History of Science in the European History Survey Course

To introduce the history of science, a useful gambit is a quick review of defini­tions. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that in the Middle Ages the word science (scientia) was commonly equivalent to the word art (ars), whereas there is an implied and real contrast in the modern academic phrasing: arts and sciences. While the ancients and medievals would subscribe to the OED’s general defini­tion, “a particular branch of knowledge or study; a recognized department of learning,” the most frequent modern usage of science is “restricted to branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws, sometimes with implied exclusion of pure mathematics.” The ordinary mod­ern usage conveniently allows us to begin the historical study of science without a lot of agonizing over the principles behind our definitions and interpreta­tions.

Historians of science usually look for explanations or orderly descriptions of past appearances of what we would call science today. However, as soon as they look beyond the recent past or outside long-established scientific disciplines, science historians will tend to bend or even disregard the modern assumptions about the nature of scientific knowledge as well as its location.

Astrology, for example, was both dis­tinguished from and intimately tied to astronomy until about 1650. Only then did astrology come to  appear opposed to astronomy as a branch of knowledge. Similarly, within theological studies about angels, grace, and the eucharist one can find very intelligent discussions of physical motion, quantification of heat, and basic characteristics of physi­cal matter during the Middle Ages. The history of science, seen over the long haul, becomes as much a history of what preceded science as we now categorize it as a history of what we now call science. More precisely, the history of science has become the study of earlier investi­gations of natural phenomena as char­acterized by those investigators rather than as labeled by modern science. For the more adventurous student, the his­tory of science becomes also a history of the frameworks and purposes of past questions about the world of natural phenomena as understood then.

While the history of technology some­ times catches the attention of students more quickly than science, technology in Western culture is much more diffi­cult to characterize as distinctively West­ern. The history of technology in China, for example, appears at least as advanced and rationalized as that in Eu­rope prior to the scientific revolution of early modern times. Consequently, my attention here will be limited to the history of science alone-a history which is intrinsically and characteristi­cally Western.

Within theological studies about angels, grace, and the eucharist one can find very intelligent discussions of physical motion, quantification of heat, and basic characteristics of physical matter during the Middle Ages.

The place of the history of science in European history survey courses will be determined by the kind of history being taught. I believe the most fruitful ap­proach at the beginning level will be one presenting science as investigations, or questions, about nature that bear wit­ ness to a set of social constraints or cultural commitments. Thus we may gain insight into the almost heroic self­ confidence of mid-nineteenth-century physiology by observing the support given to those like Emile Dubois-Rey­mond, who believed that all animal pro­cesses would ultimately be explained by electromechanical forces. Certainly the invocation of standards of “scientific ob­jectivity” or simply the reference today to idealized science as a model has per­ suasive power; witness the common no­tion that “true” science is a valid basis for resolving political disputes about such matters as environmental pollution. How long has this been so? What are its implications? What are the roots of our apparent faith in science?

Insofar as science holds a central place in our culture, we omit one of the essential driving forces and normative constraints in Western culture if we treat science as extraneous and having no history. Indeed, from a modern point of view there is a strong defense for the thesis that the history of science in its broadest sense is part of the core of the history of Western culture. One of the most striking characteristics of West­ern culture for well over a century has been its view that scientists are the “wise men” of our civilization, able to explain the fundamental causes and forces in nature as well as to solve all manner of economic, social, and political problems with applications of scientific knowledge.

Among the topics from the history of science that can be made part of a Western civilization survey the follow­ing would be likely to arouse interest:

1. Ancient Greek concepts of ideal reality (Parmenides on absolute Being, Platonic Ideas, Euclidean geometry);
2. Greek reasonings from experi­ence (Hippocratic study of dis­ eases, historical patterns in Thu­cydides, Aristotelian classifica­tion of animals);
3. Hellenistic astronomy from Ap­ollonius to Ptolemy: science for the specialist;
4. Stoic and Epicurean views of na­ture: new philosophies in the Hellenistic empires;
5. Digests of knowledge and the decline of science in late Antiq­ uity;
6. The condemnation of 1277 at Paris: theological impetus to sci­ ence in the Middle Ages;
7. Artists as scientists in the Renaissance;
8. The trial of Galileo: Copernican­ism, atomism, and the authority of the Church;
9. The science of Galileo: cosmolo­ gy and terrestrial mechanics;
10. The “mechanical philosophy” of the seventeenth century (esp. Descartes, Hobbes, Newton);
11. Newtonian physics and its meanings for eighteenth-century cul­ture;
12. The economies of nature and of human society in the late eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries;
13. Debate on the age of the earth: from religion to science;
14. Darwin on species: What are they? Where do they come from? Where are they going?
15. Scientific analysis of the material world: chemistry from Lavoisier, Dalton, and Wohler to the in­ dustrial world of 1900;
16. Atoms of life: cell theory, Pas­teur, and nineteenth-century sci­ entific medicine;
17. Forces of nature: energetics and thermodynamics of the nine­ teenth century;
18. The paradoxical world of the quantum;
19. The non-Euclidean world of rel­ativity;
20. Molecular biology: birth of a new science from physics and biology.

