1History of Science 259 History of the History of Science Spring 2013 Steven Shapin Contact details: Science Center

451 Phone: 617.384.7997 E-mail: shapin@fas.harvard.edu Office hours: Wednesdays, 10 -> 11.30 (or by arrangement) Assessment: An extended essay (20-25 pages) on a relevant topic agreed between the student and me is the major basis (75%) for course assessment. Active seminar participation is expected, as is regular attendance, and 25% of the final grade will reflect that participation. Readings: Apart from Thomas Kuhns book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), all readings will be made available to you, and copies of the relevant readings should be brought to class. January 29th: Introduction: The history of science is one among many specialized academic subjects. It has its jargon, its arcana, its internal methodological, conceptual, and personal disputes-- some of which neither are nor are expected to be of much interest to other academics or to the wider culture. In that sense, the history of science is much the same as the physiology of marine worms, Indonesian anthropology, or the history of late Antiquity. Yet the history of science is not like these other subjects in that it counts as the history of truth-- of our cultures most authoritative system of knowledge, of what is reckoned to be the source of much secular power. What science and its history are to the 20th and 21st centuries, Christian religion was

to the centuries preceding. That analogy with religion is crucial, for it immediately suggests that the nature of science, its practice, and its historical development are widely regarded as quite special, and the disciplines that speak about such things are themselves placed perilously close to what might be called the modern secular sacred. And, for this reason, the history of science is not just one among many specialized academic subjects. It is a perspicuous site for describing and interpreting changes in modern culture, in its values, in its self-understanding, and the way in which it views itself in relation to its past and to other cultures. That is the way in which we will approach the history of science in this course. Our main purpose is to foster an understanding of why science matters in the modern world, and, in particular, of how academic understandings of the historical development of science have responded to changing cultural, social, political, and economic conditions. How the history of science is written about in 2010 is a very different thing from how it was written about in 1910, and we want to understand how and why our culture has witnessed these changes in sensibility. The history of science, we will come to appreciate, holds a mirror up to modern culture in a way no other humanistic or social scientific discipline does. Stories about the historical development of science (or of other pertinent categories: philosophy, knowledge, technique, human understanding) can be traced as far back as one likes, so any survey of the history of these sorts of things is bound to be conventionally (and therefor arbitrarily) bounded. Our course discussions can range over a much wider cultural and temporal terrain, but I have decided formally to take the story back no further than the late 19th century and to concentrate on developments on or near the main lines of development that resulted in the Anglophone academic discipline of the history of science that became familiar in the period after the Second World War. Our purpose is, indeed, historical selfunderstanding- who are our founding figures and what moved them to approach the history of science as they did?-- but it is a self-understanding which does not exempt us from history. How do present-day presumptions and practices figure as moments in history? No required reading

February 5th: Modernity Making: Science and Religion One of the late 19th-century purposes of writing about the historical development of science was to make sure people understood the proper relationship between science and religion and to show the disastrous consequences-- for both science and religion-- that flowed from getting this relationship wrong. In Whites work, and in several other late Victorian texts with similar titles, the history of science was part of a cautionary tale whose moral was that science must be left alone and not interfered with by external social and cultural forces. Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918) was the first President of Cornell University (from 1866 to 1885), a practicing Episcopalian who believed that both science and religion benefitted from mutual disengagement. In other works in the warfare genre, religion was treated far less sympathetically, appearing as dogmatism, superstition, and ignorance. There is in fact some ambiguity in Whites account about who the aggressor has been: Whites overarching view seems to be that it is theology, but the details of his story also suggest a positive case for scientific aggression. Nevertheless, it is worth considering some of the consequences of warfare as a way of understanding how science and religion have historically related to each other, or even how they must relate. First, the notion of warfare curiously allows science to be portrayed as both victim and victor: scientific martyrs (notably Galileo but also Darwin) allow scientists to lay claim to a role charged with religious meaning, while the triumph of truth over error is also a theme in theological narratives of salvation and redemption. Second, the warfare genre identifies the proper boundaries around science, interference with which result in corrupted knowledge. (This will prove an important theme in later sessions dealing with science and its sociocultural environment.) Third, the warfare trope also provides a formula for writing the history of science as a fundamentally unified and continuous story. The Darwin controversies that White starts with emerge as just the latest in a long line of battles that go back without much interruption into the dim, dark past and that have afflicted all forms of science. Lastly, it situates the dynamical relations between science and religion within narratives about the making of modernity. Stories about

