Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-lrf7s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-29T15:54:09.762Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Presidential Address*: Can the History of Science be History?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

A. Rupert Hall
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It was in the closing year of the nineteenth century that Paul Tannery organized at an international historical congress the first international meeting devoted to the history of science. If antiquity would make a scholarly subject respectable, scholarship in the history of science must be beyond reproach; still earlier than Tannery and his colleagues in many European countries were the German historian of chemistry Kopp, and William Whewell, Master of Trinity; the eighteenth century had produced substantial works like those on mathematics and astronomy of Montucla and Delambre; Isaac Vossius and others virtually take these studies back to the Renaissance and Polydore Vergil. Just as in our day such classical scholars as Heiberg, Bailey, Housman, Drachman or Peck have chosen scientific texts as their subjects, so in the past, too, learning and science have met on this common ground. Few creative mathematicians of the seventeenth century thought that attention to the writings of Euclid or Archimedes was a waste of time.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , June 1969 , pp. 207 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1969

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Rossi, Paolo, Francis Bacon; From Magic to Science (London, 1968), 72Google Scholar; italics in original. I have reversed two of Rossi's consecutive sentences.

2 In general, see Yates, Frances, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964)Google Scholar; on Newton, Hall, A. Rupert and Hall, Marie Boas, Unpublished Papers of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1962), 309–311Google Scholar, also McGuire, J. E. and Rattansi, P. M., “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan’”, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, xxi (1966), 108–143.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 (Priestley's syntax)—Priestley, Joseph, History of Electricity (London, 1767), Preface, vi.Google Scholar

4 Buckle, H. T., History of Civilisation in England (2 vols., London, 1857, 1861)Google Scholar; Merz, J. T., A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century (4 vols., 1896, 1903, 1912, 1914).Google Scholar

5 See Tannery, Paul, Mémoires Scientifiques, 10 (Toulouse & Paris, 1930), p. 106.Google Scholar This essay was first published in 1904.

6 Williams, L. Pearce, “The Historiography of Victorian Science”, Victorian Studies, ix (1966), 200.Google Scholar

7 Sarton, George, Galen of Pergamon (Lawrence, Kansas, 1954).Google Scholar

8 See History of Science, ii (1963), 134.Google Scholar

9 See Wilkie, J. S.'s review article entitled “Harvey's immediate debt to Aristotle and Galen”, in History of Science, iv (1965), 112–113.Google Scholar

10 Collingwood, R. G., An Autobiography (Oxford, 1939), 58, 38.Google Scholar

11 A friendly critic pointed out to me after this talk that I had said nothing of historical techniques employing statistical analyses, or multiple biographical evaluations of the Namier type. Obviously, it seems to me, such techniques can be applied to the historiography of science with much the same merits and defects as they have in general history. The type of inductive argument used by Charles Beard (“All the founders of the Constitution of the United States were property owners, therefore it was the object of the Constitution to protect property”) is probably even more fallacious in history of science than elsewhere, and one may also suppose that if a man's family, upbringings, etc., determine his politics they do not necessarily also determine his philosophy. I am very much in favour of extending our knowledge of past science in depth by considering the (relatively) many minor figures as well as the few giants; but not necessarily by reducing them to statistics. Thought is often imitative, but never simply a social secretion, and the danger of enumerative techniques leading to inductive generalizations is that these may be artefacts produced by the technique, or mere trivialities (“more physicians than lawyers have contributed to science”).