Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 28 – History and Historiography of Science

By the Time I Get to Phoenix

Just a quick note to say I won’t be doing any posting until next week, because I’ll be at the History of Science Society conference in Phoenix. I’ll be presenting my paper, “The Past, Present, and Future of West Antarctica: Research on the Behavior of a Continent, 1957-1990,” in the Saturday morning session, as part of the panel “Producing Knowledge for Policy: Research Program Planning and Scientific Assessments”. Other presenters are Clark Miller, Keynyn Brysse, and Jessy O’Reilly (who is working on the integration of WAIS research into climate change assessments). Naomi Oreskes, UCSD historian and scholar on the science, politics, and rhetoric of climate change, will be doing commentary. The full program in pdf is here.

Now, because I can already feel the impatient demand for a YouTube clip from America’s finest era of woodenly-produced televised entertainment:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUg5p3BncuQ]

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl: The Course of French Philosophy and the Primitive Mind

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was born in 1857 in Paris. In 1876, he entered the Ecole Normale Superieure, specializing in philosophy. Lévy-Bruhl taught at secondary schools until 1895. Obtaining his doctorate in 1884, from 1886 onwards he lectured at Ecole Libre des Sciences, and from 1895 onwards, at Ecole Normale and the Sorbonne. At the Sorbonne, in 1904, Lévy-Bruhl became professor of philosophy. In 1917, Lévy-Bruhl became the editor of Revue Philosophique and in 1925 founded the Institut d’Ethnologie, together with Paul Rivet and Marcel Mauss. In 1927, he retired from the Institute as well as the Sorbonne. He was a visiting professor at Harvard from 1919 to 1920. Levy-Bruhl died in Paris in 1939.

Lévy-Bruhl considered the history of French philosophy, from Descartes to the 1890s, to demonstrate specific features connected to the French national character and intellectual life. For Lévy-Bruhl, it was of utmost significance that many French philosophers began their studies in either mathematics or the natural sciences. Voltaire “became the herald of Newton” in France, while Condillac wrote on the language of the calculus. “It seems allowable to infer,” Lévy-Bruhl concluded, “not that French philosophy was based upon mathematics, but that there has been in France a close affinity between the mathematical and the philosophical spirit” (History of modern philosophy in France, 470.)

Due to the legacy of Descartes as well as mathematics, philosophers “took it for granted that among the various ways of representing reality, there is one which is adequate and recognizable on account of its clearness and sufficient evidence” (ibid.) The connection of French philosophy to mathematics explained why French philosophers “have nearly always taken care to show that their doctrines were in perfect accord with common sense” and that method “was a mere application of the rules of common sense” (474,475.)

Consistent with Lévy-Bruhl’s coupling of French philosophy with the rational and the scientific was his privileging of the Cartesian tradition over that exemplified by de Maistre. Lévy-Bruhl’s association of French philosophy with a particular kind of system and a particular kind of intellectual work forced him to gloss over some of the more extravagant features of the French socialists and Utopians, such as Saint-Simon and Fourier, as well as the more extreme ideologues of the French Revolution. For Lévy-Bruhl, the history of “philosophy” was the steady growth of reason itself. Any derivation from such a growth was explicable by either a falling away from tradition or to a concern for justice which obviated reason.

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Schaffer on Language and Proper Conduct

One of the clearest findings in my long-term exploration of the oeuvre of Simon Schaffer, is the centrality of Schaffer’s use of the idea that a thinker’s personal understanding of the arrangement of the cosmos, their process of inquiry, and their ideas about proper social order were often intimately interrelated in philosophical inquiry in the 17th and 18th centuries. This insight provides a powerful tool for investigating different facets of the wide field of “natural philosophy” as it intersected with other realms of intellectual activity.

It is clearly the case that natural philosophy had no defined form nor any clear boundaries with other kinds of literature. In today’s post we step slightly outside the bounds of natural philosophy with two pieces that examine writings at the beginning and the end of natural philosophy’s golden age:

1) “Defoe’s Natural Philosophy and the Worlds of Credit,” in Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature, 1700-1900, edited by John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth, 1989.

