Holiday & Introductory Course August 3, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Adam Kuper, Amy Dahan, Andrew Warwick, Anthony Grafton, C. S. Lewis, Daniel Greenberg, Edward Appleton, Jack Morrell, James Secord, Jan Golinski, John Gascoigne, John Hedley Brooke, Martin Rudwick, Neil Morgan, Noel Coley, Peter Bowler, Peter Dear, Robert Olby
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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.
The Bounds of Natural Philosophy: Temporal and Practical Frontiers, Pt. 1 March 28, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Natural Philosophy/Anthropo-cosmology.Tags: Arnold Thackray, Crosbie Smith, Geoffrey Cantor, Jack Morrell, Jed Buchwald, Norton Wise, Paul Lucier, Simon Schaffer
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Lord Kelvin: still natural philosophical after all these years
If we accept the working idea that 18th-century natural philosophy could be characterized by philosophers’ willingness to incorporate ideas about the physical nature of the world into a general scheme accounting for various natural “economies” or “cosmologies” that flowed into questions encompassing the characteristics of life, body, mind, epistemology, ethics, society, theology, and politics; then we need to define how far this universalizing philosophical practice extended, both temporally and within particular cultures, and what sorts of things have happened at the boundaries.
This was an active question through the 1980s. One common answer was professionalization and specialization (not to be conflated!—notably see Paul Lucier’s “The Professional and the Scientist in Nineteenth-Century America” in the latest Isis; the piece opens with an unusually lively historiographical discussion). In 1983, Simon Schaffer saw boundary creation as a consequence of the political dangers attributable to public natural philosophical demonstrations. Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray were also very clear on this point in Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1981), discussing how the BA was established in the 1830s, both to promote scientific work, and to constrain the bounds of (and thus objections to) scientific investigation and thought.
It was likewise in this same early-to-mid 19th-century British context that William Whewell (1794-1866) coined the term “scientist” in response to an injunction by Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834) that men of science should not pretend to the more general and eminent title of philosopher. (See also Schaffer (1991) on Whewell as a critic of knowledge claims.) In 1986, Schaffer had been very explicit in denoting the establishment of new philosophies and institutions of science as signaling the “end of natural philosophy”, which also entailed the rewriting of histories of older discoveries to accommodate the new understanding of “science”, singular.
Of course, natural philosophy did not “end”. To begin with, “scientists” were by no means prevented from discussing issues outside of their defined jurisdictions, nor, conversely, was delimited expertise devoid of broader implications. In fact, the term “scientist” did not even catch on until much later. However, it is clear that the situation did change, and some effort was put into figuring out how the intellectual and moral terrain of science was reconfigured. (more…)
Primer: The British Association December 17, 2008
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer.Tags: Arnold Thackray, Charles Babbage, David Brewster, Jack Morrell, Samuel Coleridge, William Vernon Harcourt, William Whewell
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In 1830, Britain was on the cusp of one of its most famous eras of scientific activity. The year before Charles Darwin unassumingly set out aboard the Beagle, the first volume of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology came off the printing press to wide and immediate acclaim. The experimentation of Michael Faraday and James Joule in the 1830s would help spark the development of modern electromagnetic theory and thermodynamics in the ensuing decades. The Cambridge Mathematical Tripos was already beginning to churn out rigorously prepared physical theorists.
Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
However, the future, as always, was unclear, and there were a number of people who were gloomy about the state of affairs in British science. One was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Charles Babbage, who was frustrated in his search for funding for a calculating engine he had designed (and for which he would be most remembered thanks to the folk history of computing). In 1830 he gave vent to his gloom and frustration through a book entitled Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of its Causes, which was picked up by the Edinburgh experimentalist and scientific journal editor David Brewster (best known today as the name behind Brewster’s angle), who ran extracts in the Edinburgh Journal of Science, and published his own screed in the Quarterly Review.
Babbage and Brewster were concerned that British science, unsupported by the state (which had just dissolved the Admiralty’s floundering Board of Longitude in 1828), was well behind the Continent, particularly France, where post-Revolutionary governments generously supported science and (more…)
Ether Wave Propaganda 