History and Historiography of Science

Category: History 174

Continuity and Discontinuity in class

Sorry for the delay in posting–we just had the history of early modern medicine class today. At Harvard the history of medicine and history of science are sort of two separate worlds in the same department, so I had to do a lot of research to figure out what I was going to say today. Anyway, I enjoyed putting the lecture together and the students seemed to like it, too. In a nutshell, it was about the shift from the medical tradition corresponding to Galenic theory to anatomical-mechanistic views of medicine. The students are asking good questions–one student actually asked about a point I thought about including in the lecture but didn’t (if disease was seen as personal, what did they make of obvious contagions like plague?–Thank you Cambridge History of Medicine for preparing me for that one!); and, in response to my end of lecture homily about Robert Hooke’s self-experimentation with physic, another asked about the continuities with the Galenic tradition. I promised a blog post on it, and I think it’s worth reposting in full here, even though, again, it’s long and all pretty standard for the professionals.

Reposted from the History 174 class blog:

I want to take a look at a larger “historiographical” issue present in the last lecture on mapmaking and navigation and today’s lecture on medicine. By “historiography” I mean the art of writing history. One really big issue in historiography is whether to emphasize continuity or discontunity–is history (particularly the history of ideas) populated by gradual transitions from one way of thinking to another, or is it marked by sudden breaks? There is a traditional notion that in the 1600s we have what we call the “scientific revolution”–a sudden break with past philosophy and superstition marked by a turn toward experimental method and new theories. Some scholars have argued that the “scientific revolution” didn’t exist for various reasons. Some wish to emphasize the persistence of older methods and ways of thinking (the fact that Newton was into alchemy tends to get trotted out here). Feminist scholars point out that for women the scientific revolution might not only not have been a significant event, but may have been harmful (the turn from midwifery to authorized medicine, for example; or the growth of the prestige of science as validating a secondary position for women in society through theories in the social sciences, etc.)

I think it’s pretty clear that for practical historical purposes the scientific revolution existed, primarily because it was a self-conscious event. A socially significant group of people started turning to icons like Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes, and held them up as heading toward a new way of understanding the world, and, “inspired, they went out and performed wondrous deeds” (anyone ever seen 24 Hour Party People?–great movie; that’s a reference to the film’s narrator’s description of the musical reaction to the Sex Pistols’ first Manchester concert). Anyway, the participants in the scientific revolution saw themselves as revolutionary; and, as we will see with the French Enlightenment of the 1700s, the idea that modern science represented a clean break with the past had political implications.

Yet, I want to be sure and emphasize the continuities as well. Where Ptolemy’s Almagest was overturned by Copernicus and Kepler, his Geography set the pace for all later geography. There would be massive refinement of technique, but no sudden breaks in principles. Similarly, the turn from the Galenic theory of medicine to a mechanistic, anatomical model did not represent a clean break. Robert Hooke’s self-experimentation with physic and his careful recording of the results was clearly representative of the new experimental tradition, but the idea of promoting therapeutic flows of sweat, vomit, etc. through physic (and diet, environment, etc.) was still well-entrenched. Similarly, the example of Vesalius’ representing the vagina as an inverted penis in accordance with Galenic doctrine also shows how important entrenched ideas were in interpreting actual observations, such as those obtained through dissection. You see what you are trained to see (Descartes made the key philosophical critique of sensory knowledge, not that that necessarily made observation any more independent of ideas).

I chose this last example, incidentally, because it’s also a staple of feminist history of science, which I’m not integrating into the course as much as I might. You can find the argument in either Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex on the production of ideas about sex vs. gender, or in Londa Schiebinger’s (superior) The Mind Has No Sex? My go-to source for this lecture is the Cambridge History of Medicine edited by eminence gris historian Roy Porter, but Lisa Jardine’s wonderfully insightful Ingenious Pursuits on the scientific culture of the latter half of the 1600s also played a big role (as it did in the previous lecture).

On the idea of scientific revolution, by the way, the classic reference is Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which gives us the term “paradigm shift” which is applied to the alteration of entrenched interpretations of observation (e.g., the shift from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican world view). He claimed that science proceeds along a “normal” course until its underlying ideas are totally overturned. It has more to do with ideas and less to do with the establishment of new institutional programs (which I tend to emphasize). It is still influential among novice historians (and Al Gore), although most professionals have acknowledged its insights and moved on.