modernity-making, from this point of view, will center on the Birth of Modern Science and on its struggles for independence. Enormous consequences can be drawn from such views for educational and cultural policy. John William Draper (1811-1882) was an English-born American chemist and physician whose History differs significantly from Whites later account in its more vigorous partisanship: The history of Science, Draper wrote, is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other. The conflict, for Draper, was clearer, sharper, and less ambiguous than it was for White. Notice also the particular focus on Roman Catholicism and the way in which Draper insists that the conflict he is describing is a living issue. John Tyndalls celebrated address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting at Belfast in 1874 is a different type of document. It is a historically wideranging statement about science-religion relations written by a distinguished scientist, and in a precise scientific and cultural context: it is a moment in the concrete Victorian politics of science. (The Darwinian revolution and scientific materialism are its historical endpoints and Irish religious and institutional issues provide much of its force.) It is aggressive; it is historically sweeping, going from Antiquity to the scientific present; and it offers a naturalistic (scientific) explanatory of religious beliefs. Readings: Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York: D. Appleton, 1896), Vol. I: Introduction and chapter 3 (sections III-VI). John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (New York: D. Appleton, 1875), Preface. John Tyndall, Address delivered before the British Association for the Advancement of Science assembled at Belfast (London: Longmans, Green, 1874).

February 12th: Modernity Making: Science, Business, and Politics The broad notion of essential (or inevitable) conflict between science and religion has never lacked for critics, and in the session to come on Robert Mertons work we shall see that thesis explicitly attacked. Mertons views built on those of the great German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), and, especially, on Webers appreciation of the constitutive relationship between the rational and the irrational in the course of human history. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber aimed to show that the rationalizing impulses of the modern economic order were inspired by deeply religious sentiments, thus challenging assumptions about what was essentially rational and what was essentially emotional or affective in culture. As the 18th-century philosopher David Hume wrote, Reason is the slave of the passions. And, although Weber had only a little to say in this text about science, it is clear that he thought about scientific culture in much the same way that he thought about economic-rational ways of life: modern science too arose out of religious impulses. Webers influential essay on Science as a Vocation addresses one of the questions that most vexed, and continues to trouble, intellectuals: what should scientists position be with respect to the world of values? Against contemporary urgings that scientists-- including social scientists-- take a moral and political stand, Weber upheld an ideal of ascetic renunciation: the scientific laboratory and the class-room were not proper places for doing politics or pronouncing on what should be done. But could Webers ideal itself make sense without some notion of a vocation (calling) for science which resembled a religious calling? Webers American contemporary, the economist and social scientist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), possibly had an effect on Webers thinking about university politics, but, for Veblen, the real problem was not a religious, moral, or political contamination of science but a concern with which we are well familiar in the 21st century: the distortions of science which may result from commercial concerns. American science in the very early 20th century, Veblen complained, was being compromised by university administrators who demanded immediate commercial and economic results. But, Veblen argued, such concerns were

both wrong for any institution with legitimate claims to be a university and based upon a misunderstanding of the actual relations between the world of science and the world of business. Veblen here offers a sketchy history of what might be called pure and applied science: how they have related; how they ought to relate. Veblens 1906 essay on The Place of Science in Modern Civilization has a broader ambition than his later critique of The Higher Learning. Here Veblen describes the matter of fact instinct he supposed to be uniquely characteristic of modern Western culture, the absolute authority of the scientist as the ultimate arbiter of reality, and yet the uneasiness that results from scientific matter-of-factness as an answer to questions of value. In all of these readings, we see historically situated statements about the historical processes that have produced modern states of affairs. Readings: Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (New York: Sagamore Press, 1957; orig. publ. 1918), chs 1 (parts 1, 4-5), 3, 6. Thorstein Veblen, The Place of Science in Modern Civilization, American Journal of Sociology 11 (1906), 585-609. Max Weber, Science as a Vocation, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1991; art. orig. publ. 1919, from a speech in 1917), pp. 129-156. February 19th: The Great Tradition: 20th-Century Origins It should be acknowledged that people have been writing about the historical development of natural knowledge ever since it appeared as a recognized cultural category. The Greeks commented on it; so did the humanists of the late Renaissance; Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes offered historical and sociological accounts of the history of science in the 17th century, as did Scottish Common Sense philosophers in the 18th century. In the 19th century the history of science appeared as a major strand in writings on the history of civilization, and in the early 20th century commentary on the historical development

