292 François charette
science was, indeed, a major characteristic of scholarship in the history of
science during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Th e views became
increasingly and consensually Helleno- and Eurocentrist, not in the ingen-
uous and instinctive manner of previous generations, but in systematic and
dogmatic ways. In this context we can mention the infl uence of Comtian
positivism, and the rise, in some milieus, of racist and antisemitic theories.
Th e famous lecture ‘L’Islam et la science’ delivered by Ernest Renan at the
Sorbonne in 1883 proclaimed the scientifi c inferiority of Semitic races as
opposed to Indo-Aryan ones, and emphasized the essentially antagonistic
nature of the Islamic faith toward science. 62 Th e works of Pierre Duhem
on ancient Greek and medieval Latin cosmology promulgated the relative
insignifi cance of extra-European science. 63 Even the Arabist Bernard Carra
de Vaux, a close collaborator of Tannery, found recognition mainly for his
work on Greek technological works preserved only in Arabic, and con-
tributed an appendix to Tannery’s Recherches sur l’histoire de l’astronomie
ancienne in which he misinterpreted one of the most interesting chapters of
Islamic planetary theory by reducing it to an example of the way in which,
when it attempted to be original, Islamic science revealed only ‘weakness’
and ‘pettiness’. 64 Such was indeed the dominant perspective in Europe
around 1900 when the discipline of history of science was established as an
international network of scholars under the aegis of Paul Tannery. History
of science sought to and succeeded in promoting and defending the values
and uniqueness of Western civilization. 65Bibliography
Arneth , A. ( 1852 ) Geschichte der reinen Mathematik in ihrer Beziehung zur
Entwicklung des menschlichen Geistes. Stuttgart.
Biot , J. -B. ( 1841 ) [Review of ] ‘ Traité des instruments astronomiques des Arabes ,
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ältesten Zeiten bis zum Jahre 1200 n. Chr , 2nd edn. Leipzig.
( 1907 ) = 3rd edn of Cantor 1894.62 Renan 1883. Cf. Tannery 1950 : x 391.
63 On Duhem’s historiography of Islamic science, see Ragep 1990.
64 Carra de Vaux 1893 : 338.
65 See Pyenson 1993.