Ingenious Pursuits

I’m preparing my lecture on “Navigation and Exploration” for Thursday, and it’s turned out to be a much more coherent topic in the history of science than I’d initially anticipated. Right now I think I’m going to do a two part lecture, 1) the 1500s; and 2) the latter half of the 1600s. Part I deals with the rise of cartography and the use of latitude and longitude, the importance of Ptolemy’s Geography (which I didn’t previously realize), and the close connection with astronomy in the field of “cosmography” (which I also didn’t previously realize is important). I’m using John Rennie Short’s 2004 book, Making Space: Revisioning the World, 1475-1600, which covers most of what you’d like to know, although it’s a bit short on the technical details and is more of a tour of different kinds of maps and atlases. Still, it’s useful.

For Part II, I’m talking about the competition for precision; so clocks, detailed observatory studies and the like. I’m using Lisa Jardine’s Ingenious Pursuits. Ken Alder assigned this book for my undergrad Intro to the History of Science course. I’m not assigning it, because I think the more you take into the book, the better it is, and my students are not taking much into the course. I remember not getting much out of it at the time. Now, however, I find it very interesting from a historiographical point of view. Basically, as a tour of a scientific culture, I really, really like this book. It very nicely shows how practical problems and theoretical concerns were totally intertwined in Royal Society culture. But the book is totally unstructured, and hard to follow unless you pay close attention and have some familiarity with the structure of 17th century society. But, just within the first several pages, you can see how the work of the Ordnance Office, the foundation of the Royal Observatory, and the writing of Newton’s Principia are all very closely related. By weaving these things so tightly together, it helps the reader get into the heads of the participants, and, if you pay attention, how they each had different concerns–the scholarly astronomer Flamsteed versus the worldly astronomer Halley for instance.

You sort of get the same picture out of a book like Smith and Wise’s Energy and Empire, on William Thompson, who is an equally multidimensional figure as the early Royal Society fellows. But that book tends to segregate its characters’ intertwined concerns, even as it emphasizes the importance of that intertwining. As a means of historiographical presentation, the differences of approach are worth thinking about.

Copernicus? Copernicus!

I’m not sure how useful or interesting it is to repost the lecture recaps here in full. Presumably if you’re at all interested in this blog, you’ll know the general details, so unless otherwise worthwhile, I’ll go back to saying a few words about the lectures. Thursday’s lecture was on astronomy; it went fast, but I think I gave some more information about what lecture was about upfront, and did some more repeating of concepts (it’s easy to forget that even the most elementary stuff is totally new to this crowd). So, we’re getting there as far as lecture style goes. The title of this post reflects my view that there should be a musical about Copernicus–imagine his name being sung, first as a question, and then as triumphant affirmation and you’ll get the picture (or maybe not). Moving on…

I subtitled my astronomy lecture “From the Copernican Revolution to the Telescopic Revolution”; I’ve never seen the topic framed in just this way, but the themes will be familiar to a history of science crowd. Basically, it addresses the question, if Copernicus’ placement of the sun at the center of the universe was so revolutionary, why did it take 120 years for what we call the “scientific revolution” to really cohere? So, moving between two technical revolutions, I show why the latter revolution seemed to really fulfill the promise of what the former might have implied, and use the intervening period (particularly Tycho Brahe) to illustrate the movement of astronomy from a technical field to one that had something to say something about the universe and how we can come to know about it.

I try and show how Copernicus was cagey about the status of his claim. He believes in the reality of his sun-centered universe, but he’s still an astronomer. He probably doesn’t believe in the reality of his epicycles and epicyclets, but uses them to save the phenomenon as any good astronomer would. And he’s nervous about stirring up the philosophical waters. He uses quasi-philosophical arguments to defend his moving earth (De Revolutionibus, Book 1, Ch. 8), but insists in the dedication to the pope “astronomy is written for astronomers”. 70 years later Kepler, and especially Galileo were after bigger fish, and Galileo paid the price for that–but astronomy was already on a path it could not easily turn its back on. Nothing new here, obviously, but that’s how I’m presenting it to the class–90 years of astronomy history in one big gulp. We must, after all, move on to the self-perceived revolutionaries (my “Galileo, Bacon, Descartes” lecture), and the technical evolution of navigation and mapmaking, this coming week.

Finally, I’ve been at this blog for over a month now and am still having fun, so I’m trying to arm twist a few friends into joining in. Once I figure out what contributors I can get, I’ll probably try and publicize it a little more, and maybe get a decent blog title thought up.