of science was, as we have just seen, integrated into accounts of modernization. But the institutionalization of the history of science as a recognized academic speciality in the Englishspeaking world was largely the responsibility of Harvards first professor of the subject, the Belgian emigr George Sarton (1885-1956). To be brutally truthful, no one reads Sarton anymore. His signature works, such as the Introduction to the History of Science and A History of Science, are widely, if unkindly, considered to be boring, hagiographic, individualistic, triumphalist, and pedantic- all the things we have now agreed to set aside and that make us embarrassed about our academic ancestors. And yet Sartons assumptions about the nature of science and its mode of change speak eloquently to the state of the wider culture in the early 20th-century and to the place of science in it. Some of those assumptions are most clearly visible in several of Sartons more accessible short essays. You will note how Sarton treats the history of science as the secret history of civilization, as the undoubted history of the works of great men, and as a potential resource in making new scientific knowledge. I have not assigned any specific portions of Sartons multi-volume Introduction to the History of Science as required reading, but you might consult it just to get a sense of what a fundamentally bibliographic enterprise in the history of science looked like. Readings: George Sarton, The Study of the History of Science (New York: Dover, 1957; orig. publ. 1936). George Sarton, War and Civilization, Isis 2 (1919), 315-321. George Sarton, The Faith of a Humanist, Isis 3 (1920), 3-6. George Sarton, Knowledge and Charity, Isis 5 (1923), 5-19. February 26th: The Marxist Challenge The effect of early Marxist interventions in the history of science was deeply shocking to traditions of writing about science that had developed in the Anglophone world by the early

1930s. Three related points pressed by the Soviet writer Boris Hessen (1893-1936) and his colleagues were especially disturbing. First, science was not to be considered as an autonomous cultural growth, following its own immanent principles of development. Rather, science responded powerfully to both the cultural currents and economic needs of the society in which it was historically situated. Second, while towering scientific achievements were indeed made by individuals, these individuals were not to be treated as free-acting, autonomous geniuses, but as creatures of their circumstances, and even of their social class. Third, the results of writing the history of science, understood in this way, could be recruited for State policy. If science historically was the kind of thing that responded so powerfully to circumstances and needs outside of itself, then no harm could be done, and much good might be achieved, by systematizing those directions and responses. Science might be rationally planned, and it should be planned for the betterment of an egalitarian society. Hessens incendiary 1931 essay on Newton provoked, as we shall see in the following weeks, an enormous response, both by Marxist admirers and by bourgeois historians appalled by his picture of science and its mode of change. Reading: Boris Hessen, The Social and Economic Roots of Newtons Principia, in N. I. Bukharin et al., Science at the Cross Roads (London: Frank Cass, 1971; orig. publ. 1931), pp. 149-212. March 5th: The History of Science and the Planning of Science We have suggested that an understanding of how science historically developed might be a resource in science policy and that it was so viewed by a number of historians and scientists. Here we look at some ways in which the history, sociology, and philosophy of science were indeed mobilized for these purposes in the middle of the 20th century. If ambitious attempts to plan and organize science and technology were notable features of the Soviet Union, versions of science planning were also attractive in liberal democracies. In the United States, the New Deal was marked by such ambitions, during the only period in the 20th century when America had a vigorous socialist movement. But

