As more and more historians acknowledge the central signifcance of science and technology with that of modern society, the need for a good, general history of the achievements of the Scientific Revolution has grown. Scientific Culture and The Making of the Industrial West seeks to explain this historical process by looking at how and why scientific knowledge became such an integral part of the culture of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and how this (...) in turn lead to the Industrial Revolution. This comparative study not only looks at England, and its success, but follows through with the history of France, the Netherlands, and Germany. (shrink)

The aim of this contribution is to conduct a critical approach to the concept and traditional measurement of scientific culture on the basis of an analysis of the phenomenon of the social appropriation of the science, assuming a multidimensional outlook sensitive to its contextual and behavioural dimensions. The analysis will be carried out along with a revision of some statistical results coming from a recent opinion survey about public perception of science and technology in Spain.

Se exponen precisiones en torno al concepto de cultura científica sobre la base de numerosos referentes actuales y a partir de las diferencias en su tratamiento, en el que generalmente se asume como categoría que es vinculada a las grandes masas y que, por su oficio, deben portar los individuos que se relacionan directa o indirectamente con la construcción del conocimiento científico y los resultados o salidas derivados de estos. También se propone el concepto de cultura científico investigativa que parte (...) de una intencionalidad como regularidad del pensamiento científico en el modo de actuación del sujeto consciente y desarrollador de esa categoría esencial, núcleo de capacidades transformadoras que median el pensamiento científico y la toma de decisiones en función de las demandas sociales. On the basis of current references about of scientific culture concept, the authors detailed the differences in the treatment in which it is generally assumed as a category that is linked to the masses and which, due to their profession, must have the individuals that are directly or indirectly related to the construction of scientific knowledge and the results or outputs derived from them. In addition, the concept of scientific research culture is proposed, from intentionality as a regularity of scientific thinking in the action mode of the conscious individual and developer of that essential category, a nucleus of transformative capacities that mediate scientific thinking and decision making in function of social demands. (shrink)

Why did science emerge in the West and how did scientific values come to be regarded as the yardstick for all other forms of knowledge? Stephen Gaukroger shows just how bitterly the cognitive and cultural standing of science was contested in its early development. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified (...) picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often incompatible, programmes. To complicate matters, much depended on attempts to reshape the persona of the natural philosopher, and distinctive new notions of objectivity and impartiality were imported into natural philosophy, changing its character radically by redefining the qualities of its practitioners.The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future, have been profoundly altered since the seventeenth century, as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. Science has not merely brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather has completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. In The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Stephen Gaukroger offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the formative stages of this development---and one which challenges the received wisdom that science was seen to be self-evidently the correct path to knowledge and that the benefits of science were immediately obvious to the disinterested observer. (shrink)

For those in the so‐called G‐7, G‐8, or G‐20, searching for the formula for economic takeoff, this is a book that deserves a reckoning. It explores the “role of culture,” which hitherto has had “no place in traditional economic explanations” of the history of industrial achievement. It is in the cultural and epistemological transformation of the eighteenth century that Margaret Jacob finds the foundation of industrial revolution. Jacob thereby dismisses the myth of the accidental genius or the inspired semiliterate (...) backyard tinkerer that has reinforced the notion that nothing can be done except by lives of singular initiative.By comparing the British most particularly with the Dutch and the French, Jacob argues it was precisely the utilitarian and egalitarian sentiments found in British scientific and philosophical societies that mattered most. Her theme is the much‐contested vision of the efficacy of natural knowledge and the assimilation of natural philosophy by the utilitarian world of the artisan and the entrepreneur. The advance of mechanical philosophy under Galileo and Descartes notwithstanding, it was during the English Revolution of the mid‐seventeenth century that natural philosophy was explicitly attached to a new social reformation and an inchoate democratic vision.Isaac Newton had nothing but derision for the vulgar “inferior horde of people” . Yet his disciples launched into careers as purveyors of his science in public lectures heavily weighted to mechanical explanation. Often viewed with suspicion elsewhere in Europe, in England such lecturers flourished. Even the engineer James Watt's French contact J. C. Perier, who desperately sought as many British secrets as possible, had initially learned his science from the lecturer abbé Nollet. An increasing awareness of the practical consequences of the new science was essential to the economic achievements of the late Enlightenment. This ultimately is a major thrust of Jacob's argument, for many early industrialists “were smarter than historians have allowed them to be” . Those who sought the new steam engines for their mines were perfectly well aware of the mechanical limitations and natural variables that might affect the success of their enterprise. Jacob is quite correct that “the Baconian vision lived on, eventually subsumed under the larger rubric of Newtonianism” . At the end of the century, the Napoleonic technocrat Jean‐Antoine Chaptal appears as representative of the case for applied science by promoting the Baconian unity of theory and practice.The most innovative part of Jacob's story is the attention she pays to the role of science in the attitudes of Midlands entrepreneurs like James Watt and Matthew Boulton. Both insisted on a scientific education for their sons, and Boulton recommended as much for the sons of foreign visitors to the Soho foundry. Both Watt and Boulton were particularly adept in the experimental laboratory, although they were also highly suspicious of the growing public technical interest and scientific curiosity that they feared might undermine their own patent monopoly. This suspicion grew out of their own deeper unease at the burgeoning democratic sympathies. Boulton and James Watt, senior, were extremely critical of radicalism—so we need not, therefore, draw any simple equation between industrial innovation and political reform. The currents of late eighteenth‐century Britain were far too complicated for that. Jacob, nonetheless, draws broad and interesting conclusions about the ways in which Continental cultural and political factors obstructed the spread of the very natural knowledge that gave the British such advantages. In her view, especially in this age of a “knowledge economy,” it might now do us well to remember the potential effects of “the widest dissemination of scientific knowledge” and “the democratization of learning” . In Jacob's version of the Industrial Revolution, the broadening and deepening of democracy followed the spread of natural learning beyond the uses of traditional elites. (shrink)

