Course Arrangement
Spring 2015 semester, Wednesday evening18:00-19:40, room Shengsiclass now moved to Jiaoba 306.
Course requirements: no memorization, no calculations, and no particular background knowledge is required of students; only free reading and independent thinking are expected.
Assessment requirements:
Class attendance and discussion performance: 20%; (basically free points; active questioning and participation in discussion earn bonus points)
Reading report: 30%; (choose from the recommended reading list, or choose other related books you personally like; choosing a good book earns bonus points, choosing a bad book loses points.)
Final short paper: 50% (the topic is of your own choosing; it can also be completed on the basis of the reading report)
Course Outline
(1) Introduction (2 class hours)
Why study the history of science / overview of the history of science historiography (intellectual history, social history)
(2) Prehistory of Science (2 class hours)
Knowledge traditions of prehistoric civilizations; ancient civilizations such as Babylon and Egypt; the relationship between science and craft; ancient Chinese science
(3) Greek Classical Science (2 class hours)
Natural philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, mathematical astronomy
(4) Hellenistic Period (2 class hours)
Euclid, Ptolemy, Archimedes, Galen, and others
(5) The Decline of Classical Scholarship and the Rise and Fall of Islamic Science (2 class hours)
The Roman period, the decline of classical learning, the rise and fall of Islamic science
(6) The Late Middle Ages and Christianity (2 class hours)
Christianity’s destruction of and promotion of science, the scholastic tradition. The rise of the university
(7) Printing and the Renaissance (2 class hours)
Main contents: the revival of classical learning, natural history, the independence of nature, craftsmen and knowledge
(8) The Copernican Revolution (2 class hours)
Main contents: Plato—Ptolemy—Copernicus; Tycho, Kepler, Galileo
(9) Newton’s Synthesis (2 class hours)
Main contents: the establishment of the system of mechanics, the mechanistic view of nature, the mathematization of nature and the naturalization of mathematics
(10) The Mathematical Revolution (2 class hours)
Pythagoreanism, from Apollonius to Descartes, the new meaning of “all things are number,” Stevin, Viète
(11) From Alchemy to Chemistry (2 class hours)
Paracelsus, van Helmont, Boyle, Lavoisier
(12) The Enlightenment (2 class hours)
The institutionalization of science, scholarly journals, university education, the deification of Newton, science as a new culture
(13) The Industrial Revolution (2 class hours)
The alliance of technology and science, electricity, mass production
(14) The Age of Big Science and Big Technology (2 class hours)
Genetics, relativity, quantum mechanics, computers, ecology
(15) Class discussion or other supplementary content (2-4 class hours)
Main Reference Books
No textbook is designated. Reference books for the general history are listed below; specialized reference books will be recommended in class.
Wu Guosheng, The Course of Science, Peking University Press, 2002 edition, or Hunan Science and Technology Press, 2013
McClellan, A History of World Science and Technology, trans. Wang Mingyang, Shanghai Century Publishing Group, 2007
Lindberg: The Beginnings of Western Science, 2nd edition, trans. Zhang Butian, Hunan Science and Technology Press, 2013 (recommended)
Dijksterhuis: The Mechanization of the World Picture, trans. Zhang Butian, Hunan Science and Technology Press, 2010 (hard going)
Cohen: The Re-Creation of the World: How Modern Science Came to Be, trans. Zhang Butian, Hunan Science and Technology Press, 2012
Lecture Notes on the General History of Science (Introduction)
The main purpose of the first week’s classes is to settle course registration, so there will not be too much substantive content involved; the focus will be on a general introduction. Everyone is also welcome to raise their own questions or thoughts. How I teach the course and how I assess it are all things that can be adjusted at any time.
Since taking or not taking the course is something freely decided by everyone, you need to weigh the significance of this course—in other words, what is this course good for?