Great Britain had not only a strongly class-based socialist movement, and a Communist Party sympathetic to the Soviet Union and attractive to intellectuals and scientists, but also an electorally viable Labour Party which adopted many articles of socialist policy. Hence, there was a real constituency in Britain for intellectual explorations of the basis for and practice of rational science planning. J. D. Bernal (1901-1971) was a noted British crystallographer (and Communist Party member), and a public intellectual with wide-ranging cultural and political interests. Although Marxism was popular among British scientists (Joseph Needham, J. B. S. Haldane, Hyman Levy, Lancelot Hogben, et al.), Bernal was without doubt the most articulate and influential spokesman for a socialist scientific enterprise. He offered a vision of the history of science in which science was always part of society and constructively responsive to its needs. Bernals version of the history of science elicited a vigorous response from British scientists who considered that he was encouraging a systematic attack on the autonomy of science and the freedom of the individual scientist. The Society for Freedom of Science (SFS) was formed to protect science from just such threats, and its leading spokesman was the Hungarian emigr physical chemist Michael Polanyi (1891-1976). Polanyi did not write history as such, but he developed an influential view of the role of tacit knowledge in science which was used to undermine the rationalism of those who sought to organize and plan science. If science was, as Polanyi maintained, personal knowledge, then it could not be effectively planned, and society had no choice but to accord autonomy to the scientific community and to trust their judgment. The essay on The Republic of Science illustrates how Polanyi used ideas about the nature of science to oppose threats to its autonomy. Polanyis colleague in the SFS, the Oxford biologist John R. Baker (1900-1984), gives a concrete view of what he saw as the disasters of planned and socially responsible science. Readings: J. D. Bernal, Science in History, 4 vols. (London: Watts & Co., 1954), Vol. IV, ch. 14.

Michael Polanyi, The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory, Minerva 1 (1962), 54-74. John R. Baker, Science and the Planned State (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1945), chs 2-4. March 12th: Marxism Domesticated: Science, Technology, and Society after Hessen Robert K. Merton (1910-2003) is widely regarded as the father of the sociology of science, and his 1935 Harvard doctoral thesis on relations between science, technology, religion, and society in 17th-century England is taken as the founding moment of that discipline, certainly in Anglophone settings. At the same time, Mertons thesis was an exercise in the history of science, and George Sarton was one of his two thesis advisers, along with the White Russian emigr sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968), who was the first chair of Harvards sociology department. There were three main themes of contextual interest in Mertons thesis. The first was his attempt to take on board the positive sociological lessons of Hessens work while distancing himself from the Soviet scholars vulgar Marxism: science did respond to external social forces, but that responsiveness was neither automatic nor total; much belonged to the internal logic of science. Second, Marxist materialism was to be leavened with the idealism associated with the sociologist Max Weber: among the causes affecting science in the 17th century was religious belief, and Merton took very seriously the religious motivation of important strands of the Scientific Revolution. Contra the views of writers like White, Draper, and Tyndall, there was no necessary or substantial conflict between science and religion in the English setting that Merton studied. The only partial success that Merton had in distinguishing sociology from Marxism is illustrated by the dismissive essay on the Merton thesis by the English historian of science A. Rupert Hall (1920-2009). The third theme reflecting contextual concern was only hinted at in Mertons thesis, and was more visible in essays about the ethos of science appearing in the early 1940s. Here, in the setting of World War II, Merton described the normative

structure of science in such a way that made clear the threats posed by both Fascism and Communism to the integrity of scientific objectivity. Merton was defending science from attack as much as he was describing and explaining it. Readings: Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Harper, 1970; orig. 1935 Harvard Ph. D. thesis: Sociological Aspects of Scientific Development in Seventeenth-Century England. This thesis was published a few years later as Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England, Osiris 4 (1938), 360-632, and it is this version that is available on the course website and which you should read.) Robert K. Merton, Science and Social Order and The Normative Structure of Science, in idem, The Sociology of Science, ed. Norman W. Storer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973; arts. orig. publ. 1938, 1942), pp. 254-266, 267-278. A. Rupert Hall, Merton Revisited, or Science and Society in the Seventeenth Century, History of Science 2 (1963), 1-15. March 19th: No class (Spring break) March 26th: The History of Scientific Ideas Historians of science these days tend to take for granted that the core of their discipline is the history of scientific ideas (concepts, beliefs), or, at any rate, the formal intellectual products of scientific activity. True, practitioners also study inter alia the history of scientific institutions, of scientific roles, and of the relations between science and the State. But these are often taken as marginal extras to the history of ideas. It was not, however, always so. A history of scientific discoveries is not necessarily the same as the history of scientific ideas, and much very early history of science undertook to establish and document who had discovered what and when. (We will have at least mentioned this in connection with Sarton, and you may find that most laypeople, and many sorts of academics, also think this is what