This paper argues that eighteenth-century Portuguese scientific policies promoted the inclusion of its main colony, Brazil, in the Enlightenment environment. This was accomplished by innovative initiatives, such as voyages to explore the colonial territory. Natural history activities, especially in mining, remained at the center of this political project and relied on co-opting groups of Portuguese in America. Based on the life of João da Silva Feijó, this article outlines the relevant connections between Feijó's scientific activities and the first (...) Brazilian national expedition in the 1850s, which led to discussion about developing the Brazilian nation. This analysis is aimed toward the growing consensus in historiography of the sciences that scientific activities practiced outside European centers gave rise to complex interactions involving the processes of mondialization of sciences and the construction of a local scientific context. (shrink)

We review the Nuffield Council on Bioethics 2018 report on germline gene editing and show how its shortcomings are part of an increasingly permissive climate among elite scientists that may well have emboldened the Chinese 'CRISPR babies' experiment. Without a robust and meaningful airing of the perils of human germline modification, these views are likely to encourage additional, more mainstream moves in the same dangerous direction.

A Revista Internacional de Língua Portuguesa (RILP) tem sido o veículo da expressão da comunidade que se expressa em português, impulsionada pelo movimento associativo universitário dos anos oitenta e noventa do século XX. Dirigida, primeiro, por Maria Helena Mira Mateus, numa série inicial composta por dezassete números, e, depois, coordenada por José--Augusto França, numa segunda série com três exemplares, perfaz hoje vinte e um títulos, o último dos quais abre a terceira série em curso, de cariz institucional e temático. A (...) sua pretensão de divulgação da língua portuguesa, a longevidade e a expressão intercontinental fazem desta revista um caso nacional único de internacionalização, do centro linguístico original para o universo multilateral das culturas associadas, em torno do vector comum da língua, alheia às vicissitudes políticas que o tempo impôs e os poderes engendraram. Neste artigo são revisitadas as várias séries. (shrink)

Habit and habitualisation play an important role in Husserl's phenomenology, yet one aspect of habituality has been somewhat overlooked, namely the dimension of authenticity/inauthenticity. While authenticity in Heidegger has received a lot of attention, inauthenticity in Husserl is less well researched, although, as I will show, it is of equal importance to his overall theorising. The central aim of this paper is to explore the authenticity/inauthenticity-distinction in the various domains of habitualisation and to establish its fundamental importance for Husserl. In (...) the first, introductory part of this paper I offer a few remarks on how to understand and categorise Husserl's transcendental take on habits; I also introduce the important distinction between authentic and inauthentic habits and authenticity and inauthenticity in general. In the second part I present the problem of mechanisation as a form of inauthentic habitualisation as it appears in Husserl's phenomenologies of ethics and, more importantly, science. The third part concludes the paper with a reflection on how phenomenology is programmatically aimed against any form of inauthenticity, and on how it might or might not achieve this goal. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to offer a sympathetic reconstruction of the political thought of Paul Feyerabend. Using a critical discussion of the idea of the ‘free society’ it is suggested that his political thought is best understood in terms of three thematic concerns – liberation, hegemony, and the authority of science – and that the political significance of those claims become clear when they are considered in the context of his educational views. It emerges that Feyerabend is best (...) understood as calling for the grounding of cognitive and cultural authorities – like the sciences – in informed deliberation, rather than the uncritical embrace of prevailing convictions. It therefore emerges that a free society is best understood as one of epistemically responsible citizenship rather than epistemically anarchistic relativism of the ‘anything goes’ – a striking anticipation of current debates about philosophy of science in society. (shrink)