University life is completely different from the so-called “compulsory education” stage, where one has to learn whether one wants to or not. University students are adults; they are no longer studying because of their parents’ or other people’s demands, but need to take responsibility for themselves and study for their own purposes. Whether you choose a school, a major, or an elective course, there should be this level of reflection: what is this course good for? Even if this course is a required one and you cannot escape it, your understanding of it will determine the attitude and manner in which you approach it. If the meaning of this course is merely to pick up a few credits, that is also a kind of meaning; then you should choose the most efficient way to get through it, and would rather devote more of your limited energy to other courses you are interested in or to social practice. The first thing a university student must learn is how to slack off. If you only know how to be diligent, throwing yourself into everything with full force, in the end you may simply become mediocre and accomplish nothing especially well. You have to learn to distinguish what path you truly want to take, which things require your utmost effort, and which things can be dealt with by slacking off. So the most wasted students in university are not those who do not like studying, but those who only know how to study and do not understand self-reflection.
I also welcome students to take this course as a channel for slacking off and collecting credits. My requirements for this course are not high: basically just listen to me ramble, read one or two books, and write one or two papers. I can promise that as long as the paper is not plagiarized, even if you write an essay-like piece, the grade will not look bad. Of course, plagiarism gets a zero—there is no room for negotiation on that.
Of course, if, beyond the credits, everyone can gain something from this course, that would be best. This course has many benefits: it can help you grasp the spirit of science, cultivate historical awareness, bridge the humanities and the sciences, and refine your sensibilities… But what I say myself is of no use; in the end it still depends on each person’s different background, different aspirations, and different interests. The attitude and manner with which each person approaches this course will also differ, and the gains each person ultimately obtains from the same course will likewise differ.
Perhaps you haven’t thought that much about it; perhaps you simply think this course is interesting and fun, and so you enrolled. Maybe what I say is not interesting enough, but you are interested in the related content, and can use the opportunity of this course to read some books, and so on—that is not bad either. “Interesting” is a final explanation; “useful” is not final. If you say this course is useful for earning credits, then the next question is: what is the use of earning credits? If earning credits is useful for graduating, then the next question is: what is the use of graduating? And so on, ad infinitum… But if one says, “because it is interesting,” then there is no need to ask, “what is the use of being interesting?”—the questioning simply cannot continue.
Research in the history of science is the same. The different backgrounds and demands of different researchers, and their different understandings of “what is the significance of the history of science?”, also affect their attitudes and methods, as well as the kind of results they are ultimately able to obtain.
At first, the history of science was mainly intended to serve scientific research. In a certain sense, there had been such scholarly histories at least since ancient Greece—for example, Hippocrates described the history of medicine before him, and Aristotle, in many of his discussions, first listed the relevant views of natural philosophers before him. It is much like how, when we do academic research now, we also have to begin with a literature review, bringing up what predecessors have already researched on the relevant problem. But modern science developed rapidly; new research may only need to trace back through literature from the past few years. Physicists no longer enumerate Newton’s work, so the historical component in scientific research has become almost invisible. Only a very small number of scientific studies still cite content from the history of science—for example, astronomers may still quote ancient Chinese records of celestial phenomena compiled by historians of science. But on the whole, contemporary research in the history of science basically no longer contributes to scientific research, or rather, history of science is no longer part of scientific research.
Somewhat later, in the nineteenth century, attempts at a synthetic history of science—or what can also be called a “general history of science”—began to appear. A landmark was the British scholar William Whewell (1794–1866), who published his “History of the Inductive Sciences” in 1837; Auguste Comte (1798–1857), a representative figure of positivism, also advocated the study of a synthetic history of science. The main aim of the history of science in this stage was to try to derive, across the various specialized disciplines of science, a set of common, universal “scientific methods.” This stage was also the marker of the gradual independence of the scientific community; the word “scientist” was precisely coined by that same Whewell around 1833, modeled on artist. The demand for a synthetic history of science and the pursuit of “scientific method” both reflect scientists’ efforts to seek identity. From this point on, “science” and “scientists” increasingly became distinguished from philosophy, literature, and other professions, and acquired a unique social status. Incidentally, terms such as literature and art also only took shape in their contemporary meanings very late; in earlier times there was no such division of disciplinary fields as we have now, so Leonardo da Vinci, as we see him today, was a polymath, but in his own time he was in fact just a specialist. (I’m going off on a tangent, but one should have historical awareness when dealing with various terms, rather than forcing contemporary ready-made meanings onto them. This is something one must pay attention to first when studying history.)
