一、课程信息

全球科学史与科学哲学

课程号：08400942

课程体系：专业必修课（硕博） 

学分：3

考核方式：homework and reading preparation (30%); class participation (30%); final

historiographical essay (40%)

教学方式：讨论

负责教师：雷震 John Alekna

 

二、课程介绍：

What does it mean to say that science has a history, to imply that terms and categories that at first seem so solid in our contemporary imagination in fact change over time? What are the implications of such a claim for the fields of history and science, and indeed for society more broadly? This course offers students an introduction to these questions, and provides an examination of how scholars of the past several decades have understood science, technology, and medicine as constructed within and dependent upon social, cultural, economic, and political context.

 

To these ends, this course aims to establish a grounding in the key works and central debates in the history of science, technology, and medicine. We proceed chronologically and thematically from the global early modern period through until the present, providing students with both an overview of the history science and insight into the historiographical interventions of their own research. While rooted in the historiography of European science, the course seeks to offer a de-centered global view, actively incorporating the history of societies and cultures outside the narrow confines of Western Europe and challenging popular notions of a linear, corporeal ‘science’.

 

Students will be assessed on their preparation (30%) and class participation (30%), as well as written final project (40%) which will take the form of a historiographical essay on a topic of their choice. Readings are in English, approximately 400 pages per week. Each student is expected to have an understanding of all materials, and to work toward efficient scholarly reading that allows for participation in discussion. Classes will be run as Socratic seminars where discussion and questioning are prioritized—therefore student preparation is an imperative. Each student should arrive in class with their own questions and observations about the readings—some weeks students will be assigned special responsibility for materials, or a short presentation—and be prepared to be ‘cold-called’.

 

 

三、课程大纲与参考文献

1. Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science

a. How do we define science? What are its boundaries?

b. How does science progress? Are ‘paradigm shifts’ a satisfactory explanation?

c. Importance of contextualization and semantics.

 

2. Reconsidering Assumptions: the Cases of Galileo and Newton

a. The trial of Galileo: a case of Science versus Religion?

b. Newton and the non-invention of rational physics.

c. What happened to magic?

 

3. The Social and Political Context of Science

a. What was a ‘scientist? Was Robert Boyle one?

b. The relation between early modern philosophy of science and politics

c. Does science change when seen in political and philosophic context?

 

4. Science in the Global Early Modern

a. What does it mean to speak of a global early modern?

b. Science in colonial Latin America, Ottoman Turkey, and Tokugawa Japan.

 

5. The First Age of Exploration

a. How did European exploration occur? Through what technology?

b. Indigenous Ages of Exploration: the Case of Hawai’i

c. How did exploration shape European ideas of technology and progress?

 

6. The Enlightenment

a. Is Enlightenment a useful category of analysis?

b. The relationship between enlightenment philosophies and science

c. Was there ever an ‘Age of Reason’?

 

7. The Industrial Revolution

a. Did the industrial revolution occur? Why pose such a question?

b. The Great Divergence: Why England?2

c. Did the Industrial Revolution ever end? How revolutions occurred?

 

8. Positionality, Measurement, and Observation

a. What is Objectivity and how can it be historicized?

b. The history of observation and measurement.

c. When did systematic experiment begin?

 

9. Taking in the World: Banks, Von Humbolt, and Darwin

a. Joseph Banks and the military-scientific missions of Captain Cook.

b. Alexander Von Humbolt and the Invention of Theories of Nature.

c. Charles Darwin and the Origins of Evolution.

 

10. Laboratories, Universities, and the State: Science in the 19th Century

a. The origins of laboratories and scientific spaces.

b. The emergence of science in universities.

c. The state becomes embedded in the scientific process.

 

11. Creating Medicine, Health, and Hygiene

a. The Pasteurization of France.

b. The creation of weisheng in semi-colonial context.

c. The laboratory in medicine.

 

12. Science, Technology, and Empire

a. Communications technology as the handmaiden of empire.

b. Materials and industry in imperial networks.

c. Disease and animal agency.

 

13. The Destruction of Progress

a. The First World War and the crisis of Science.

b. The American tragedy of eugenics.

c. The global origins of science in the Nazi empire.

 

14. The Nuclear Age

a. Who was Albert Einstein?

b. Origins of the Nuclear Project.

c. Why were the atomic bombs used?

 

15. Science in the Cold War

a. Towards an apolitical science?

b.Science-diplomacy after the Second World War

c. Science as propaganda.

 

16. Climate and the Problems of Post-Cold War Politics

a. How have scientists studied climate in the past?

b.Why is it hard to comprehend the scientific problem of climate change?

c. Does the Cold War still shape our ideas of science? How can we change?