Efforts to diffuse useful knowledge on the part of dedicated social reformers, enterprising publishers, and vigorous voluntary associations created new forms of popular literature in the urban centres of Paris and London during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Popular science periodicals, especially, embodied the aims of the advocates of cheap literature, by providing ‘improving’ information at prices low enough to reach readers who might otherwise purchase potentially dangerous political tracts. Besides promoting social stability, popular science periodicals served to (...) answer the needs of diverse increasingly literate, leisured, and well paid social groups.From their inception, through their evolution over half a century, periodicals in London and Paris mirrored these similar commitments and concerns of their creators. Continuous imitation back and forth across the Channel indicated just how closely English and French editors shared common programmes. Yet despite the similar aspirations of their promoters, popular science periodicals in England and France revealed the outlines of two very different low scientific cultures, shaped by the dissimilar characteristics of their audiences, editors, and high scientific communities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Emergence of Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685Helen HattabStephen Gaukroger. The Emergence of Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Pp. ix + 563. Cloth, $65.00.The sheer variety of both cognitive and non-cognitive contributions to the emergence of a scientific culture in the West and the complex relations to pre-modern developments that (...) scholars have brought to light over the past decades have put into question both the Enlightenment and Kuhnian accounts of the scientific revolution. Gaukroger’s work performs the ambitious but indispensable task of beginning to formulate an alternative way of understanding this momentous transition, one based on recent scholarship. Gaukroger treats science as both “a particular kind of cognitive product, and as a particular kind of cultural product” (3). His overarching goal is to show that examining the interrelations between the two can teach us something about modernity that focusing on one, to the exclusion of the other, cannot. He argues that the enduring success of Western science was not due to its advances (there were previous advances in other cultures), but due to its ability to consolidate. Successful consolidation promotes the cognitive claims of science and builds a scientific culture to legitimate them. Hence, throughout this book, Gaukroger explores how particular advances (e.g., in astronomy and natural philosophy) were legitimated by their ability to reinforce revelation, unify different disciplines, and exemplify the scientific persona. Since these means of consolidation, unlike methods of scientific discovery, rely on both cultural forces and intellectual advances, Gaukroger makes good on his promise to teach us something that intellectual and cultural histories taken separately cannot.Gaukroger characterizes Western modernity in terms of the eventual assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific ones. He targets the Enlightenment view which, as a result of this assimilation, reinterprets the success of scientific practices over others in ahistorical terms. On this view, the longstanding success of science results solely from cognitive advances, such as the commitment to objectivity (science was assumed to have dissociated itself from religion), the employment of adversarial, non-dogmatic arguments, and the development of quantitative and empirical methods. Gaukroger shows instead that: (1) early modern Epicurean and mechanist natural philosophies forged a closer connection to religious doctrine in response to the ultimate failure to maintain the Thomist reconciliation of theology with Aristotelian natural philosophy; (2) the threat posed by the naturalism of Renaissance philosophers like Pomponazzi led to a privileging of systematization over innovation in late Scholasticism, as well as a renewed interest in natural history, which later spawned the enterprise of physico-theology; (3) the adversarial character of ancient means of cultivating wisdom was rejected in favor of gentlemanly cooperation. This went hand-in-hand with a gradual reassignment of the aims of enquiry from the attainment of a transcendent truth to a productive truth, and the corresponding construction, by Bacon and others, of the scientific persona, which embodied the cognitive virtue of objectivity rather than the ethical virtue of ancient and medieval wisdom. Finally, (4) Beeckman and Descartes failed to achieve the quantification of natural philosophy they aimed for, in large part due to their conflicting commitment to corpuscularian matter theory. The successful replacement of Aristotelian causal explanations in natural philosophy by mechanistic explanations lay in mechanism’s ability to unify all causal explanation, rather than its ability to offer quantitative [End Page 640] explanations of various natural phenomena. Similarly, the experimental methods of Gilbert and Boyle were at first hotly contested, the eventual success of non-foundationalist, empirical approaches owing more to the unifying role played by the experiments of Gilbert, Boyle, and Newton. Although Boyle’s experimental philosophy included a mechanistic matter theory, unlike strict mechanists, experimentalists used experiments to focus and unify heterogeneous phenomena rather than grounding explanations in matter theory.Gaukroger presents the relevant cultural developments and theoretical advances with an impressive degree of detail and accuracy. Readers will gain insights about everything from the differences between early medieval Augustinianism and late medieval Aristotelianism, to Spinozism versus its late seventeenth-century alternatives. Scholars with expertise in specific areas will no doubt take issue with individual claims... (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe ‘Scientific Culture at Enterprises’ project aims to identify the different factors that characterize the image of science held by entrepreneurs and business managers, explore the relationships among these factors, and shed light on the role they play in defining this image and ultimately in developing a culture of science in the business sector. This article is based on the results of the SCe 2016 survey with a specially designed telephone survey questionnaire of a representative sample of (...) Spanish companies. The novelty of our approach lies in the application of a model developed in the fields of Social Studies of Science and Public Understanding of Science to the business sector, in order to obtain information on the dispositions of perception, interest, knowledge and action and their relationships with science and innovation in the business sector in Spain. Using the PIKA model of the image of science, we found this image in the business sector to be shaped by entrepreneurs... (shrink)