History of Science course Cliff’s Notes

I think my students are getting a little blown away this early in the semester with what I have to admit is some fairly heavy stuff. We had our first sections Tuesday, and my TA showed me “one of the better” quizzes. “But Christopher,” I said, “this person didn’t get anything right!” At least they filled in the blanks. Now, mind you, I’m telling my students exactly what will be on the quiz. If the topic isn’t on my nifty Powerpoint lecture slides or mentioned three times in the textbook (and we haven’t gotten to the first textbook, Peter Dear, yet), it won’t be on the quiz–and these slides are made available on the course website. Nevertheless, I’m told, the students looked at my TA “as though he had two heads” when handed the quiz.

Anyway, I’m convinced that once it sinks in that the class isn’t going to be “nifty background for science majors” they’ll be up to the task. But I’m also giving them online Cliff’s notes to help them through the material. I thought I’d repost these here as well as my background posts, just to demonstrate what I’m up to in a bit more detail. As a warning, these will be sort of on the long side.

Reposted from the History 174 Blog

Today’s lecture blew by quicker than I thought, and with a topic as vague as medieval literary culture, a number of you seem to feel that a little more road map might have been nice. I’ll go over a few main points here, but my first point is not to worry too much. We’re still in background material, and so if you just come away with some impressions of what the medieval book culture looked like, that should be OK to get along with. But, here’s a quick recap:

1) There are a lot of different kinds of medieval books that were not well distinguished from each other: books of hours (devotional instruction manuals) blended into hagiographies (saints’ lives), which blended into history and bestiaries (for example, a bestiary might discuss St. George’s encounter with the dragon), which blended into “books of secrets” (such as The Secret of Secrets, which was supposed to be a letter from Aristotle to Alexander the Great), which were supposed to reveal hidden, occult knowledge about the way the world worked, but might also have practical advice on statecraft.

2) Books were not “books” as we know them. Except for the Bible, they were copied and rearranged, quoted and reproduced in whole or in part without attribution–and different copies of the same book might contain different material. Sometimes authors impersonated other wiser authors, so some books were supposed to be by “Aristotle” but we now know that they were written by someone we can only call “pseudo-Aristotle”

3) Books, except in matters of religion, were not supposed to tell you anything practical. The most important medieval “truths” were spiritual ones, so oftentimes their contents were supposed to offer a moral or be interpreted symbollically. In some cases, they were simply meant for entertainment, to provoke “wonder” in the minds of the readers (more on this later). Books were not intended to be scrutinized for whether or not they were “true” (as we would interpet the term), and so blended fact and fiction indiscriminately.

4) It was widely believed that the Ancients (and Biblical figures) knew everything important and wrote it down, but that that knowledge was lost as books were lost and text was corrupted (say, by a careless scribe). The key point is this: knowledge (including the allegorical kind) was supposed to be directly tied to the words the Ancients had written down–not an unusual thought for a culture where the Bible was considered the ultimate authority. Scholarship mostly involved preserving and reassembling this Ancient knowledge, not creating new knowledge.

5) Not all literary traditions followed this trend. Some authors wrote from personal experience. Gottfried of Franconia’s book on trees and wine mixed literary sources with his own reports indiscriminately. Theophilus, in his book “On the Various Arts” spoke entirely from his own experience. Frederick II (Holy Roman Emperor), in his book on falconry, openly scorned the literary tradition that valued text over experience. But, for the most part, knowledge gained from practical experience was passed on orally (say, within a guild)–it was not tied to book culture.

6) Ultimately, the medieval literary culture did not fade away but coexisted with a new experienced-based literature. We can see this in travel narratives. William of Rubruck aimed to report back to Louis IX as accurately as he could what he found out in the east. Marco Polo’s narrative (actually written down by someone experienced in writing chivalric romances), on the other hand, sought to please and entertain as well as inform his audiences. Marco Polo’s description of exotic wonders created a large audience for John de Mandeville’s Travels, which were totally untrue and replicated the earlier conventions of the bestiary and the hagiography.

[Plus some general tips on using sections to their advantage, etc.]