The effort to summarize “scientific method” from the history of science ultimately also failed, or rather, it had long since ceased to be mainstream in history-of-science research. The ins and outs of this matter are rather complicated and involve the development of twentieth-century philosophy of science, so I won’t say much here. But in short, the key is nothing other than “it cannot be found.” The more we study the history of science, the more clearly we recognize the complexity of history; the actual development of science is often not driven by some simple scientific method. It is hard to imagine a “scientific method” that is universally applicable to various historical situations, much less to formulate it clearly.
To summarize, “scientific method” still ultimately means taking contributing to science as the purpose of the history of science; early history of science was always ancillary to science. Our country’s disciplinary system still preserves this influence: “history of science and technology” is classified as a first-level discipline under the category of science, on the same level as mathematics and physics, yet it has no affiliation with history or philosophy. But under this first-level discipline of the history of science there are no second-level disciplines, while this discipline can grant degrees in science, engineering, agriculture, medicine, and so on. This bizarre phenomenon exists because “history of science and technology” has traditionally not had an independent teaching system or research community: those studying the history of physics are in physics departments, those studying the history of chemistry are in chemistry departments, those doing medical history are in medical schools, and so on. So everyone manages their own affairs. Each science college also generally has a few old professors who have stepped back from the front lines of research and, with some free time on their hands, dabble in it; there is no specialized academic training involved.
The development of history of science as an independent disciplinary field took place mainly in the twentieth century. One important driving force was George Sarton (1884–1956). He too was influenced by Comte’s positivism, but he did not insist on summing up a set of scientific method; his belief was that only science could reflect human progress, so the history of human culture ought to be written as a history of science—rather than entangling history with those cyclical dynastic changes, it would be better to focus on the ever-advancing achievements of science. Sarton devoted his whole life to the cause of history of science. He founded the first, and most influential, journal of history of science, *Isis* (the name of a goddess of wisdom, and has nothing to do with the Islamic State, haha~), established the History of Science Society in the United States, and opened courses in history of science at Harvard. He also tried to write an *Introduction to the History of Science* covering the entire history of science before the twentieth century, but during his lifetime he completed only two volumes (the Classical Greek period and the Hellenistic period). No one continued the work afterward, and in fact it could not really be continued, because although Sarton promoted the institutional independence of history of science, in terms of research method and perspective he did not break out of the earlier positivist framework. He lacked sufficient historiographical self-awareness, and the result could only be the accumulation of material in the most exhaustive way possible. Clearly, the later the period, the more material there is; in the end, even if this work could truly have been completed, it would only have become an immensely bloated mishmash.
History of science truly became independent and developed in historiography in large part thanks to Koyré (1892–1964). In his early years he studied phenomenology under Husserl, mathematics under Hilbert, and philosophy under Bergson. He began by studying the history of religious thought, and ultimately turned to the history of scientific thought. The historiography he pioneered is called the history of scientific thought, or the history of scientific ideas. This kind of history of ideas does not merely refer to the history of scientific ideas; rather, it refers to an “idealist” history of science. Idealism, after all, has another Chinese translation, namely “唯心主义,” and “理想主义” is also this same word. (Note that this is not a bad term; we should quickly forget the way middle-school textbooks depict the history of philosophy as a struggle between idealism and materialism, since we will discuss the problems with that mode of description shortly.)
In short, the history of ideas assumes that scientific thought has some inner logical thread, and the task of the historian of science is to grasp the internal thread of this intellectual development and organize and interpret the relevant materials of the history of science around that thread. For example, the title of one of Koyré’s books—《From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe》—already hints at one intellectual thread in the Scientific Revolution of the modern period, revealing that the transformations in astronomy, physics, and other fields were in fact underpinned by changes of this or that worldview or cosmology.
