with a particular agenda of placing science as a discipline, within the cultural context of the times. Relating the particulars of the data received and gathered from experiments, research and collections, the substrata of methodologies used to explicate the intersecting parameters of knowledge became cornerstone in the ways in which the history of science was to be written and presented.

Isis, 2008

This essay opens up the question of what difference the history of science makes. What is the value of the history of science, beyond its role as an academic pursuit that we historians of science know and love? It introduces the set of essays that follow as explorations that grew out of a seminar on this topic and that arise from the authors' particular concerns both that historians of science do not work hard enough to make their work of value and that others do not know of the potential. That seminar, at the Marine Biological Laboratory, was funded for nineteen years by the Dibner Institute and last year by Brent Dibner. It will continue and carry such discussions forward in new ways as the Arizona State University-Marine Biological Laboratory History of Biology Seminar Series. This set of focused essays seeks to invite lively discussion and response.

Science in History, 2007

This is the preprint version of a published paper. The latter was not the usual history of science. What it tried to do may be described as follows: It deals with a number of different themes. First, it deals what the present author understood by ‘science’ when the essay was written and how far it is possible to speak of ‘science’ as regards past human cognitive efforts. Secondly it goes on to examine in some detail the features of human cognition – the characteristics of human language and the nature of non-linguistic elements in human cognition. Thirdly it tries to understand how such features emerged in the course of the evolution of hominids and particularly the Homo sapiens. The discussions are from an unabashed Darwinian evolutionary standpoint, for although the latter is far from providing all the answers, it seems to be the paradigm with the most promise. Here again, the author was guided by his own intellectual preferences and convictions. Having done with such largely theoretical themes the essay moves on to examine ‘science in Indian history’ down to c.1800. The treatment has not aspired to be comprehensive but has concentrated on items that appeared intriguing. There is in between a relatively extended treatment of the Greek-speaking world, for reasons that will be given in their proper place. A discussion of the ‘scientific revolution’ in Europe seemed indispensable, for our understanding of science and its history and indeed the very nature of our present existence is a result of the ‘scientific revolution’. There is no discussion of science in India in the colonial and post-colonial periods, for other articles in the volume in which the paper was published were devoted to these themes. But it was deemed important to comment on certain qualities of modern Indian science and to bring into discussion the roles of modern science and technology in a world looking ahead to environmental catastrophe.