Medieval Book Culture

Reposted from the History 174 class blog:

Here I’d like to address the background question of what all this has to do with science. I got today’s lecture largely from Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park’s book, published in 1998, called Wonder and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. This is a really clever book, and demonstrates just what we have to gain from abandoning whig notions of history. Rather than try and reach back into the soup of books that come to us out of the middle ages and either brush it off entirely, or to try and pick out things that look like science, Daston and Park take all of these books as part of a unified intellectual culture. Literate people used to read devotional texts, bestiaries, and travel narratives all together, and they assembled knowledge indiscriminately from them–they didn’t relegate knowledge about the natural world to one defined set of books and read another set for entertainment. They all participated in a “model” of the universe, to use Lewis’ term, that informed and was informed by poetry, hagiography, philosophy, etc… Daston and Park choose to trace changes in this bookish culture not by trying to pick “science” out of it, but by tracking changing attitudes toward “wonder”–was it something that created a simple admiration for God’s creation? was it something that suggested the need for a preternatural or supernatural explanation? or was it something that was supposed to be expunged through rational explanation (as, they argue, happened with the rise of science).

Next lecture we’ll talk about astronomy, which was an extremely technical profession, but we have to understand that “natural philosophy” as it began to cohere in the 1600s, encompassed all kinds of non-technical subjects like natural history and geography as well as astronomy, and we have to understand where interest in those subjects came from. The answer is medieval book culture.

(For the super-interested, also check out William Eamon’s Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture)

Ancient and Medieval Philosophy

Cross-posted from my class blog for History 174 at UMD:

We went pretty quickly through lecture today. It’s sort of a bind–because in order to understand the context of science, as it starts to happen in the 1500s and 1600s, you really have to set up this philosophical background. Philosophy/Theology was the most important knowledge in that time period, and for people who studied natural philosophy using new methods (such as quantitative measurement, which, you’ll recall, was only an accidental quality in the main tradition), the primacy of these Platonic and Aristotelian philosophical traditions was something they 1) could draw inspiration from, but 2) had to contend with as something that was always going to overshadow whatever claims they made.

So, we cover it quickly as necessary background, which means your responsibility is to pick out the most basic issues, and to make sure you use section to come to a proper understanding of them. Why are things we consider important, like quantitative measurement, considered merely accidental? But, also understand why it made sense not to worry about them–because, in a world where things were thought to tend to happen, but did not necessarily have to happen, being precise wasn’t such a big deal, because the formal qualities of something were what explained their tendencies. It’s certainly confusing, so make good use of section.

Check out the online lecture notes from a full course on Ancient philosophy at the University of Washington: http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/320Lecture.html

I used these notes to help me prepare my lecture–they’re pretty detailed, and might help you make sense of the concepts. On the Medieval period, I can recommend for basic explanation as well as extracts from Christian, Islamic and Jewish traditions, Philosophy in the Middle Ages, by Arthur Hyman and James J. Walsh, which was the textbook used in a course I took on this topic (don’t ask me why) my freshman year as an undergrad. I relied on it heavily to make sure I wasn’t saying anything patently false about this profoundly esoteric topic.

Hope you’re having fun. It won’t all be this intense!

WT

Roots of Modern Science

The first lecture in my history of science course is tomorrow. There’s not a lot to say about it–it’s a pretty standard intro lecture–except that I’m going to be introducing some terms at the outset to try and smooth the academic concept shock as we go along. So, students will be getting working definitions of: whig history, epistemology, ontology, teleology, and reification. Not being a big student of the philosophy of science, myself, (with the exception of whig history) I’ve never had these formally explained to me: I picked them up one by one, once I decided that I really, really needed to have a solid definition in my head. So, I think it will be useful to lay them out at the outset. But we won’t be hitting up the philosophical pedigree of each; I’ll just be giving some idea of what we’re talking about when we bandy these terms about as if they were the most obvious things in the world.

Now, the Thursday lecture is going to be on the philosophical roots of modern science. For a specialist in 20th century science, this is pretty far removed from what I ordinarily do. My big saving grace here was my seemingly unjustifiable decision as an undergrad to take the first two of three History of Philosophy courses offered in Northwestern’s philosophy department–Seeskin and McCumber, this post’s for you! At absolutely no point did I ever think that my freshman year course on philosophy in the middle ages (a profoundly weird topic) would prove useful later on. And yet, here I am dusting off my old Presocratic Reader, and my knowledge of Augustine and the Scholastics, and my other textbooks, conjoining them with other things I’ve picked up by osmosis in grad school, to put together a workable overview of the key conceptual traditions.

