Wrestling with Nature From Omens to Science

(Romina) #1
Introduction 7

(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), xiv. Some of Sarton’s contemporaries
demurred from this vision. See, e.g., Otto Neugebauer, “On the Study of Wretched
Subjects,” Isis 42 (1951): 111.



  1. John Henry, The Scientifi c Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (London:
    Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 4. For representative discussions of these issues see also
    Peter Dear, “What Is the History of Science the History Of? Early Modern Roots of the
    Ideology of Modern Science,” Isis 96 (2005): 390–406; Andrew Cunningham, “Getting
    the Game Right: Some Plain Words on the Identity and Invention of Science,” Studies
    in the History and Philosophy of Science 19 (1988): 365–89; and Simon Schaffer, “Scien-
    tifi c discoveries and the End of Natural Philosophy,” Social Studies of Science 16 (1986):
    387–420.

  2. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “science,” “scientist”; Sydney Ross, “‘Scientist’: The
    Story of a Word,” Annals of Science 18 (1962): 65–86.

  3. G. E. R. Lloyd, Early Greek Science (New York: Norton, 1970), xv, cf. 125; David C.
    Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
    1992), 4; and Nicholas Jardine, “Epistemology of the Sciences,” in Cambridge History
    of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C. B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler, and Jill
    Krave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 685. For a strong claim about
    the constructed nature of the category “science,” see Roy Harris, The Semantics of Sci-
    ence (London: Continuum, 2005).

  4. On the contrast between science (Gk. episteme, Lat. scientia) and opinion (doxa,
    opinio), see Plato Republic, Book 5, 477a–478a; Plato Timaeus 37b5–c3; Aristotle Posterior
    Analytics 88b30–35; and Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 2a2ae.1, 5. For a Renais-
    sance restatement of this dichotomy, see Matteo Palmieri, “Civil Life, Book II” in
    Renaissance Philosophical Texts, vol II: Political Philosophy, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge:
    Cambridge University Press, 1997), 149–72 (quote, 153).

  5. Galileo Galilei, Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno a due nuove scienze
    (1638). For seventeenth- century uses of the term, see the list of the sciences in D. Aber-
    crombie, Academia Scientiarum: Or the Academy of the Sciences, being a Short and Easy In-
    troduction to the Knowledge of Liberal Arts and Sciences (London: 1687); and the defi nition
    in Thomas Holyoake, A Large Dictionary in Three Parts, s.v. “scientia” (London: 1676).
    Illuminating discussions of some of these issues may be found in Lindberg, Beginnings
    of Western Science, 1–4; and Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London
    and the Scientifi c Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), xv–xviii.

  6. Pamela O. Long offers a comprehensive account of the relations among practi-
    cal, technical, and discursive knowledge from antiquity to the Renaissance in Open-
    ness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the
    Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

  7. For the idea of modern science as overlapping sets of activities, see John Pick-
    stone, Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine (Manchester:
    Manchester University Press, 2000); and Peter Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature; How
    Science Makes Sense of the Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

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