Science and Society The Scientist's Role in Society. A Comparative Study. By Joseph Ben-David. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., and London: Prentice-Hall, 1971. Pp. xii + 207. £1.20 (paperback) (original) (raw)
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European Journal of Philosophy, 2021
On 24 March 1877, in a lecture recognized as "the first and indeed the most decisive attack on established historical scholarship," the German physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond addressed the topic of "Civilization and Science" (du Bois-Reymond, 1912; Fuchs, 1994). Passing over "the unedifying details of politics," du Bois-Reymond pointed to a comparable absence of moral or aesthetic improvement among "the heroes of literature and art" (du Bois-Reymond, 1912, pp. 608-620). As he saw it the true basis of historical development was to be found in the study of the natural world. "Science is the chief instrument of civilization," he announced, "and the history of science the essential history of humanity" (du Bois-Reymond, 1912, p. 596). Du Bois-Reymond's proclamation could serve as the charter of my field. Indeed, George Sarton repeated its argument six decades later in an address inaugurating a "seminary on the history of science" at Harvard University: Definition. Science is systematized positive knowledge, or what has been taken as such at different ages and in different places. Theorem. The acquisition and systematization of positive knowledge are the only human activities that are truly cumulative and progressive. Corollary. The history of science is the only history that can illustrate the progress of mankind. In fact, progress has no definite and unquestionable meaning in other fields than the field of science (Sarton, 1936, p. 5). The last volume of Stephen Gaukroger's four-part history, Civilization and the Culture of Science, takes aim at this familiar story of triumph. Gaukroger's book is divided into four parts. First, it recounts how champions of science presented the investigation of the natural world as the basis of Western superiority. Then, it describes how claims for the unity of science came to substitute for the dogma of Christian universality. Next, it shows how scientists grounded those claims in an Epicurean doctrine that reduced nature to matter and energy. Finally, it recalls how economics, philosophy, technology, eugenics, and popular culture endorsed this secular characterization of the world. Such a presentation has its merits. It is not hard to find a line of continuity between Christian missionaries who strove to enlighten the world and 19th-century boosters who spread the gospel of science. Improvements in knowledge lent Condorcet, Comte, and Spencer the same conviction that Ricci, Bossuet, and Intorcetta drew from teachings of the Church. Similarly, Virchow, du Bois-Reymond, and Büchner's calls to unite biology with chemistry and physics helped to compensate for the disappointments of the Revolution of 1848. Haeckel, Dobzhansky, Simpson, and Mayr saw evolution as the key to progress in nature; Mill attempted to unify "ethics, politics, economics, and logic" (p. 251); Cohen, Windelbrand, and Cassirer employed Kantian reasoning to defend science "as the motor of civilization and culture" (p. 287); touts hawked science in children's books,
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Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2012
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