Other historians of science may not necessarily agree with Koyré’s grasp of the logical thread of intellectual history; they may propose other threads from other angles, such as the “mechanization of the world picture.” But Koyré’s historiographical method and attitude have had a far-reaching influence. Even the “social history” of the late twentieth century, whose starting point is exactly the opposite of intellectual history, could hardly deny Koyré’s influence.
The social history of science and intellectual history are focused in exactly opposite directions: they do not focus on the logical thread within thought itself, but on the relationship between the scientific community and its external environment, and on how scientists’ religious beliefs, political status, and social relationships influence their scientific research and are in turn influenced by it. The representative figure is Merton (1910–2003). In 《Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England》 he proposed that Puritan ethics promoted the scientific spirit, and he supported this view through a series of sociological investigations. In general, we call intellectual history “internal history,” and social history “external history.”
Aside from the Merton school, Marxist history of science was also quite influential. The so-called “the material base determines the superstructure” is likewise a typical “external history” approach.
By the late twentieth century, these historiographical schools had each developed further, and it had long since become an oversimplification to divide everything into internal history and external history. But after all, we are a course in the general history of science, not a course in historiography, so obviously there is no need to expand on this in too much detail. It is enough for everyone to have a rough impression.
We do not need to know exactly what schools historiography has within history of science, but we should at least realize that history of science has historiography. That is to say, like any history, history of science is not simply a matter of recounting some objective, ready-made things; rather, it requires starting from a specific subjective perspective and proceeding through a specific method and set of emphases in order to sort things out.
History, strictly speaking, is something recorded by people; but what is recorded, and how it is recorded, all depends on the recorder’s subjective perspective. “Today I attended a lecture on the general history of science”—can this become history? Right now, tens of thousands of teachers are teaching tens of thousands of courses; these things cannot possibly all be recorded and eventually enter the annals of history. But if I later become an important figure, or if one of the students here becomes a historical figure and once gained a great deal from this course of mine, then the fact that I opened this course here and now might really enter history. History has never been fair. Any historical narration is always biased in some way, always leaving out a great many things. So which things are important and which are unimportant—who gets to decide that? If I myself am very important, then this course may also become very important; but why would I become important in the first place? Perhaps because something I promoted was important; but then why was that thing important? … In short, under a certain historiographical perspective, there may be a logic to distinguishing between important and unimportant things, but we cannot find some absolute standard beyond all perspectives with which to measure history. Therefore various historiographical schemes are not necessarily mutually contradictory. Often it is differences in perspective and emphasis that lead to quite different narratives being written. For example, if you think that the line from “the closed world to the infinite universe” is important in modern science, then the key figures are astronomers such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton; if you think that the breaking down of the boundary between natural things and artificial things, or the development of experimental apparatus, is more important, then the key figures are Paracelsus, Boyle, Lavoisier, and so on, while Copernicus becomes a supporting character. Different strategies can all tell a “general history of science,” but behind each general history there are positions and viewpoints.
So our course requires thinking rather than rote memorization, because I do not want to merely instill some superficial historical knowledge; I want everyone to understand and question the ideas and viewpoints behind it. I took several rounds of Professor Wu Guosheng’s “General History of Science” at Peking University, and his course was assessed by open-book exam. Many classmates did not understand this at the time: if history is open-book, how can there still be an exam? What they understood by history was still those ready-made annals and chronologies—so-and-so did this and that in such-and-such year. But these “facts” actually have little meaning, especially in the information age: if you can find them with a quick online search, what is the point of painstakingly memorizing them? What matters more is not what Zhang San did or what Li Si did, but what is the logic that connects the things Zhang San and Li Si did? That requires thought and understanding, and there is never any ready-made fixed answer.
