THE EUROPEAN BIRTH OF MODERN SCIENCE: AN EXERCISE IN MACRO AND COMPARATIVE HISTORY (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction to special issue of Histories: (New) Histories of Science, in and beyond Modern Europe
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.
Fashioning the Discipline: History of Science in the European Intellectual Tradition
Minerva, 2006
This paper offers personal reflections on the fashioning of the history of science in Europe. It presents the history of science as a discipline emerging in the twentieth century from an intellectual and political context of great complexity, and concludes with a plea for tolerance and pluralism in historiographical methods and approaches.
An outline of the rise of science in the Renaissance and during the Reformation in parallel with the emergence of banking from the shadows to take a foremost part in Europe, and a review of some of the key contributions of Descartes and Newton to shaping it. It was the second part of a module on Technique and Science comprising papers by a number of thinkers.
The History of Science as European Self-Portraiture
European Review, 2006
Since the Enlightenment, the history of science has been enlisted to show the unity and distinctiveness of Europe. This paper, written on the occasion of the award of the 2005 Erasmus Prize to historians of science Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, traces the intertwined narratives of the history of science and European modernity from the 18th century to the present. Whether understood as triumph or tragedy (and there have been eloquent proponents of both views), the Scientific Revolution has been portrayed as Europe's decisive break with tradition – the first such break in world history and the model for all subsequent epics of modernization in other cultures. The paper concludes with reflections on how a new history of science, exemplified in the work of Shapin and Schaffer, may transform the self-image of Europe and conceptions of truth itself.
On the emergence of the system of modern science
Cosmos+Taxis, 2022
It is widely acknowledged by both historians and scientists that in the course of the 17 th century in Western Europe a new way of thinking about nature and knowledge took hold and new methods of obtaining knowledge of nature were proposed and tried. The spectacular success of this new science was recognized even at the time, and the genius of its leading practitioners was widely appreciated. There had been brilliant upsurges in scientific activity in various times and places before this, but this episode is unique in that, rather than lapsing into stasis or abandonment, it has continuously grown in both results and participants to the point where it is an integral part of modern civilization. Many reasons have been proposed for the origin and the success of the new science, but none convincingly address why this scientific revolution should have the staying power that others have not. The hypothesis developed here is that the innovations of the 17 th century-changes in methodology, epistemology, ideology, and institutions-coalesced to form a radically new social arrangement in the form of a self-maintaining system of scientific processes, an arrangement that can be formally described as an anticipatory social system.
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