2) “The History and Geography of the Intellectual World: Whewell’s Politics of Language,” in William Whewell: A Composite Portrait, edited by Menachem Fisch and Schaffer, 1991.

In (1), Schaffer observes the novelty of natural philosophy in Defoe’s time (c.1659-1731) and notes similarities in literary strategies between it and another new form of writing, “the news journal,” both of which “appealed to a new authority relation—that of the circumstantiated report of the novel and unprecedented event…” In (2), at the other end of the time frame, we find a portrait of Whewell (1794-1866) as a critical writer on scientific work,

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The 20th-Century Problem: Krige and National Narrative

In my last discussion of the challenges involved in writing about the history of science in the 20th century, I noted that local narratives can be taken to be revealing of broader issues, but that such narratives can also simply reflect back some larger narrative already understood to exist. In this post we take this consideration to the case of the national narrative.

John Krige’s 2006 book American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe is, I would say, an important step in the establishment of a historiography of post-1945 science on the European continent. Until recently, the history of scientific Europe in this period has not been systematically explored. 1999’s Science under Socialism, edited by Dieter Hoffmann and Kristie Macrakis (who just joined Krige at Georgia Tech this year), etched out a picture of science in East Germany. Cathryn Carson has written on science in West Germany (publications list here). In 1998’s The Radiance of France (out in a new edition this year), Gabrielle Hecht wrote on the development of the unusually important nuclear power industry in that country. The object here is not to put together a complete bibliography, but if anyone wants to add to the picture of this historiography, please do leave a comment.

Krige’s book covers a lot of important bases, looking at the Marshall Plan, NATO, the State Department and CIA, the activities of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and the establishment of CERN (on which he has written more extensively elsewhere) as institutions linking American and European science and politics. (Here one should also make note of Ron Doel‘s ongoing project to study American science’s diplomatic uses.) Similar to Needell’s book on Lloyd Berkner, the emphasis here is on individual cases. In this case, different

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Schaffer and Golinski on Enlightenment and Genius

This post looks at two articles by Simon Schaffer:

“States of Mind: Enlightenment and Natural Philosophy,” in The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, ed. G. S. Rousseau, 1990, pp. 233-290.

“Genius in Romantic Natural Philosophy,” in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, 1990, pp. 82-98.

It makes comparison with some related points in Jan Golinski’s book Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820, 1992. Unlike the last post integrating Schaffer’s and Golinski’s analysis of eudiometry, this one distinguishes the (complementary) positions of the two authors.

Since his earliest pieces (especially his 1983 piece on natural philosophy and spectacle), Schaffer had been exploring the tensions between natural philosophical inquiry and the forces leading to professionalized specialties. In pieces circa 1990, Schaffer further explored the relationship between enlightenment political ideals—which stressed rational assent as a path away from enthusiasm and despotism toward a proper polity—and natural philosophy and the political pressures it created and to which it was subjected.

In “States of Mind”, in a move not unlike his and Steven Shapin’s analysis of Hobbes’ critique of experimental philosophy, Schaffer stresses objections, particularly that of Edmund Burke (1729-1797) that the politics of rational assent proffered by people like Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) simply cloaked alternative religion-like claims to political authority.

The transformation of politically important elements of cosmology—rather than the elimination of their significance—is once again central to Schaffer’s argument (see also the transformation of comets from omens to source of physical disaster). Here Priestley’s objection to the pneumatic philosophy of souls and spirits (as in Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, 1777) brushes away the idea of mind as guided by spirit to allow the mind to be seen as a material organ with its own relationship

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The 20th-Century Problem: Needell and Biography

In the history of science, the 20th century is unique in terms of the sheer scale, social importance, and intellectual diversity of the scientific enterprise, and the closeness of its relationship to the development and design of technology. This can create some intimidating historiographical challenges.

