Essay Review: What is the History of Science Really Like?,Science: A Four Thousand Year History

I am being deliberately rude, of course, but it is a peculiar feature of the sort of history of science that lionizes its protagonists that it tends to deprive them of agency as much as does any heroic fairy story. Faraday according to these kinds of accounts was as much a prisoner of fate as was Beowulf.

In 1993 The British journal for the history of science published a special issue discussing the big picture in the history of science. See in particular Christie J. R. R. , “Aurora, Nemesis and Clio”, The British journal for the history of science, xxvi (1993), 391–405.

Ironically, the originator of the term ‘Whig history’ was Herbert Butterfield, whose own contribution to the history of science was notably whiggish. See Butterfield Herbert , The origins of modern science (Cambridge, 1949) and Butterfield Herbert , The Whig interpretation of history (Cambridge, 1931).

Hunt Lynn , (ed.), The new cultural history (Los Angeles, 1989).

Collins Harry , “Stages in the empirical programme of relativism”, Social studies of science, xi (1981), 3–10, and Collins Harry , Changing order (London, 1985).

Dawkins Richard , The God delusion (London, 2006).

Shapin Steven , “History of science and its sociological reconstructions”, History of science, xx (1982), 157–211; Shapin Steven and Schaffer Simon , Leviathan and the air-pump (Princeton, 1985).

Shapin Steven , “The mind is its own place: Science and solitude in seventeenth-century England”, Science in context, iv (1991), 191–218.

Dampier William Cecil , A shorter history of science (Cambridge, 1944).

“Dissolving views”, Mirror of literature, amusement and instruction, i (1842), 97–10, p. 97.