Early research in history of science often had no awareness of this kind of subjectivity in historiography, largely because it was not regarded as a branch of history but as part of science. In this way, unlike ordinary history, history of science very easily found an “objective” standard for judging what was important and what was not: namely, the ready-made conclusions of contemporary science. History of science was nothing more than taking the various achievements of contemporary science—the formulas, the data, and so on—and tracing, one by one, who discovered them and in what year.
But this historiographical strategy is not without subjective viewpoint; on the contrary, it contains even more bias. Conscious bias can often become a unique insight, while unrecognized bias is merely blindness.
First, this view of history of science implies an outdated view of science, namely, that science is built up by the accumulation of one objective proposition after another. In this respect, the advances in philosophy of science in the latter half of the twentieth century, especially after Thomas Kuhn, have basically already updated this understanding; I will not expand on that for now. Second, the so-called “historical knowledge” found under this strategy—such as “so-and-so discovered something in a certain year”—is often also the product of over-simplification or outright forced interpretation. Because we are merely judging from the standpoint of the present and have not deeply entered the historical context, these pieces of knowledge are all stripped of context, rigid assertions without any surrounding text.
This kind of historiographical style in history of science is called “Whiggish history,” or “the Whig interpretation of history.” This is a concept proposed by the historian of science Butterfield. The Whigs were the predecessors of the British Liberal Party; when Whig politicians wrote their party history, they would depict history as a simple black-and-white struggle, in which justice defeats evil, light defeats darkness, the Whigs defeat the Tories … In short, history is presented as something that unfolds continually toward the Whigs’ final victory.
Of course, this historical attitude is not the Whigs’ exclusive property. Many church histories in religious traditions are written in this way, and various other partisan histories follow the same model. Early history of science was even more of a classic example. History of science was described as reason defeating superstition, truth defeating error, science defeating religion, materialism defeating idealism … a grand process of struggle of this kind.
Such history is of course extremely simplified. Of course, no history can avoid some degree of simplification; to extract certain threads from the vast ocean of historical material, the historian will certainly be operating with some personal perspective or bias. The question remains: what is history for? What is the meaning of history of science? If the meaning of doing history of science lies in self-glorification or in boosting national self-confidence, then Whiggish history may well be the most effective approach. Nationalist states often like to construct similar historical myths, for example Hitler’s shaping of the history of the Germanic people. One must admit that such myths are effective for the purpose of cultivating national sentiment.
In China, early history of science also bore the mission of cultivating national pride. For example, when introducing certain laws or phenomena, we would say who in the West proposed this thing in which year, while Chinese people had already discovered it in which year—“hundreds of years earlier than the West.”
Even today, much of the research on the history of science and technology in China still serves this purpose: to single-mindedly dig up in ancient China those achievements that were “hundreds of years earlier than the West,” making it seem that we Chinese are especially remarkable. But if you think carefully, this really does not mean much. The more impressive our ancestors were, the more it means we ourselves have declined; no matter how clever the ancients were, what do they have to do with us? To be fond of boasting about ancient achievements is even less admirable than “my dad is Li Gang.” At least that guy was a second-generation rich kid; whereas we are separated from those people by who knows how many generations.
Whether or not history of science can shoulder missions such as boosting pride, this kind of research oriented toward external ends cannot satisfy the free scholar. By “free scholar,” I mean the historians of science who gradually became independent in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Thanks to the efforts of Sarton, Koyré, and their predecessors in terms of disciplinary institution-building and theoretical framework, historians of science gradually became independent and formed a relatively autonomous academic lineage. One direct consequence was that historians of science were no longer the appendages of scientists or politicians, no longer needing to take as their standard some external purpose such as praising the achievements of contemporary science or increasing national pride; instead, they could establish their own standards. What we seek is not just some self-deceptive flattery, but rather “understanding” from history.
We hope to understand our own situation: where we come from, and where we are going. Historical tracing can precisely answer our demand for self-understanding.
We say that everyone has their own perspective or bias. Many things that we take for granted are in fact nothing more than the result of indoctrination by authority or by the social environment; we are not even aware of many prejudices or fixed habits of thought. Yet although we cannot reach an absolutely detached height, we always hope to surpass ourselves continually, broaden our horizons, and break through the limitations of our age—only then do creativity and progress become possible.