It may be said that these topics fit well into the general developments in the history of ideas in the higher culture. The first five, for example, follow a traditional pattern in the history of art and drama in classical antiquity, and these in turn have usually been said to mirror to some degree the religion and politics of the successive centuries from the sixth BC to the fourth AD. Topics 7–11 deal with the transformations that made possible modern Western science. Topics 12–16 reveal the progressive ra­tionalizing and even “scientizing” of ma­jor aspects of the everyday world we inhabit. This is a central thrust in the history of modern thought. Topics 18–20 introduce ideas that have trans­ formed science again, producing “post­classical” science. We can look at a couple of topics long enough to observe ties to the general culture and themes for emphasis in teaching.

Item 6 in the list is the only medieval theme, largely because medieval cultur­al and intellectual history in general receive a limited place in the European survey course. Item 6 offers an excellent opportunity to broaden students’ un­derstanding of scholasticism as well as to see the utility of investigating religious subjects in search of information and attitudes on ostensibly (to moderns) nonreligious matters.

It was not simply the translations of scientific works from the Arabic in the twelfth century nor even the transla­tions of Aristotle and commentaries on his works, more specifically, which occa­sioned the concern of ecclesiastical lead­ers regarding rationalistic doctrines about the material world. The condem­nations of 1277 are a part of the intellec­tual history of the universities, specifi­cally the University of Paris, and the internal conflicts regarding the proper subjects of study. A general background can be found in the essay of William A. Wallace, “The Philosophical Setting of Medieval Science,” in D.C. Lindberg (ed.), Science in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA, 1978, 91-119). Edward Grant’s es­ say, “Science and Theology in the Mid­dle Ages,” in D.C. Lindberg and R.L. Numbers (eds.), Gods and Nature: Histori­cal Essays … (Berkeley, CA, 1986, 49- 75), focuses on the science vs. theology issue, while his earlier article, “The Con­demnation of 1277, God’s Absolute Power, and Physical Thought in the Late Middle Ages,” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 10 (1979, 211-44) (also published as ch. 13 in E. Grant, Studies in Medieval Science and Natural Philosophy, [London, 1981]), focuses directly on the scientific questions. The 219 propositions condemned by the bishop of Paris in 1277 are translated in Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi (eds.), Medieval Political Philosophy (New York, 1963, 337-54); a selection from these, especially relevant to science, appears in E. Grant (ed.), Source Book in Medieval Science (Cambridge, MA, 1974, 45-50).

Topic 12 shows the transformation of economics from human systems of pow­ er and wealth to more general biosys­tems of rationalized mutual interdepen­dence. In short, humanity becomes no more than a part of nature, and nature becomes for some an object of sympa­thetic concern, not simply manipulable property. Yet the old attitude of domi­nation remains. Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rodian Shore (Berkeley, CA, 1967, 501-654), covers the eighteenth­ century emergence of a new natural history from natural theology and the concerns for an environment fit for various inhabitants. The story told by Glacken concludes with Malthusian population doctrines and the idea of limits on environmental support systems. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: a History of the Modern Sensibility (New York, 1983, esp.  143-191), describes the affective, emotional  side  of this new awareness of nature as human habitat. The human material economic environment as analyzed by Adam Smith is nicely  comprehended in ex­cerpts presented by Peter Gay (ed.), The Enlightenment: a Comprehensive Anthology (New York, 1973, 576-616). The story of ecology in the later eighteenth century, both Arcadian and rationalistic, and the conflict of these two outlooks through Darwin’s contributions is at­tractively told in Donald Worster’s Na­ture’s Economy: a History of Ecological Ideas (New York, 1985, pts. 1I, 3).

For the two topics just discussed, as well as the others in the list, the connec­tions with the European history survey must come from within the individual topics. There is no simple formula for integrating all or even most themes on the history of science into the course. At a general level—and this can be pushed too far—the institutional framework provides connections that help: univer­sity, governmental agency, industrial employer, private or public patronage, etc.