Conceptual traditions is key–I’m going to start out with a little discussion of the Pythagoreans and the Atomists and a few others to say that some of what they say is recognizable to us as resembling what we believe about the universe and how to investigate it, but then point out that they don’t really represent a consistent tradition that we can follow through to modern science. It’s really Plato and Aristotle that represent the crucial traditions that we can follow through bifurcated Middle Ages manifestations (Neoplatonism by way of Augustine; and the Arabic preservation of Aristotle). Later natural philosophers might pick up and read some of the other schools and identify their own ideas with them, but I think it would be too much to say that they were selecting one tradition over another as though off a menu. Their primary aim would be trying to give an intellectual framework to practical knowledge–this would be a reaction to the literary tradition of the Middle Ages extending beyond philosophy, and its failure to distinguish credible from not credible knowledge. We deal with that tradition next week.

That’s a rough overview–this blog is a thinking space, not an official source of course information.

How to begin…

Starting in with discussion about the upcoming course, I guess I’ll just say a few words about the course structure. As an “Introduction to the History of Science” I’m trying not to make things too fancy. I’m not going to muddy up the plot-line too much. This will be, unabashedly, the history of what we understand to be the modern scientific enterprise–not the history of knowledge about the natural world. Thus it’s largely a European story (with some detours into the Arabic-speaking world early on, of course) until the 20th century. Because, if we were to take some kind of weighted average, the most “science” does take place in the 20th century, I’m also trying to expand coverage of more recent events to try and address just how radically the character of science has changed in the last century–not just the well-known advent of “big science” but also diversification in the topics of scientific inquiry; diversification in methodology, and, above all, the full-scale integration of science into the fabric of society.

In some ways this integration (which, I would say, we can trace to the relationship between university science education and industrial R&D) represents a return to the way the medievals looked at the world; wherein knowledge of the natural was not well separated from theology, politics, history, and poetry–the most important topics of that period. I’m going to be using C. S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image to make this point about the medievals. This book is, as I understand it, a favorite of Katy Park at Harvard, and is now being used in their new year-long survey course. And it is a very nice way of jumping into the medieval mindset from which modern science emerges.

So, what I’m doing, after the introductory lecture is to give two lectures. The first will be on the classical philosophical issues. This will sort of give the high intellectual road to science, which comes via Arabic preservations of full classical texts–also pertinent are early Christian and Scholastic high philosophy. The second lecture will be on the “Medieval Model” as Lewis calls it. This is more of the broad “on-the-street” intellectual content of the early modern period, of which the early scientific sorts would also have been keenly aware. Subsequent lectures will focus on the clear craft influences on intellectuals in the early modern period.

Cumulative History

It’s now a week until my course at the University of Maryland, so increasingly this blog will be turning toward that. I’ll let my students know about it, and they can come here to look at some of the background ideas and sources behind lectures, if they like. It also makes it seem like a good time to talk about cumulative history. As I was saying earlier, the history of science does not tend to reflect historical methodology. Hence there are few textbooks. For our course, I’ll be using Peter Dear’s Revolutionizing the Sciences (which Ken Alder used when I took my first history of science course as an undergraduate at Northwestern), and Peter Bowler and Iwan Rhys-Morus’ Making Modern Science (which my AIP predecessor, Babak Ashrafi, used when he taught the same course). These are pretty good books–probably the best available for these purposes.

I’m really looking forward to teaching a “Plato to NATO” course, actually, because it gives me a chance to go back and try and assemble a coherent narrative about science. I think we need to write more long histories. When I was writing my dissertation, I was reading R. F. Foster’s Modern Ireland, 1600-1972, which I thought was a fantastic example of what such histories should look like, and was stylistically inspiring. Foster clearly incorporated historiographical insights into what his book included and how it included them.

If I were to make a sort of coarse observation about the history of science profession, it’s that there’s sort of a nervous hesitancy to paint broad pictures. One of my colleagues has noticed that we focus on the micro-level apparatus and observation, rather than on the level of the department, the university, the discipline/profession, or the nation. I can’t really say why this narrow focus exists, but I get a feeling it has to do with a reluctance to get criticized for oversimplifying historical developments–there are always more wrinkles that just have to be included, otherwise we might as well not undertake the venture of cutting a broad swathe through science; or maybe it’s that we feel we can’t say anything coherent about broad trends at all. But I’m of the opinion it’s better to write and rewrite histories rather than wait for a day when we’re confident enough to make broad statements. Following science, we should have more textbooks, certainly, but we should also have more review articles.

Anyway, busy day ahead, so I’ll cut this off fairly abruptly here.