And to transcend the limitations of one’s time, the best way is to study history. By investigating the ins and outs of history, we can more easily understand the characteristics of our own age. By understanding the different intellectual worlds and habitual modes of thought in history, we can more easily discover whether many things that we have already taken for granted are themselves a kind of prejudice.
In this sense, we need to set a higher standard for history of science, that is, not only to know what is the case, but also to know why it is the case. What history of science should investigate is not only who proposed what in which year, but also the historical background and intellectual premises of each scientific advance,
The biggest problem with Whiggish history of science is its lack of examination of historical context. It simply takes the conclusions in today’s textbooks as ready-made standards, doing nothing more than labeling each ready-made conclusion with the person who proposed it and the time it was proposed. In a sense, this is not history at all, because the Whiggish picture is always static; it cannot reveal historical change, much less break down prejudices or broaden horizons.
In Whiggish history of science, Aristotle’s status may even be lower than that of Huang Daopo, because some of Huang Daopo’s technical innovations have been proven effective and may still be retained today, whereas Aristotle did not propose a single scientific conclusion that still seems valid today. For a long time, Aristotle was even regarded as a negative force obstructing scientific development.
Of course, the Scientific Revolution that came later was built on overturning Aristotle’s authority, but that does not mean that things would have been better without Aristotle. In fact, in the context of ancient Greece, Aristotle and his peers had a much more far-reaching significance for the establishment of the Western scientific tradition. Aristarchus in ancient Greece proposed heliocentrism, which from today’s perspective seems closer to the truth, but in the environment of that time, Aristarchus was indeed not very important; his doctrine was difficult to use in driving the development of Greek science.
Whiggish history of science looks down upon history from the standpoint of contemporary achievements, consciously or unconsciously assuming an arrogant attitude, and this attitude often makes some historical interpretations even more foolish and laughable. We may as well think of the anecdote of Emperor Hui of Jin, “Why not eat minced meat porridge?” This is a typical example of looking down on others from one’s own standpoint—relative to the environment I am in, if I am hungry and there is no food, then eat minced meat porridge; that is perfectly correct as a strategy. Emperor Hui’s mistake was not that he ate minced meat porridge, but that he extended the reasonableness of his eating minced meat porridge to a completely different context, and that became a joke. The history of early scientists’ science has this kind of problem: for example, how come the scientists of antiquity did not think of this, how should one understand that, how could they be so foolish and superstitious—this is precisely the mistake of “Why not eat minced meat porridge?”, judging others from a lofty position on the basis of one’s own circumstances.
Independent history of science, whether intellectual history, social history, or any other historiographical school, attempts to transcend the shortcomings of Whiggish history. First, we no longer simply judge heroes by “results,” nor do we pay special attention to the question of attributing the credit for some discovery to one person or another; instead, we pay more attention to the antecedents and consequences of events, to the gestation process before the dust has settled. History of science is no longer concerned only with those heroes who ultimately succeeded; it also has to pay attention to the losers, and to those great and important mistakes—this is also an entry point for deeply understanding the historical background and context. We must keep ourselves alert at all times: the ancients were not fools, and success in history was not necessarily due to wisdom, nor was failure necessarily due to stupidity. In Copernicus’s age, were Copernicus’s followers necessarily wiser than the skeptics? Were Aristotle’s physics ideas, which could make people’s jaws drop, really so childish and superficial? In the end, independent history of science presents a pluralistic, rich picture: scientists are no longer saints standing apart from the world and fighting alone; they too are flesh and blood, with religious beliefs, political opinions, and social relationships. Scientific activity has never been anything other than part of the social and cultural environment.
Further Reading for This Chapter
Shuster: 《An Introduction to the History of Science and the Philosophy of Science》
Chalmers: 《What Is This Thing Called Science?》
Kuhn: 《The Structure of Scientific Revolutions》
Chen Jiaying: 《Philosophy, Science, Common Sense》
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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