The History of Science in a World of Readers (original) (raw)
Related papers
History of Science in a World of Readers: Frames of References for Global Exchange
2019
The idea for this collection was born on a foggy day in March 2015 during a scholarly retreat on the outskirts of Berlin. A photo of a reader sitting in a crowded bookshop in Shanghai, China, holding the 1990 Chinese translation of Joseph Needham's introductory volume, Science and Civilisation, 1 elicited a lively debate about the purpose, themes, and reception of translations in the globalizing discipline of the history of science, technology and medicine. 2 What role should historians of science have in communicating their own body of literature-its methods and concerns-across linguistic boundaries? This anthology, published in both English and Chinese, is an initial response to that debate, reflecting a wish to counteract and complement both market-driven and individual efforts with a collective reflection on some of the influential literature in this field published in English since 1990. The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin, and the History of Science Society (HSS) organized a selection committee including representatives from six other societies-the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM), the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS),
The History of Science in a World of Readers (edited by Dagmar Schäfer and Angela N.H. Creager)
Max Planck Research Library for the History and Development of Knowledge, 2019
What role should historians of science, technology, and medicine have in communicating their own body of literature—its methods and concerns—across linguistic boundaries? This anthology is a proactive response to this question. As the West and the East become ever more closely related through travel, trade, and—not least—the globalization of knowledge, the seven essays in this volume should stimulate new engagements between English and Chinese readers on the centrality of science, technology, and medicine for our histories and our future. A wider selection of influential literature published in English since 1990 has been translated into Chinese and published in China in a companion volume.
Review-Essay of two books on the history of science
Contrary to what I was taught in high school in the mid-1940s, science is no longer defined as an inductive methodology for immaculately conceiving culture-free truth after sifting through a huge data base of objective facts. For without some prior hypothesis to guide her, a scientist would not be able to decide which facts were relevant. Nowadays hypotheses can come from anywhere in the imagination or culture within which the scientist is working. The importance of a scientific hypothesis is that it be framed in such a way that it can be falsified when tested. Science now has a history and is part of human cultural evolution. The major premise of both these recent books is that scientific innovation needs to be understood as intricately bound to the particular time and cultural milieu in which it occurred.
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine: A Second Look at Joseph Needham
Isis, 2019
These essays take a second look at Joseph Needham (1900-1995), the British biochemist whose colossal publishing project with Cambridge University Press, Science and Civilisation in China (1954-), attracts and frustrates historians of science, medicine, and technology in equal measure. Current reflections on the state of play in these fields address the themes, methods, and approaches that Needham took seriously and, in many cases, pioneered. This Second Look section probes the contributions that Needham's work can still make to ongoing debates. I n 1954, Joseph Needham published the first installment of Science and Civilisation in China (SCC) with Cambridge University Press as a down payment on his exploration of "China's hitherto unrecognized contributions to science, technology, and scientific thought." The productive challenges to a Eurocentric field that Needham unspooled over the following years succeeded-perhaps too well. While Needham professed confidence that the series' ensuing volumes-those that he would not live to see-would not alter his views, the posthumously published General Conclusions and Reflections (2004) to SCC gave ample evidence that both Needham's framing questions and his answers were losing their conceptual and methodological grip on the profession. 1 While some researchers continue to wrestle with the perennial "Needham question"-Why did modern science develop in Renaissance Europe, and not elsewhere?-others refute its counterfactual, comparativist, or civilizational premises in order to
History of Science and Global History: Portraits of a Fraught Relationship, 1900-2020s
Dhruv Raina, ed., Histories of the Sciences and the Politics of History. Festschrift for Irfan Habib (Delhi: Primus Books, 2024), pp. 221-247., 2024
The so called 'global turn' of the 1990s had a profound influence on all disciplines in the social sciences, not least the history of science and science studies. Indeed, the domain has seen a rising spate of publications, both books and articles, ever since the turn of the present century. 1 The journal Isis itself, has, for example, published at least four of its focus sections on global themes since 2004. 2 In addition to the continued deployment of an irenic vision where all human cultures contributed to the ocean of knowledge culminating in modern science, à la Joseph Needham, or to the diffusionist one embodied in George Basalla's emblematic article of 1967, both of which we shall come to later, other recent approaches to globalizing the history of science include a multiplication of narratives of knowledge-formation in different linguistic, national, and regional contexts, to complement the traditional, European, narrative of the history of science. 3 More often than not, this concatenation constitutes a repackaging of traditional area studies, or a re-labelling of what was previously called 'non-Western' science. Although some authors have included what
Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science promotes scholarly research in the historiography of science and chronicles its history and criticism. Although historiography of science is a sub-discipline of History, we construe this subject broadly to include analysis of the historiography of science produced by history of science, philosophy of science and related disciplines. By focusing its analysis on the different historical, social and epistemological implications of science, historiography of science is a transversal knowledge with respect to the production of science, hence the name of this journal. In order to accomplish its purpose, Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science discusses historical, theoretical, conceptual and methodological aspects of the different themes, works and authors present in this tradition, as well as the new approaches in the recent historiography of science.
One Hundred Years of Internationalizing the History of Science
Isis, 2024
This essay examines how internationalization has been a part of the history of the History of Science Society (HSS) from its establishment in 1924 to the present. Although the HSS remains a US-based society and its annual meetings are held primarily in the US, attended by mostly US-based scholars, we argue that there has always been a strong commitment to internationalism that continues to this day. We walk through the hundred years of the Society in four phases, namely the Sarton years (1924-52), the coming-of-age of the field in America (1953-88), the opening up of the HSS to the world (1989-99), and the new millennium