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Is Al-Ghazali (Really) the Halagu of Science in Islam

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Is Al-Ghazali (Really) the Halagu of Science in Islam NO. 87: OCTOBER 2008 ISSN: 1751-8261 Contents Science on Screen and the Main feature 1 Science on screen BSHS grants report 3 History of Science Jeff Hughes: President 4 Tim Boon calls for historians of science to explore film and Newton online 5 television. Reports of Meetings 6 Most of us grew up in the age of television, in The scholars pursuing STM in film seem either Three Societies 2008 the period extending for over half a century to be historians of medicine exploring visual Styles & Ways of Knowing now, when the normal domestic pattern has aspects of medical historical themes, or else Scientific Instrument Soc. included this once novel technology. It is film scholars – often located in English and Scientific Voyaging probable that, slightly behind their experi- Communications faculties – who have be- ences at school, it is television that most come interested in the specific issues raised ‘Designing Darwin’ 10 significantly moulds peoples’ knowledge of, by scientific and medical case studies. In other Views: Science after Al-Ghazali 10 and attitudes to, science and technology. You words, most of us historians of science, even might think, then, that the study of science those that work on the last century, leave the Reviews 12 in televisual and other moving image media study of this crucial technology to others. would be naturally attractive to historians Does this matter? The Questionnaire 14 of science. But in fact very little has been If we are alert to the contingent nature of Listings 15 published on science films and television, science, surely we should also pay attention especially on non-fiction genres. This says to the forces that shape our own discipline, BJHS, Viewpoint details 16 something about the self-definition of our and explicitly seek out the areas that have discipline, which has come of age more been omitted from study. After all, the badge recently even than television. This was borne of excellence in the humanities is finding new Editorial out recently when I organised some scientific questions to ask, territory that is uniquely ours film sessions for a film history conference. The to explore. The tendencies, exemplified by the This is my last issue as Editor of Viewpoint. response was good, but it may be significant Edinburgh School, that focused on the social It has been a privilege to have steered the that overwhelmingly the papers offered were construction of scientific ideas also drove our newsletter into its new format, and I would on medical subjects, not science or technology. concerns back towards the private spaces of like to thank everyone who has contrib- uted to its success over the last three years, especially Rosemary Wall who will be tak- ing over as Editor in 2009. I am finishing with a packed issue. Tim Boon writes in the feature article about the importance of considering film and televi- sion when writing about 20th-century his- tory of science and technology. The incom- ing BSHS President, Jeff Hughes reflects on the current BSHS and sets his agenda for the coming two years. John Young convinc- ingly argues that high scholarly standards that can be achieved on the internet. There is a full Reports of Meetings sec- tion, headed by reflections on the Three Societies Meeting in Oxford. In a nod to this event, the interviewee for this issue’s Questionnaire is the Canadian Society’s former President Gordon McOuat. Contributions to the next issue should be sent to Rosemary Wall at newsletter@ bshs.org.uk by 15 December 2008. Singing Chemist from Paul Rotha’s New Worlds for Old (1938). Picture courtesy Rebekah Higgitt, Editor of National Grid. 2 Viewpoint No. 87 esoteric scientific knowledge and away from Jordanova. And words have, for history of that the mores and techniques of a historian the play of science in general culture. The science as much as for most branches of of science do very good service in research- history of science that I was taught was still history, become the accepted media not only ing cinematic and televisual representation of self-consciously in flight from the internalism of research, but of analysis and exchange. It science, technology and medicine. In studying of the scientist-historians who had dominated seems that, for the moment, studying non- moving images, we don’t need to do anything earlier phases of writing. But in many ways, literary sources is something that we mainly different from what we would otherwise do those types of history of science that are clos- leave other disciplines to do; we have our as historians of science, but our colleagues in est to the laboratory have invented a new type esoterica and they have theirs. But do we film and media studies certainly do have new of internalism; one that is alert to the social need to? tricks to teach us, and the engagement with nature of the scientific enterprise, but still con- Both History of Science and Film Studies their categories can be very stimulating. For cerned with science qua science. But science were products of the same postwar academic example, Tom Gunning’s idea of the ‘cinema of considered without the broader culture is as moment – both, in a sense, Robbins-era attractions’, which describes early film’s place meaningless as a world of forms without the innovations – but crucially also reactions to in the spectacular entertainment culture of Platonist to worry about its existence. previous practice. HSTM was a new profes- the Edwardian era, can help situate popular sional historical discipline with its own mores, So we also need to recognise the corollary science in general as much as it does the first departments and rules of engagement science films. Equally, applying a conven- type of externalism that explores what hap- defined in reaction to the practitioner-histo- tional art historical iconographic approach pens in the fabulously ambiguous territory ries of these fields written by (often retired) to British documentaries can help set aside where lay people, carrying many kinds of scientists and doctors. Similarly, Film Studies the entrenched biographical and institutional scientific, technical and natural knowledge, was in part a response to older practitioner conventions of many established accounts. encounter highly mediated versions of profes- and connoisseurial traditions in film criticism. Looking at these films for what they convey sional science. For different periods we need Once again it involved the creation of a new about their time and context revealed their to study and understand the vehicles that professional discipline with its own mores, makers to me not as exceptional individuals, have been implicated in those exchanges, as argot, departments and rules of engagement but as the members of a roundly Modernis- Steve Shapin argued in his still useful article in defined in response to what had gone before. tic coterie entranced by the transformative the Leeds Companion to the History of Modern In both cases, the new practitioners believed potential of science and technology. Science. Such studies have, very fruitfully in the that there was a need for a new scepticism, a It is not sufficient to leave the history of last decade in projects such as SciPer, explored new critical rigour, new questions to be asked scientific moving images to media studies the social and cultural space of science, but and new answers to be found. These were dis- scholars because historians of cinema will they have tended to focus most strongly on ciplines formed in new interdisciplinary areas not ask the same questions of scientific films publications and on the written word, despite – between science and history; and between as we do. For example, in researching Films of the efforts of scholars including Ludmilla the apparatus of film production/consump- Fact, I found that I was asking different ques- tion and the Academy, tions about pre-World War Two nature films if you like. But even than film historians had; not so much ‘what disciplines with interdisci- kind of film is this?’ As ‘what kind of science plinary origins may tend is this?’ The conclusion I reached was that to become calcified, hard- these films do not represent a popularisation ened around particular of élite science, but an authentic lay science, theoretical assumptions a successor for the age of the clerks to the and an artificially reduced proletarian botanists in Anne Secord’s work. set of subjects. Today we At Leeds in the 1980s, absorbing the mores have the opportunity of the history of science, I learned the historio- to reach a rapproche- graphical manners that typify our discipline. I ment between these two learned to look at a historical account and to disciplines to their mutual ask whether it was the only possible story, or advantage. whether a different question might elicit a dif- If it is unfamiliarity that ferent narrative that would tell us something prevents us from studying new about the subject. My experience has non-literary sources, we shown me that films can be the most fantastic may reflect that there is goad to asking new questions about science, nothing more intrinsically technology and medicine. Like museum difficult in the conceptual objects, films are the very particular products tools of media studies or of specific times and places. But films and art history than in the sci- television programmes, especially non-fic- ence we study, or indeed tion examples, are in many ways a much in the approaches we are easier proposition for study by the historian accustomed to employ, of science than museum objects because of whether they derive the indexical relationship to the world they from Donald Mackenzie represent.
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