I am going to be doing some traveling for the next couple of weeks, and so there are likely to be no new posts in that time. In other news, starting in October, I will be teaching a year-long introduction to the history of science course here at Imperial. I’ve included a tentative lecture schedule and reading list below the fold. This isn’t set in stone yet, so comments and suggestions are welcome.
AUTUMN TERM
LECTURE 1. Course Overview & How to Argue Historically
LECTURE 2. Scholastic Philosophy and the Medieval Cosmos
Tutorial 1
- C. S. Lewis, selections from The Discarded Image (1964)
*I assigned this in its entirety for my 2008 history of science course at the University of Maryland — huge disaster. But I really like how Lewis portrays Medieval thought as essentially bookish, and how this bookish culture revolves around an unspoken “model,” or cosmology. Pruning it down, I think it will also mesh well with the Grafton in Tutorial 2, but I’ll have to at least do some sort of intro to what’s going on, probably as early as lecture 1, if I want it to work.
LECTURE 3. Renaissance Challenges
LECTURE 4. Philosophical Reformers
Tutorial 2
- Anthony Grafton, “All Coherence Lost,” in New Worlds, Ancient Facts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery
- Peter Dear, “Mathematics Challenges Philosophy: Galileo, Kepler, and the Surveyors” and “Mechanism: Descartes Builds a Universe,” in Revolutionizing the Sciences
LECTURE 5. Experimental Philosophy/The Place of Isaac Newton
LECTURE 6. Alchemy, Matter Theory, and Chemistry
Tutorial 3
- Noel Coley, “Science in Seventeenth-Century England,” in The Rise of Scientific Europe
- Jan Golinski, “Chemistry” from Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 4
LECTURE 7. The Enlightenment
LECTURE 8. The Spirit of Improvement and Specialised Science
Tutorial 4
- Jan Golinski, excerpts from “’Dr. Beddoes’ Breath’: Nitrous Oxide and the Culmination of Enlightenment Medical Chemistry” in Science as Public Culture, pp. 157-175
- John Gascoigne, “The Principles and Practice of Improvement,” in Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment (1994)
LECTURE 9. Natural History, Natural Philosophy, and Mathematics in the 1700s
LECTURE 10. Making Sense of the Earth: Life and Geology
Tutorial 5
- Martin Rudwick, “The Theory of the Earth,” from Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (2005)
- James Secord, “Introduction” to Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (Penguin Edition)
SPRING TERM
LECTURE 11. Science, Religion, and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century
LECTURE 12. Darwin and His Place in the Sciences
Tutorial 6
- John Hedley Brooke, “The Fortunes and Functions of Natural Theology” in Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives
- Peter Bowler, The Fontana History of the Environmental Sciences, pp. 282-305, 323-361 (on Darwin and the reception of natural selection)
LECTURE 13. Laboratories and Universities
LECTURE 14. The New Physics and Engineering
Tutorial 7
- J. B. Morrell, “The Chemist Breeders: The Research Schools of Liebig and Thomas Thomson” Ambix (1972)
- Andrew Warwick, “A Mathematical World on Paper: Written Examinations in Early 19th-Century Cambridge” Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics (1998)
*I was unaware of the Morrell until Andy Mendelsohn here at Imperial told me about it when I was looking for something on laboratories. It’s a bit long, but it pairs really nicely with Andy W.’s piece.
LECTURE 15. The Social Sciences
LECTURE 16. Origins and Facets of Twentieth-Century Biology
Tutorial 8
- Adam Kuper, “Anthropology,” from Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 7
- Neil Morgan, “From Physiology to Biochemistry” and…
- Robert Olby, “The Emergence of Genetics,” both in Companion to the History of the Modern Sciences
*Note: These readings are all fairly dry. The objective is to try an exercise in “untangling” history, wherein disparate traditions in anthropology, biochemistry, and genetics all emerge out of the same 19th-century soup of physiology, evolutionary theory, and chemistry, before re-synthesizing to a degree in molecular biology. I’m still thinking of switching in Kohler on Drosophila, or something similar.
LECTURE 17 Industry and the Expansion of Science
LECTURE 18. Twentieth-Century Politics of Science and Technology
Tutorial 9
- Listen to: Edward Appleton, “Industrial Science” from his 1956 BBC Reith Lectures http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hg1rq
- Daniel Greenberg, “The Scientific Community” from his The Politics of American Science (1969)
LECTURE 19. Calculation, Modelling, Simulation, and Artificial Intelligence
LECTURE 20. Review
Tutorial 10
- Amy Dahan-Delmedico, “History and Epistemology of Models: Meteorology (1946-1963) as a Case Study” Archive for History of Exact Sciences (2001)