historians of science do.) And so the history of science considered as a body of ideas is itself a historical development, and the turn to the history of scientific ideas also has its historicity. On the one hand, the history of scientific ideas could be a response to the question what is historical about science?. Scientific ideas, it might be maintained, are not timeless truths-- though science might be said to produce such truths-nor was it the task of historians to award points to ideas according to how well they anticipated present-day science. From the point of view of academic history, scientific ideas were as particular to their cultural contexts as, say, political or artistic ideas. They had a historical integrity and coherence. And that, indeed, was the major contribution of the RussianFrench scholar Alexandre Koyr (1892-1964), whose work on Galileo had a decisive influence on subsequent historical writing. In this way, the history of science could hope to identify itself as authentically historical: it was not a mere handmaid of present-day science. Yet another context for the emergence of the history of scientific ideas in the post-World War II period was the radical alternative it posed both to history of science as chronology and hagiography (Sarton et al.) and to the Marxists. Here it was understood that Marxist externalism was a denigration of science, rendering it a mere auxiliary to the policy-makers and planners. A history of science as a body of self-contained ideas might be mobilized as a defense of the intellectual autonomy of science. Koyrs essay Galileo and Plato is a seminal example of his history of ideas approach, while it also takes a swipe at the Marxists. Herbert Butterfields The Origins of Modern Science is a semi-popular text inspired by Koyr, while his earlier anti-triumphalist Whig Interpretation of History allows an appreciation of the trajectory Butterfield took from the history of political ideas to the history of scientific ideas. Readings: Alexandre Koyr, Galileo and Plato, Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (1943), 400-428.

Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800, revised ed. (New York: Free Press, 1965; orig. publ. 1957), Introduction, chaps 10, 12. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell, 1931). April 2nd: Big Science and Its Cold War History World War II not only radically changed the relations between science and the State, it also altered public perceptions of the nature of science and its capabilities. In the early 17th century Francis Bacon argued that knowledge is power and that a reformed natural philosophy would be a vital aid to State power. But until the 20th century belief in the ultimate utilitarian capacities of disinterested scientific research was patchy at best, and, in the United States, the Federal government was reluctant to accept a role as paymaster for science. Although the success of early 20th-century hightech industrial research, especially in the electrical, chemical, and photographic industries, did much to change public perceptions, Hiroshima was the decisive event-- a dramatically destructive illustration of how quickly, and unpredictably, even the purest scientific research might be transformed into technologies of enormous power. To the distaste of writers like Polanyi and Baker, the Marxists had seemed to view science primarily as a potential source of economic and social power, but now this became the dominant tendency in liberal democracies as well. And as a direct result of this change in sensibilities, Little Science became Big Science, integrated into what President Eisenhower famously called the military-industrial complex, later expanded to the military-industrial-academic complex. Members of the scientific community had mixed feelings about the new state of affairs in which American science found itself in the Cold War State. Sociologists of science tried to describe it and contrast it with the past, while historians response was in most cases indirect and attenuated. At Harvard, President James Bryant Conant (1893-1978) returned from the Manhattan Project convinced that a pedagogical response was necessary to address new problems of the relations between

scientific power and democratic culture. The Director of the Atomic Energy Commission Alvin Weinberg (1915-2006) introduced the phrase Big Science, in the course of worrying about the consequences of bigness for scientific integrity, as, several months earlier, did President Eisenhower. In this setting, and directly responding to the identification of Big Science a few years earlier, sociologist-historian Derek deSolla Price helped launch a program of scientometrics, mining quantitative measures of scientific activity- gross numbers of scientific publications in different fields, patterns of citation, etc.to develop ways of knowing the history of science objectively, potentially establishing a science of science. Readings: Dwight David Eisenhower, Farewell Address to the Nation, January 17, 1961, in The Military-Industrial Complex, ed. Carroll W. Pursell, Jr. (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 204-208. Alvin M. Weinberg, Impact of Large-Scale Science on the United States, Science 134, No. 3473 (21 July 1961), 161-164. James B. Conant, On Understanding Science: An Historical Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. xi-xv, 1-64. Derek J. deSolla Price, Little Science, Big Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). April 9th: Science Historicized and Normalized, Progress and Reason Problematized After taking his Ph.D. in physics at Harvard, Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) turned to the history of science, spending time as a member of the Society of Fellows and teaching in the new undergraduate course that President J. B. Conant designed for teaching non-scientists about the nature and methods of science. After writing an important book on The Copernican Revolution (1959), Kuhn produced a short, synthetic work on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which has been widely accounted one of the most important books of the 20th century-- in any field. (Conants influence can be noted in the cases treated in SSR, many of which come from the undergraduate

