Trends in the Historiography of Science

The articles in this volume have been first presented during an international Conference organised by the Greek Society for the History of Science and Technology in June 1990 at Corfu. The Society was founded in 1989 and planned to hold a series of meetings to impress upon an audience comprised mainly by Greek students and scholars, the point that history of science is an autonomous discipline with its own plurality of approaches developed over the years as a result of long discussions and disputes within the community of historians of science. The Conference took place at a time when more and more people came to realise that the future of the Greek Universities and Research Centres depends not only on the progress of the institutional reforms, but also very crucially on the establishment of new and modern subject areas. Though there have been significant steps towards such a direction in the physical sciences, mathematics and engineering, the situation in the so-called humanities has been, at best, confusing. Political expediencies of the post war years and ideological commitments to a glorious, yet very distant past, paralysed the development of the humanities and constrained them within a framework which could not allow much more than a philological approach.

Inhalt

I Methodological Issues in the Historiography of Science.- Charting the Scientific Community.- Theory and Practice in Early Modern Physics.- Styles of Scientific Thinking or Reasoning: A New Analytical Tool for Historians and Philosophers of the Sciences.- Kinds and (In)commensurability.- Types of Discourse and the Reading of the History of the Physical Sciences.- On Demarcations between Science in Context and the Context of Science.- On the Harmful Effects of Excessive Anti-Whiggism.- Issues in the Historiography of Post-Byzantine Science.- Social Environment, Foundations of Science, and the Possible Histories of Science.- Scientific Discoveries as Historical Artifacts.- Selection, System and Historiography.- Can the History of Instrumentation Tell Us Anything about Scientific Practice?.- The One in the Philosophy of Proclus: Logic versus Metaphysics.- Rational versus Sociological Reductionism: Imre Lakatos and the Edinburgh School.- Sociocultural Factors and the Historiography of Science.- II Historiography of Mathematics.- Is Mathematics Ahistorical? An Attempt to an Answer Motivated by Greek Mathematics.- The Story of the Discovery of Incommensurability, Revisited.- On the History of Indeterminate Problems of the First Degree in Greek Mathematics.- On the Justification of the Method of Historical Interpretation.- The Infinite in Leibniz's Mathematics - The Historiographical Method of Comprehension in Context.- John Landen: First Attempt for the Algebrization of the Infinitesimal Calculus.- Historiographical Trends in the Social History of Mathematics and Science.- The Conception of the Scientific Research Programs and the Real History of Mathematics.- III Historiography of the Sciences.- Scientists and the State: The Legacy of World War II.- Unification, Geometry and Ambivalence: Hilbert, Weyl and the Göttingen Community.- The Two-Dimensional View of the History of Chemistry.- The Problem of Method in the Study of the Influence a Philosophy Has on Scientific Practice. The Case of Thermoelectricity.- Reopening the Texts of Romantic Science: The Language of Experience in J. W. Ritter's Beweis.- Problems and Methodology of Exploring the Scientific Thought during the Greek Enlightenment (1750-1821).- History of Science and History of Mathematization: The Example the Science of Motion at the Turn of the 17th and 18th Centuries.- The Artistic Culture of the Renaissance and the Genesis of Modern European Science.- Archaeoastronomy in Greece: Data, Problems and Perspectives.- Index of Names.