 

Course Bibliography:
1. Peter Dear and Sheila Jasanoff, “Dismantling Boundaries in Science and Technology
Studies,” Isis 101 (2010): 759-774
2. Steven Shapin “Lowering the Tone in the History of Science: A Noble Calling,” chapter 1
of Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies,
3
Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority.
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) 1-14.
3. Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 50th anniversary edition (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2012)
4. Alan E. Musgrave, “Kuhn’s Second Thoughts,” and Gary Gutting, “Introduction,” in Gary
Gutting, Paradigms and Revolutions: Applications and Appraisals of Thomas Kuhn’s
Philosophy of Science (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1980) pp1-12, 19-21, 39-53
5. Bruno Latour, “Why has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of
Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30(2004): 225-248
6. Finocchiaro, Maurice A. Retrying Galileo, 1633–1992. (Univ of California Press, 2005.)
7. Redondi, Pietro, and Raymond Rosenthal, trans. Galileo Heretic. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987.)
8. Josephson-Storm, Jason (2017). The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the
Birth of the Human Sciences. University of Chicago
9. Iliffe, Rob. Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (Oxford UP, 2017)
10. Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the
experimental life. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.)
11. Küçük, Harun. Science Without Leisure: Practical Naturalism in Istanbul, 1660-1732.
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019.)
12. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of
Science in the Iberian World. (Stanford University Press, 2006.)
13. Dung-shen Chen, “We Have Never Been Latecomers: A Critical Review of High-Tech
Industry and Social Studies of Technology” East Asian Science, Technology and Society:
An International Journal 9, no. 4 (2015): 381-396.
14. Federico Marcon, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern
Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015);
15. Michael Adas. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of
Western Dominance. (Cornell University Press, 2015.)
16. David Chang. The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of
Exploration. (University of Minnesota Press, 2016)
17. Schotte, Margaret E. Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800. (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2019.)
18. Thomas Hankin. Science and the Enlightenment. (Cambridge University Press, 1985)
19. Margaret Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West. (Oxford
University Press, 1997)
20. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the
Progress of Reason,” Richard Nice trans. Information (International Social Science
Council) 14, no. 6 (1975): 19-47.
21. Elman, Benjamin. On Their Own Terms. (Harvard University Press, 2009) excerpts
22. Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution. Second Edition. (University of Chicago Press,
2018)
23. Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern
World Economy. (Princeton University Press, 2000.)
4
24. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “The Industrial Revolution in the Home,” in Donald McKenzie and
Judy Wajcman, eds. The Shaping of Technology, 2nd ed. 1999[1985] 281-300
25. Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007)
26. Daniela Bleichmar, “The Geography of Observation: Distance and Visibility in Eighteenth
Century Botanical Travel,” in Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, Histories of
Scientific Observation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010) 272-295
27. Steven Shapin, “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth Century England” Isis 79
(1988):373-404 (reprinted in Science Studies Reader)
28. Theodore M. Porter, “Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science,” Social Studies
of Science 22 (1992): 633-652 (reprinted in Science Studies Reader)
29. Simon Shaffer, “Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation,” Science
in Context 2(1988): 115-145
30. Notes and Records The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science “Rethinking
Joseph Banks” special issue 73:4(2019)
31. Alistair Sponsel, Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of
Speculation. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018)
32. Andrea Wulf: The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humbolt’s New World. (New York:
Penguin Random House, 2015)
33. Simon Schaffer, “Late Victorian Meteorology and Its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of
Ohms,” in Science Studies Reader
34. Ken Alder, “A Revolution to Measure: the Political Economy of the Metric System in
France.”
35. Pickstone, John V. Ways of knowing: A new history of science, technology, and medicine.
(University of Chicago Press, 2001.) Chapters 4-7 pp83-188
36. Thomas P Hughes, “The Evolution of Large Technological Systems” in the Science
Studies Reader
37. Bruno Latour “Give Me a Laboratory and I will Raise the World” in the Science Studies
Reader
38. Ruth Rogaski. Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.)
39. Bruno Latour The Pasteurization of France. (Harvard University Press, 1988(1993))
40. Simon Schaffer “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bruno Latour” Studies in the History and
Philosophy of Science, 22 (1991) [review of the Pasteurization of France]
41. Gerald Geison, “Public Triumphs and Forgotten Critics: The Debate over Pasteur’s Early
Use of Rabies Vaccines in Human Cases,” Chapter 8 of The Private Science of Louis
Pasteur (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) 206-233
42. Jean-Paul Gaudilliere, “An Indian Path to Biocapital? The Traditional Knowledge Digital
Library, Drug Patents, and the Reformulation Regime of Contemporary Ayurveda,” East
Asian Science, Technology, and Society 8(2014)
43. Bruno Latour: “The Costly Ghastly Kitchen” in The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine by
Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams eds.
44. Headrick, Daniel R. The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of
Imperialism, 1850-1940. (Oxford University Press, 1988.)
45. Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. (Vintage, 2015.)
5
46. Reviel Netz, Barbed Wire: an Ecology of Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2004)
47. McNeill, John Robert. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean,
1620-1914. (Cambridge University Press, 2010.)
48. Kimberley Walker and Mark Nesbitt Just the Tonic: A Natural History of Tonic Water. (University of Chicago, 2020.)
49. Cornwell, John. Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil’s Pact. (Viking Press, 2003)
50. Daniel Kevles In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity 1985
51. Stefan Kuhl The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (Oxford University Press, 1994)
52. Michael Gordin. Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
53. Michael Gordin. Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)
54. Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press, 2014)
55. Audra J. Wolfe Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Scienc (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020)
56. Audra J. Wolfe Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012)
57. D. Graham Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2011) excerpts

58. Deborah R. Coen, Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018)
59. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, “Challenging Knowledge: How Climate Science
Became a Victim of the Cold War,” in Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, eds. Agnotology: the Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008): 55-89
60. Carolyn Merchant, “The Scientific Revolution and the Death of Nature,” Isis 97, no.3 (2006):513-533