course.) Indeed, the history, philosophy, and sociology of science are still trying to come to terms with Kuhns work. While the precise status of Kuhns notions of paradigms, normal science, crises, anomalies, incommensurability, and revolutions, are still much debated, for our purposes it is important to note two fundamental features of SSR. First, Kuhn criticized existing history of science for not being historical enough. In the course of celebrating scientific progress and a supposedly unique rational and formalized Scientific Method, historians had, Kuhn thought, misrepresented the actual nature of science and its mode of change. Instead, historians should look closely at scientific practice and give accounts of that practice warts and all, whatever challenges emerged for traditional notions of progress and reason. Second, and relatedly, Kuhns approach was naturalistic, in the sense that he wanted, so far as possible, to describe and explain science and scientific change, rather than to celebrate and defend it. Appearing in the early 1960s, during the height of the Cold War, and just after the build-up of State-sponsored science had begun to cause the sort of concern that we discussed in our last session, Kuhns naturalism can be instructively contrasted with Sartons celebration of science and Mertons defense of science against threat. A securely institutionalized science could bear a naturalistic approach; it seemed to many that science did not now need defending in the way it once did. And, while Kuhn posed all sorts of problems for progressivist and rationalist accounts of science, criticism of those accounts did not amount to a criticism of science itself. Furthermore, the American educational response to Sputnik in 1957 had included, as a minor feature of the National Defense Education Act, a vast expansion of support for the history and philosophy of science, and Kuhns view of the historical integrity of scientific paradigms-- modeled on Koyrs historiography- offered resources for asserting the historical integrity of the newly expanding academic profession of the history of science. Reading: Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

April 16th: The History of Science as the History of Culture: Boundaries Relaxed Kuhns naturalism was far from the only element making for a more professional history of science, increasingly disengaged from celebratory functions and more and more confident in the possibility and interest of a more fully historical approach to the subject, free from the presentist concerns of practicing scientists. Whereas in the past, historians of science had been overwhelmingly recruited from the ranks of scientists, and those with substantial scientific training, the history of science now began to be practiced by those who identified more completely with cultural history, the history of ideas, and, later, even social history. In Britain, the influence of cultural historical circles with ties to the Warburg Institute in London was important, stimulating awareness of the constitutive historical relations between science and other forms of culture, such as religion, art, and magic. Within a naturalistic orientation, there was little awareness of possible denigration, since the task of historians of science was taken to be documenting the condition of science as it actually existed in past epochs, rather than rationally reconstructing it as it ought ideally to have been. The great economist Lord Keynes (1883-1946) signaled the direction of much future work on early modern science when he announced that Newton should not be viewed not as the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians. The new science was to be assimilated to the traditions out of which it emerged, not celebrated for the modernity it presaged. In the 1960s, a group of scholars at Leeds University produced an impressive body of work exploring substantial links between the science of the 17th century and currents of mysticism, magic, and social reform. Once historians worried very much about how to demarcate proper science from corrosive non-scientific cultural currents; now the name of the game seemed to be showing the connectedness of science with these forms of culture. Readings: John Maynard Keynes, Newton, the Man, in The Royal Society, Newton Tercentenary Celebrations, 15-19 July 1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946), pp. 27-34.

J. E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, Newton and the Pipes of Pan, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 21 (1966), 108-143. Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). April 23rd: The West and the Rest

Many of the preceding readings in this course make The Scientific Revolution into the major organizing concept and event in writing the history of modern science. It was taken as the moment at which The World Was Made Modern, and, hence, as the watershed in the Rise of Science. In the most simplistic forms, there was no science before the Scientific Revolution and everything that happened since was the working out of the conceptual and methodological achievements of the Scientific Revolution. If that way of thinking changed how people wrote the history of Western science, it also had wide-ranging effects on how historians and social scientists wrote about science in nonWestern cultures. Was it even proper to use the word science for anything but the cultural products of early modern Europe, which were then universalized? What were the historical relations between the achievements of non-Western cultures in technology and natural knowledge and developments in Europe? Joseph Needham (1900-1995), an eminent English embryologist and socialist, served in China in the Sino-British Science Cooperation Office during World War II, and the result of his quickly developing fascination with the history of Chinese culture was a work of scholarship which some have called the greatest scholarly achievement of the 20th century, his multivolume Science and Civilization in China. More than anyone else, it was Needham who demonstrated to the rest of the world the astounding range of scientific and technological achievements of ancient Chinese culture. Nevertheless, Needhams overarching question about China, as economically expressed in these short essays, was about failure. If Modern Science was born only once, then it happened in Europe in the 17th century. Why did Chinese civilization, for

