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Download Report 2013-14 MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE RESEARCH REPORT 2013—2014 Boltzmannstraße 22, 14195 Berlin, Phone (+4930) 22667– 0, www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE RESEARCH REPORT 2013—2014 REPORT RESEARCH Max Planck Institute for the History of Science INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE MAX-PLANCK- Cover: The photo of the Institute’s entrance hall was taken by Montserrat de Pablo with the Experimental Historical Camera Obscura (CO) of the MPIWG. This Camera served and serves investigations into the performance of optical CO’s of the 17th and 18th centuries when this instrument played an important role in the development of optics. These CO’s were also of significance for painting in the early modern period and later on no less for photography up to the present day. Montserrat de Pablo, who teaches photography at the Universidad de Castillia-La Mancha, Cuenca, Spain, stayed at the MPIWG as a visiting scholar and artist-in-residence in Department I in 2014 and 2015. photographs p. 255: Yehuda Elkana © Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Johannes Fehr © Collegium Helveticum Most of the portrait photographs were taken by Skúli Sigurdsson RESEARCH REPORT 2013—2014 MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Department II 2 MPIWG RESEARCH REPORT 2013–2014 Introduction In 2014 the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin, turned twenty. Since 2013, the MPIWG has witnessed a changing of the guard in key posi- tions: a new Department directed by Dagmar Schäfer has begun its work; Ohad Parnes has succeeded Jochen Schneider as Research Coordinator; and Esther Chen will soon take over as Head Librarian from Urs Schoepflin. As we gratefully say fare- well to old colleagues and warmly welcome new ones, we pause to take stock of the MPIWG’s development, retrospectively and, especially, prospectively. The MPIWG was established in 1994 to conduct research on fundamental questions in the history of knowledge from Neolithic times to the present. Of central interest is the emergence of basic categories of scientific thinking and practice as well as their transformation over time: examples include experiment, data, rationality, normalcy, space, proof, and science itself. MPIWG projects investigate traditional themes of philosophical epistemology historically, drawing on concrete cases, embracing prac- tices as well as concepts, and embedding episodes of innovation in cultural, social, and economic contexts. The common perspective of the MPIWG’s diverse research activities is therefore often called “historical epistemology.” The premise of historical epistemology is that not only bodies of knowledge (e. g., disciplines such as physics, as well as systems of rational planning such as large-scale architectural and water projects) but also ways of knowing (e. g., experiment, collecting, classification, and observation) and criteria for what counts as knowledge (e. g., certainty, predictive accuracy, explanatory scope, and practical applicability) all have histories and that these histories are intertwined. When the MPIWG began its work twenty years ago, its research focused almost exclu- sively on the history of the natural sciences in the Western tradition, broadly inter- preted. This focus has long been the heartland of the history of science as a discipline, and a great deal of the MPIWG’s research continues to cultivate this fertile field. How- ever, the same comparative perspective, both cross-cultural and cross-historical, that inspired historical epistemology has widened the ambit of our inquiry dramatically. This panoramic view has forced us to rethink the boundary between knowledge and science. Comparative approaches have revealed just how provincial the current understanding (especially the anglophone or francophone understanding) of “sci- ence” is: a product of the latter half of the nineteenth century in a few (not all) Euro- pean countries, this definition of science narrowed its meaning to the university- based natural sciences. Even though historians of the premodern period and non-European cultures knew better, the modern definition still dominates the subject matter of the history of science to a surprising extent: for example, even though the German word Wissenschaft has resisted the narrowing trend of its cognates in English and French, the bulk of Wissenschaftsgeschichte was nonetheless devoted to the history of the modern natural sciences—a situation that is changing dramatically Introduction due to recent research initiatives like the Excellence Cluster Topoi, with which the ➔ p. 26ff, 22f MPIWG has cooperated closely. This research landscape is now being reconfigured, thanks to several trends that are enlarging the history of science into a history of knowledge, including a re-examina- tion of the interactions between practical and theoretical knowledge in both familiar (e. g., mechanics in early modern Europe) and not-so-familiar (e. g., water manage- ment in imperial China) contexts; new histories of forms of learning usually excluded from modern definitions of science (e. g., philology across a range of premodern and modern cultures); comparative studies of the classification and hierarchies of knowl- edge and associated forms of reasoning (e.g., thinking with cases in sixteenth-century Italian medicine, Qing dynasty forensics, and twentieth-century social science); and the concerted tracking of certain objects (e. g., jade, astrolabes, indigo) and practices (e. g., distillation, note-taking, double-entry bookkeeping) wherever they may lead, across the boundaries that separate disciplines, learned from lay practitioners, and cultural traditions. All of these trends are well represented in the research document- ed in the pages of this report. The history of knowledge has flourished especially but not exclusively in the history of premodern and non-Western science. Its practitioners have queried the anachro- nistic assumptions that restrict the gaze of historians to institutions, actors, and genres that seem most continuous with modern, Western ones (e.g., professors at medieval universities who write treatises but not apothecaries who trade recipes) or the ethnocentric assumptions that posit a European origin of modern science that slowly diffused to other parts of the world (e. g., through Jesuit missions to China). Historians of knowledge have paid particular attention to place (e. g., the princely court, the household, the merchant’s warehouse, the scholar’s library) and material culture (e. g., materia medica traded over oceans and continents), as well as to the points at which local, lay knowledge intersected with cosmopolitan, elite science (e. g., in observer networks of earthquakes or the weather). Historians of women and gender as well as social historians have shown how much natural knowledge was and is generated outside the framework of professional science, itself a relatively recent institution. The history of knowledge also encompasses learned discourses about what knowl- edge is, what its main divisions are, how it should (and should not) be cultivated, and who should pursue it and why. Especially important in the last decade have been histories of non-Western intellectual traditions, which have challenged long-standing assumptions in the history of science about classifications and hierarchies of knowl- edge as well as about knowers. For example, the dominant role of philology in remarkably long-lived Chinese, Sanskrit, and Arabic, as well as Greek and Latin, in- tellectual traditions has illuminated scholarly practices and standards of rigor that informed other forms of systematic inquiry, such as astronomy. Analogously, the combination of the roles of scholar and government official institutionalized by the 4 MPIWG RESEARCH REPORT 2013–2014 Introduction Chinese examination system queries taken-for-granted assumptions about the boundary between theoretical and practical knowledge that inform much past history of science. Projecting modern classifications of knowledge even onto late nineteenth- century Europe, much less onto other periods and cultures, can significantly distort our understanding of the history of standards for the most certain and highly esteemed forms of knowledge, as well as the shared practices (and often personnel) that bound them together. More generally, attention to the history of texts, both their contents and their material form, and to their associated practices, such as reading, note-taking, commenting, compiling, and interpreting, is transforming the history of science across periods and places, whether it be the impact of woodblock printing in the Song dynasty, the archiving of astronomical observations on baked clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia, or cheap paper in Victorian Britain. The history of knowledge is already cross-fertilizing the history of science in stimu- lating ways, as a glance at even mainstream journals in the field reveals. Yet there has been no sustained reflection on the implications of the enlarged vision for the history of science—most obviously, for periodization, geography, professionalization, and other core topics, but also for a unified history of ways of knowing. One obvious advantage of enlarging the history of science would be to deprovincialize the history of science: what was not just a Eurocentric narrative but rather the Eurocentric narrative—how science and technology made modern European and derivative cul- tures historically
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