For example, as National Air and Space Museum historian Allan Needell observes in his 2000 book, Science, Cold War, and the American State: Lloyd V. Berkner and the Balance of Professional Ideals, “the Cold War relationships among scientists, politicians, the expanding national security bureaucracy, and advocates of more broadly based technocratic initiatives are extraordinarily complex” (3). It sounds obvious enough, but it resonates with me—I think it’s that “extraordinarily” that speaks to the sense of confusion following the sobering encounter with the archive, particularly a major one, such as the US National Archives here in College Park, Maryland. Having seen reams of committee minutes, reports, and correspondence documenting the (often painfully mundane) organizational details of a seemingly endless stream of institutions and initiatives, I know that the question inevitably arises: “What in the hell am I going to do with all this?”

Figuring out what is to be done demands a set of historiographical tools capable of analyzing scientific and engineering work in general ways: it can be extremely limiting to concentrate on singular narratives of significance (say, the history of DNA or elementary particle theory), because it would ignore entire categories of important work that can only be fruitfully analyzed in terms of the evolution of research programs or other general trends, instead of great breakthroughs. It can feel like—indeed, it is—a real accomplishment to reassemble even a single strand of narrative from the archival morass. But faced with the insignificance of any individual narrative, it can be depressing to consider the fact that hundreds of similar narratives are playing out at the same time.

A key strategy is to take hold of certain life preservers that pop out of the depths of the archival record, such as familiar players.

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Imperial Nature, by Jim Endersby

Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science is a study of late Victorian botany and natural history centered around the career and practices of naturalist Joseph Hooker (1817-1911). Endersby avows to be less interested in the structures or mentalities which informed Hooker’s long career in botany, ending as director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, than in “considering his material practices and the objects they involved” (312.) By analyzing practices, Endersby “sets” Hooker back “on his feet,” while previous accounts, by beginning with ideas, have stood him “on his head.” Much like Marx’s purported inversion of Hegel’s philosophy into the realm of social action and into praxis, the result of Endersby’s book, is, in many ways, as concerned with ideas as those histories he is writing against.

The practices of Victorian botany in Endersby’s narrative helps to narrate the interaction between “apparently esoteric matters, like theories of geographical distribution” and “mundane matters like the practicalities of earning a living” (313.) As importantly, an emphasis on the minutiae of daily practice, for Endersby, helps underscore how Hooker’s botanical work “remade nature in empire’s image.” Hooker, Endersby details, though only briefly visiting colonial spaces- New Zealand, Tasmania, and British India-, was keen to persuade his network of colonial botanists, whose samples his work depended upon, “that he alone knew how many species of plants their land held and what each were called” (314.)

Endersby’s discussions of taxonomy and the species question in Hooker’s writing as well as his account of Hooker’s efforts to render his botany more philosophical in response to the pressures of distinguishing himself in a crowded field depend upon the situation of Hooker in the history of ideas as well as concrete daily practices.

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Chris Renwick on the History of Thinking about Science

Today we have the second guest post by Chris Renwick, who starting in January will be a lecturer in modern British history at the University of York.

In one way or another, most approaches to history of science share a common intellectual assumption: that science can be related to the contexts in which it is produced, even if historians can’t agree about what’s important when talking about those contexts. Indeed, such is the importance of this contextualist point that it is often seen as a crucial moment in moving history of science away from the wholly discredited study of great men and their ideas. When, though, did this shift take place and who was responsible for it?

Ever since I started out as graduate student, I’d assumed, like many others, that the effort to relate science and its contexts was originally the gift of Karl Marx and Marxism. After all, who doesn’t know the story of the letter in which Marx explained how Charles Darwin had transplanted Victorian society onto the natural world (though, for the record, the letter we always attribute to Marx was actually written by Engels) or the legend of Russian physicist Borris Hessen’s presentation on Isaac Newton to the Second International Congress of the History of Science at the Science Museum in London in 1931? However, in considering this issue recently I’ve come to the conclusion that something is missing from our understanding of the history of history of science and that it tells us something important about the intellectual trajectory of the field.