all its considerable achievements, fail to develop Modern Science? He could, and did, argue that the rivers of Chinese achievements were among many that flowed into the one great ocean of universal science, but he felt he could not maintain that science emerged in any other place but Europe, nor could he, or his contemporaries, seriously entertain the thought that science was not unitary and universal, but that the sciences were many and culturally diverse. The anthropologist Robin Horton was not willing to entertain such a thought either, but he was interested in exploring the heretical idea that there are many similarities between modern Western science and African traditional ways of thinking. You will notice his uses of Kuhns ideas in making that suggestion. Consider what might be changing about late 20thcentury culture and world political arrangements that made previous assumptions about universal science and Western intellectual superiority seem less secure than they once were. Consider also how ones understandings of historical relations between the west and the rest bear upon practical decisions with respect to development and with respect to the world cultural conflicts which now so occupy our attention. Readings: George Sarton, East and West, in idem, The History of Science and the New Humanism (New York: Henry Holt, 1931), pp. 59-110. Joseph Needham, On Science and Social Change [1946] and Science and Society in East and West [1964], in Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), pp. 123-153, 190-217. Robin Horton, African Traditional Thought and Western Science, in Rationality, ed. Bryan R. Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970; art. orig. publ. 1967), pp. 131-171. George Basalla, The Spread of Western Science, Science 156 (5 May 1967), 611-622. April 30th: Historicizing the Categories: History of Science Becomes Self-Conscious and Begins to Wonder What in the World It Is

Once the history of science becomes a normal part of history, and once science becomes a normal historical object, a new problem arises. The problem is one of identity. What, as Peter Dear asked, is history of science the history of? The question assumes salience as historians have become more sensitive to the categories that constitute the objects of their inquiry. Is science a self-evident historical category, or should we follow the cultural distinctions made by various historical actors? In which case, are we students of natural philosophy, and, if so, what do we say about pertinent distinctions made by, say, early modern actors between natural philosophy and mathematics, between natural philosophy and natural history? What is astronomy or chemistry, and where on the map of knowledge were they placed? And suppose- aware of the ensuing problems- we just say that we are students of natural knowledge. What is nature such that our objects of study interpret it? What belongs to nature and what to the super-natural or the human, the moral, the artifactual? What a long way weve come from conceptions of science as such a special object that mere historians lacked the ability to study it, from science as a quite distinctive intellectual and moral object, and from matter-of-fact acceptance of the integrity, coherence, and temporal stability of science. The various readings by Peter Dear and Andrew Cunningham represent some of the more explicit recognitions of problems of identity partly brought about by what must count as disciplinary success, even progress, but these types of sensibility are pervasive among academic historians of science. That said, it would be wrong simply to identify disciplinary sensibilities with what modern culture thinks about science, what it is and how it came to be what it is, and it is a good idea to conclude by considering the present-day relationships between professional and amateur writings in the history of science. Readings: Andrew Cunningham, Getting the Game Right: Some Plain Words on the Identity and Invention of Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 19 (1988), 365-389.

Peter Dear, Religion, Science and Natural Philosophy: Thoughts on Cunninghams Thesis, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32 (2001), 377-386. Peter Dear, What is History of Science the History Of? Early Modern Roots of the Ideology of Modern Science, Isis 96 (2005), 390-406. Peter Dear, Science Studies as Epistemography, in The One Culture? A Conversation about Science, eds Jay A. Labinger and Harry Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 128-141. Steven Shapin, Science, in New Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, eds Tony Bennett, Larry Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 314-317. Steven Shapin, Lowering the Tone in the History of Science: A Noble Calling, in idem, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Were Made by People with Bodies, Situated in Space, Time, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 1-14.