12/22/2023 0 Comments Physics science dictionary![]() ![]() Before the nineteenth century this tradition remained predominantly programmatic, producing little significant historical research. Condorcet and Comte are only the most famous of the philosophically inclined writers who, following Bacon’s lead, attempted to base normative descriptions of true rationality on historical surveys of Western scientific thought. Early in the seventeenth century Francis Bacon proclaimed the utility of histories of learning to those who would discover the nature and proper use of human reason. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though alternative approaches had begun to develop, scientists continued to produce both occasional biographies and magistral histories of their own specialties, for example, Kopp (chemistry), Poggendorff (physics), Sachs (botany), Zittel and Geikie (geology), and Klein (mathematics).Ī second main historiographic tradition, occasionally indistinguishable from the first, was more explicitly philosophical in its objectives. From the last fifty years of that period come the earliest historical studies that are sometimes still used as such, among them the historical narratives embedded in the technical works of Lagrange (mathematics) as well as the imposing separate treatises by Montucla (mathematics and physical science), Priestley (electricity and optics), and Delambre (astronomy). Similar works-together with a growing body of heroic biography-had a continuous history from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century, when their production was much stimulated by the Enlightenment’s vision of science as at once the source and the exemplar of progress. That traditional genre appeared in classical antiquity both in historical sections of technical treatises and in a few independent histories of the most developed ancient sciences, astronomy and mathematics. The historical section with which so many technical treatises and monographs still open is contemporary illustration of what was for many centuries the primary form and exclusive source for the history of science. They saw in it, besides intrinsic appeal, a means to elucidate the concepts of their specialty, to establish its tradition, and to attract students. ![]() Usually history was for them a by-product of pedagogy. Until very recently most of those who wrote the history of science were practicing scientists, sometimes eminent ones. Under the circumstances any brief report on development and current state is inevitably more personal and prognostic than for a longer-established profession.ĭevelopment of the field. The resulting tensions, though they have relaxed with increasing maturation of the profession, are still perceptible, particularly in the varied primary audiences to which the literature of the history of science continues to be addressed. From their predecessors, most of whom were historians only by avocation and thus derived their goals and values principally from some other field, this younger generation inherits a constellation of sometimes irreconcilable objectives. Only since 1950, and initially only in the United States, has the majority of even its youngest practitioners been trained for, or committed to, a full-time scholarly career in the field. StorerĪs an independent professional discipline, the history of science is a new field still emerging from a long and varied prehistory. SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION Norman Kaplan and Norman W. THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Michael Scriven
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