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This essay provides solutions to the puzzles surrounding the meaning and development of Isaac Newton’s famous “Rules of Philosophizing.” It charts afresh the shift from the “Hypotheses” of ...

This essay presents a critical analysis of the relationship between Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632), and his father Vincenzo’s Dialogue on...

Samuel Clarke is best known to historians of science for presenting Isaac Newton’s views to a wider audience, especially in his famous correspondence with G. W. Leibniz. Clarke’s independen...

The earliest references to Darwin in China, which came by way of the network of Protestant missionaries, emerged in the early 1870s: the principle of general transformism and ideas about hu...

This essay shows that comparable notions of humanism emerged independently in two twentieth-century scholars, Yuen Ren Chao (1892–1982) and George Sarton (1884–1956). They met as young men ...

This essay examines the physicist John Tyndall’s journal writing in the mid-nineteenth century and focuses on how Tyndall used his journal during a series of transitions that occurred when ...

This study deals with some pitfalls and opportunities of contextual explanation in the history of science by examining the case of Isaac Beeckman’s invention of corpuscular-mechanical natural philosophy. It makes use of ideas about contextual explanation—its dangers as well as more fruitful avenues of approach—that the author has expressed elsewhere in studies of Descartes’s intellectual biography, the historiography of the Scientific Revolution, and the internalism/externalism debate, as well as in articulations and criticisms of post-Kuhnian developments in the history and sociology of science.

This essay seeks to explain how Ashley Montagu, the American anthropologist, could have been both a cultural relativist and a biological determinist, two stances that seem to be opposites. ...

Considerable historiographical controversy surrounds the question of why and how Copernicus decided to overturn the prevailing Earth-centered representation of the heavens. This essay summa...

This essay provides an assessment of Joseph Needham’s account of Chinese medicine. Focusing on Needham’s thesis on the making of ecumenical science, it reviews the volume on medicine in Sci...

“Mechanical objectivity,” which Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison trace to the mid-nineteenth century, often coincided with efforts to inscribe nature “directly,” such as through automatic ...

Joseph Needham offered a vision of history that united his understanding of the physical world with his interpretation of social process, in which the material, social, and ideal realms were reciprocally constituted. This essay explores Needham's ideas about matter and form to show how he developed a systematic theory of materialism in his early writings on science and social change. Shifting the ground of discourse in Needham's project from "science" to "materialism," the essay brings him into conversation with new materialists to reflect on the ongoing challenges in theorizing the relationship between social and material phenomena. Calling into question an all-encompassing materiality that sacrifices the role of determinate structures and histories in the production of the world, the essay asks: How can we formulate a framework of material/-ity/-ism that does not dispense with or occlude the already embedded politics of culture, social relations of production, and historical contingency?

These essays take a second look at Joseph Needham (1900–1995), the British biochemist whose colossal publishing project with Cambridge University Press, Science and Civilisation in China (1...

This essay concerns the authors’ translation of the debate between the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner and Galileo Galilei in 1611–1612, published as On Sunspots by the University of C...

The economist Paul Samuelson acknowledged that he was a disciple of Edwin Bidwell Wilson (1879–1964), an American polymath who was a protege of Josiah Willard Gibbs. Wilson’s influence on t...

This essay relocates Alexander J. Ellis’s translation of Hermann von Helmholtz’s book Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (1863) in a broader context. It discusses Ellis’s various endeavors to make knowledge available to those with limited access to it and, more specifically, his attempts at making the sound of speech accessible to readers of printed text. Against this background, the essay then compares the central notion of tone sensation in Helmholtz’s book to Ellis’s rendition thereof. As will be seen, Ellis preferred familiarity to literal translation, but he also made great efforts to convey the quality of speech sounds where these became the object of investigation. This double strategy—which was not in line with Helmholtz’s forging of anew theory of perception through defamiliarizing common terms—forced Ellis into exuberant explanations that eventually overgrew the carefully transmitted original, resulting in what amounted to a book of his own.

The four generous responses to “Science’s Imagined Pasts” here commented on fruitfully extend its argument. In particular, all of them resonate with—even though only one of them explicitly ...

The key role that Francis Bacon played in the reevaluation of mechanical arts is a well-established tenet of the scholarship on the Scientific Revolution. However, scholars tend to assume t...

The debate about the superiority of ancient versus modern culture, known as the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, also found expression in conflicting positions about the developing mathematical methods of natural philosophy. Isaac Newton explicitly referred to the authority of Euclidean geometry as a justification for the conservative form of the proofs in his Principia Mathematica, where he avoided the use of analytic geometry and infinitesimal calculus, the central innovations of seventeenth-century mathematics, as much as possible. Rather, he modeled his proofs, just like the overall structure of the treatise, as closely as possible on Euclid’s geometry. A century later, however, Joseph-Louis Lagrange announced in the introduction to his Mechanique Analytique that no geometrical diagrams would be found there and that Newtonian mechanics was presented exclusively in the form of analytic equations. This essay analyzes the relationship of this radical change in the theoretical methodology of mechanics to the actors’ ideas about ancient science and its authority. It also discusses the consequent development of a conception of ancient science as distinct from modern science and the relation of this conception to a history of science in our contemporary sense.