Part of what sparked my interest in this issue was a 1952 book, entitled Darwinism: Competition and Cooperation, by the British-American anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who played a leading role in the production of the famous 1950 UNESCO statement on race. In that book, Montagu argued that it wasn’t Marx or Marxists who first grasped how to relate science to its socioeconomic contexts but Patrick Geddes—the Scottish biologist, sociologist, and town planner whom I’ve spent a great deal of time studying (see pages 29 to 31 in particular). To illustrate his point, Montagu picked out a passage from Geddes’ late 1880s article on “Biology” for Chamber’s Encyclopaedia:

The substitution of Darwin for Paley as the chief interpreter of the order of nature is currently regarded as the displacement of an anthropomorphic view by a purely scientific one: a little reflection, however, will show that what has actually happened has been merely the replacement of the anthropomorphism of the eighteenth century by that of the nineteenth. For the place vacated by Paley’s theological and metaphysical explanation has simply been occupied by that suggested to Darwin and Wallace by Malthus in terms of the

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Simon Schaffer and Jan Golinski on Eudiometry

Landrianis eudiometer, from the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence — Diagram of a eudiometer, from the Museo Galileo in Florence

First off, apologies for slow posting—things have been too bananas recently to indulge blog-related side interests. I’m hoping things clear up soon, but I’m presenting my research on Antarctic research at 4S here in DC at the end of the month, so things may remain at a trickle until November. However, before it got too desolate around here, I did want to parachute in and do a quick write-up on eudiometry. Our article is: Simon Schaffer, “Measuring Virtue: Eudiometry, Enlightenment, and Pneumatic Medicine” in The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, Andrew Cunningham and Roger French, eds., 1990, pp. 281-318. A close companion work is Jan Golinski’s Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820, Cambridge UP, 1992, esp. pp. 117-128. I won’t try and distinguish the two treatments here.

The technology of the eudiometer is based on Joseph Priestley’s “nitrous air test”, devised in 1772. A good explanation of the nitrous air test as well as a computer animation of how eudiometers worked are available from the Museo Galileo in Florence (for modern scientific explanation, see the animation here). The basic idea is that manufactured nitrous air (nitrogen oxide) is mixed with a sample of ambient air. Part of the mixture dissolves into water leading to a decreased volume of now-unrespirable air in the chamber, which can be measured. Priestley (1733-1804), understanding the respirability of air to be reflective of its virtue, and understanding respiration to transfer phlogiston from the body to the air, understood the remaining air to be phlogisticated by the test, and the test to be a measure of the “goodness” of the common air used.

Italian experimenters, beginning with Felice Fontana and Marsilio Landriani replicated the test, embodying it in an instrument that Landriani called a eudiometer, which taken from Greek literally means a measuring instrument of the goodness of the air. Through the

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Schaffer on the Priestley Lit

Getting back to the series on Simon Schaffer, we’re going to be looking at a series of articles on Enlightenment chemistry, which will hopefully give us the opportunity to discuss Jan Golinski’s book Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820, which expressly owes a lot to Schaffer’s work, and covers a lot of the same ground. First, though, I want to backtrack to jot down a few notes about the 1984 piece, “Priestley’s Questions: An Historiographic Survey,” History of Science 22: 151-183.

At the end of last year, we discussed Schaffer’s 1987 piece, “Priestley and the Politics of Spirit”. To recap, Schaffer was calling attention to the connections some 18th-century natural philosophers made between pneumatic and electrical phenomena and the actions of spirit, and Priestley’s desire to dissociate theological from natural philosophy. In the earlier piece, Schaffer was reviewing problems identified in the analysis of Priestley’s life and identifying historiographical strategies used to address those problems—a service that should be a much more common feature of our journals (and one also at work in his criticism of the Newton literature).

Priestley (1733-1804) was a dynamic figure of particular historiographical interest for a couple of reasons: first, he was an innovative chemical experimenter, making significant contributions to the chemistry of air that began to develop in the latter half of the 18th century, but also remaining a staunch proponent of the phlogiston theory even after most chemists accepted Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier’s chemistry of oxygen. Second, Priestley was a proponent of the Enlightenment project linking political authority to reasoned assent—a radical position at that time. Schaffer pointed out that the historiography of

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