Freemasonry was the most widespread form of secular association in eighteenth-century England, providing a model for other forms of urban sociability and a stimulus to music and the arts. Many members of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, for instance, were Freemasons, while historians such as Margaret Jacob have argued that Freemasonry was inspired by Whig Newtonianism and played an important role in European Enlightenment scientific education. This paper illustrates the importance of natural philosophy in Masonic rhetoric (...) and utilizes material from Masonic histories, lodge records and secondary works to demonstrate that scientific lectures were indeed given in some lodges. It contends, however, that there were other sources of inspiration for Freemasonry besides Newtonianism, such as antiquarianism, and that many other factors as well as the prevalence of Masonic lodges determined the geography of English scientific culture. Although the subject of Freemasonry and natural philosophy has great potential, as Jacob has demonstrated so well, much further work, especially in the form of prosopographical studies of provincial lodges, is required before the nature of the relationship between the two can be fully appreciated. (shrink)

Edinburgh has long been recognized as one important place where early glacial theory was promoted and debated. This paper, rather than attend to the longer-term development of glacial theory, focuses on the ways in which the theory was assessed, disseminated and received in and through the scientific culture of early Victorian Edinburgh. Edinburgh's scientific and educational societies, science journals, newspapers and field sites are brought to view through examining their engagement with, and use of, early glacial theory. (...) Tracking the theory's passage across a range of spaces bound up with the promotion of geology in mid-nineteenth-century Edinburgh signals relations between local geological endeavour and other sorts of scientific and cultural work. Particular, though not exclusive, attention is given to practices more readily defined as ‘popular’. (shrink)

Cultural accounts of scientific ideas and practices have increasingly come to be welcomed as a corrective to previous—and still widely held—theories of scientific knowledge and practices as universal. The editors caution, however, against the temptation to overgeneralize the work of culture, and to lapse into a kind of essentialism that flattens the range and variety of scientific work. The book refers to this tendency as culturalism. The contributors to the volume model a new path where historicized (...) and cultural accounts of scientific practice retain their specificity and complexity without falling into the traps of culturalism. They examine, among other issues, the potential of using notions of culture to study behavior in financial markets; the ideology, organization, and practice of earthquake monitoring and prediction during China's Cultural Revolution; the history of quadratic equations in China; and how studying the "glass ceiling" and employment discrimination became accepted in the social sciences. Demonstrating the need to understand the work of culture as a fluid and dynamic process that directly both shapes and is shaped by scientific practice, Cultures without Culturalism makes an important intervention in science studies. Contributors. Bruno Belhoste, Karine Chemla, Caroline Ehrhardt, Fa-ti Fan,Kenji Ito, Evelyn Fox Keller, Guillaume Lachenal, Donald MacKenzie, Mary S. Morgan, Nancy J. Nersessian, David Rabouin, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Claude Rosental, Koen Vermeir. (shrink)

The new interest in special divine action has led to a close reading of the great debates and discussions of the early modern period in an attempt to understand contemporary resistance to the notion of divine action, and to develop strategies for reaffirming the notion in a refined manner. Although continuing engagement with and evaluation of the Humean legacy on miracles and divine action will be of central importance to this programme of review, there are other issues that also need (...) to be addressed. In this article I identify some of the factors that have caused or continue to cause difficulties for the articulation of a concept of special divine action and I suggest how they might be engaged. (shrink)

(1978). Robert Goodacre's astronomy lectures (1823–1825), and the structure of scientific culture in Philadelphia. Annals of Science: Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 353-363.