This essay seeks to explain the most glaring error in Ptolemy’s geography: the greatly exaggerated longitudinal extent of the known world as shown on his map. The main focus is on a recent hypothesis that attributes all responsibility for this error to Ptolemy’s adoption of the wrong value for the circumference of the Earth. This explanation has challenging implications for our understanding of ancient geography: it presupposes that before Ptolemy there had been a tradition of high-accuracy geodesy and cartography based on Eratosthenes’ measurement of the Earth. The essay argues that this hypothesis does not stand up to scrutiny. The story proves to be much more complex than can be accounted for by a single-factor explanation. A more careful analysis of the evidence allows us to assess the individual contribution to Ptolemy’s error made by each character in this story: Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, ancient surveyors, and others. As a result, a more balanced and well-founded assessment is offered: Ptolemy’s reputation is rehabilitated in part, and the delusion of high-accuracy ancient cartography is dispelled.

A short-lived but important movement in seventeenth-century English natural philosophy—which scholars call “magnetical philosophy” or “magnetical cosmology”—sought to understand gravity (both terrestrial and celestial) by analogy with magnetism. The movement was clearly inspired by William Gilbert’s De magnete (1600) and culminated with Robert Hooke’s prefiguring of the universal principle of gravitation, which he personally communicated to Isaac Newton in 1679. But the magnetical cosmology, as professed by those in the movement, differed from Gilbert’s philosophy in highly significant ways. Proponents never accepted Gilbert’s animistic account of magnets and seem tacitly to have accepted a belief in action at a distance that Gilbert himself rejected. This essay argues that Francis Bacon (1561–1626) had already provided just the adaptations to Gilbert’s philosophy that the later thinkers adopted, including an important endorsement of action at a distance, and that he should be recognized as playing an important role in the movement.

For more than three decades, fierce debates raged both in private letters and across public spaces over a formula expressed in 1864 by the French geometer Michel Chasles. Proofs and refutations thereof abounded, to no avail: the formula was too useful to be abandoned by its defenders, too elusive to be made rigorous for its detractors. The disputes over Chasles’s formula would not be solved by a definitive proof or rebuttal; rather, the core epistemic issues at stake shifted from generality to rigor and from truth to geometrical significance. This essay tracks the main lines of circulation of Chasles’s formula and shows how the disputes to which it gave rise embody conflicting mathematical selves—that is to say, different normative accounts of what being a mathematician entails. This perspective allows for a renewed understanding of what historians have described as the conflicted rise of modernism in mathematics and a firmer rooting of it within broader late nineteenth-century cultural trends.

What moved Copernicus to switch from the time-honored geocentric to a heliocentric setup for the planetary system? He himself did not explain this momentous move in any detail--his only comments about it suggest that Ptolemy's complete solution to the problem of nonuniform motion, the equant model, led him to propose. Earth's annual motion around the Sun. The most widely accepted accounts of the origin of Copernicus's theory dismiss or dispute any direct relation between the principle of uniform motion and the heliocentric theory. Two scholars, the Polish expert on Copernicus Ludwik Antoni Birkenmajer (1855-1929) and the American historian of astronomy Curtis Wilson (1921-2012), constructed detailed arguments about how Copernicus's rejection of Ptolemy's solution led him to his theory. The principal aim of this essay is to reintroduce Birkenmajer's and Wilson's voices to the discussion of the origin of Copernicus's heliocentrism.

A familiar story about mid-twentieth-century American psychology tells of the abandonment of behaviorism for cognitive science. Between these two, however, lay a scientific borderland, muddy and much traveled. This essay relocates the origins of the Chomskyan program in linguistics there. Following his introduction of transformational generative grammar, Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) mounted a highly publicized attack on behaviorist psychology. Yet when he first developed that approach to grammar, he was a defender of behaviorism. His antibehaviorism emerged only in the course of what became a systematic repudiation of the work of the Cornell linguist C. F. Hockett (1916-2000). In the name of the positivist Unity of Science movement, Hockett had synthesized an approach to grammar based on statistical communication theory; a behaviorist view of language acquisition in children as a process of association and analogy; and an interest in uncovering the Darwinian origins of language. In criticizing Hockett on grammar, Chomsky came to engage gradually and critically with the whole Hockettian synthesis. Situating Chomsky thus within his own disciplinary matrix suggests lessons for students of disciplinary politics generally and--famously with Chomsky--the place of political discipline within a scientific life.