Furthermore, cultural correlation, while showing no causal connection, are useful teaching devices, and these may appear in motivation, content, or pur­pose of scientific  work.  Such correla­tions are better left as tentative bases for further inquiry than as evident facts. Examples are: the parallels with political uncertainty in the discussions about the uncertainty principle in quantum me­chanics, the presentation of idealized forms in Platonic physics and Greek sculpture of the fifth century BC, the rather ideological trumpeting about the virtues of the method of experimental science in many seventeenth-century re­sponses to radical religious and philo­sophical scepticism.

Science has a social history and a cultural history, but the discipline of history of science  at  present seems to offer the most uniform support for students looking for expositions of the de­velopment of scientific ideas. Like the history of a political theory, the history of a scientific theory is of marginal significance in the absence of connections with its contemporary history, but the teacher (or student) must sometimes bend the available expositions of an idea or theory to realize its potential for historical significance. The student in a European survey course will be doing well to gain the basic idea of a scientific theory or achievement and a reasonable notion of the relevance of this to the rest of history. Equally important is the rec­ognition, through the introduction of science history at many points in the course, that science has as long and as meaningful a part in the Western tradi­tion as, for example, religion or art.

An introductory bibliography for teachers will necessarily omit some de­siderata. The basic bibliography for both teaching and research is the annual Critical Bibliography published as the final number each year in Isis, the official periodical of the History of Science So­ciety. This has been put into more con­venient reference form in the Isis Cumu­lative Bibliography 1913-65 (London: Mansell 1971-82); volumes on 1966-75 also published by Mansell (1980, 1985). Information on persons in the history of science appears in the sixteen-volume Dictionary of Scientific Biography,  ed. by C.C. Gillespie et al. (New York: Scribner’s 1970-80). “The Scientific Revolution” (July 1986) is the first of a series of teaching guides for selected topics, to be published initially in the History of Science Society Newsletter and then as separate pamphlets.

Articles of general interest to Europe­ an history teachers appear from time to time in the periodical History of Science, which takes a special interest in the intellectual and social context of science and in reviews of scholarship on a topic. A recent example is D.R. Oldroyd’s “How Did Darwin Arrive at His The­ory? The Secondary Literature to 1982,” in vol. 22 (1984, 325-374).

A useful outline of thirty lecture topics, With readings, from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twenti­eth, can be found in S. Shapin’s “A Course in the Social History of Science,” Social  Studies  of  Science, 10 (1980, 231-258).

Unlike the Western civilization course, the history of science survey has not been inundated by a variety of often successful textbooks. Quite the con­trary, there seems no general recogni­tion of the success of even one such textbook. For want of a replacement, Stephen F. Mason’s A History of the Sci­ences (New York: Macmillan 1962) is still used by some, though it is almost thirty years old. For the period up to ca. 1600, Richard Olson’s Science Deified and Sci­ence Defied (Berkeley: U. Calif. Press 1983) is useful for teachers but is not confidently recommended for students. John Marks, Science and the Malting of the Modern World (Portsmouth, N.H.: Hein­emann 1983), covers the period  from ca. 1600 to the present in thirty-seven short chapters; only the final chapters of this book make good use of research published since the 1960s. L.P. Williams and H.J. Steffens, The History of Science in Western Civilization, 3 vols. (Washing­ ton, D.C.: University Press of America 1979), provides historical introductions to a well chosen set of readings from the sources of scientific thought. A volume still useful, originally published in 1971, is Joseph Ben-David’s The Scientist’s Role in Society (Chicago: U. Chicago Press 1984). Dependable surveys of important eras and themes in the history of science are available. Among these are the following:

Geoffrey E.R. Lloyd, Early Greek Sci­ence: Thales to Aristotle, New York, Norton, 1974

Geoffrey E.R. Lloyd, Greek Science Af­ter Aristotle, New York, Norton, 1973

Marie Boas, The Scientific Renaissance 1450-1630, New York, Harper & Row, 1962

A. Rupert Hall, From Galileo to Newton, Mineola (N.Y.), Dover, 1982

Garland Allen, Life Science in the Twen­tieth Century, New York, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978

C. Chant and J. Fauvel (eds.), Darwin to Einstein: Historical Studies in Sci­ence and Belief, Chicago, Longman, 1981

N.G. Coley and V.M. Hall (eds.), Dar­win to Einstein: Primary Sources in Science and Belief, Chicago, Long­man, 1981

D.C. Lindberg and R.L. Numbers (eds.), God and Nature: Historical Es­says on the Encounter between Chris­tianity and Science, Berkeley, U. Cal­if. Press, 1986