Computers are supposed to be smart, yet they frustrate both ordinary users and computer technologists. Why are people frustrated by smart machines? Computers don’t fit people. People think in terms of comparisons, stories, and analogies, and seek feedback, whereas computers are based on a fundamental design that does not fit with analogical and feedback thinking. They impose a binary, an all-or-nothing, approach to everything. Moreover, the social world and institutions that have developed around computer technology hide and reinforce the lack (...) of alignment between computers and people. This book suggests a solution: we do not have to accept the way things are now and work around the bad social and technical design of computers. Rather, it proposes a diverse, distributed, critical discussion of how to design and build both computer technology and its social institutions. (shrink)

This article, through a case study of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), traces the reception, experimentation with, and uses of radium in early twentieth-century Ireland. Throughout the nineteenth century there was increasing state intervention in the provision of scientific and technical education in Ireland. This culminated in the loss of the RDS's traditional role in this area. The article demonstrates that the RDS was forced to re-envisage its role as a scientific institution by actively seeking to support experimental (...) research. Using radium as a case study, the article argues for the success of this tactic. It demonstrates that radium played a central role within the RDS as a nexus for the maintenance of an experimental and philanthropic culture that permeated much of the society's scientific output in this period. In doing this it highlights the importance of sociability in the promotion of science in Ireland in the early twentieth century. In addition, it explores the role of the RDS as an arbiter of scientific authority. (shrink)

Ancient Greek philosophers were the first to postulate the possibility of explaining nature in theoretical terms and to initiate attempts at this. With the rise of monotheistic religions of revelation claiming supremacy over human reason and envisaging a new world to come, studies of the natural order of the transient world were widely considered undesirable. Later, in the Middle Ages, the desire for human understanding of nature in terms of reason was revived. This article is concerned with the fundamental reversal (...) of attitudes, from “undesirable” to “desirable”, that eventually led into the foundations of modern science. One of the earliest, most ingenious and most interesting personalities involved was Eriugena, a theologian at the Court of Charles the Bald in the 9th century. Though understanding what we call nature is only one of the several aspects of his theological work, his line of thought implies a turn into a pro-scientific direction: the natural order is to be understood in abstract terms of ‘primordial causes’; understanding nature is considered to be the will of God; man encompasses the whole of creation in a physical as well as a mental sense. Basically similar ideas on the reconciliation of scientific rationality and monotheistic religions of revelation were conceived, independently and nearly simultaneously, by the Arab philosopher al-Kindi in Bagdad. Eriugena was more outspoken in his claim that reason is superior to authority. This claim is implicit in the thought of Nicholas of Cusa with his emphasis on human mental creativity as the image of God’s creativity; and it is the keynote of Galileo’s ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina’ some 800 years later, the manifesto expressing basic attitudes of modern science. -/- This article in English is based on the monography (in German): A. Gierer “Eriugena, al-Kindi, Nikolaus von Kues - Protagonisten einer wissenschaftsfreundlichen Wende im philosophischen und theologischen Denken”, Acta Historica Leopoldina 29 (1999), Barth Verlag in MVH Verlage Heidelberg, ISBN: 3-335-00652-6, which is also available online on this server. -/- -/- . (shrink)

These are reflections on the Arkansas creationist trial by a witness for the American Civil Liberties Union. The following points are stressed: First, religion took the lead in defending science at the trial. Second, the appearance of creation science is a function not only of Protestant fudamentalism but also of the establishment of science in our wider culture. It represents a “deviant science” in such a culture. Third, our century has manifested many such bizarre unions of ideological religion (...) and modern science. This shows that science is dependent upon its humanistic, moral, and religious matrix for its social and historical health. Fourth, part of the cause of the rise of creation science has been the power, status, and self–assurance of science that it represents “the only form of truth.” Fifth, religion in turn tends both to increase and to become fanatical in advanced and precarious cultures; religion, therefore, needs rational and moral criticism if it would help in the creation of social health. (shrink)