The ArgumentThis paper, an attempt at an institutional history of ideas, compares patterns of reproduction of scientific knowledge in Catholic and Protestant educational institutions. Franciscus Eschinardus'Cursus Physico-Mathematicusand Jean-Robert Chouet'sSyntagma Physicumare examined for the strategies which allow for accommodation of new contents and new practices within traditional institutional frameworks. The texts manifest two different styles of inquiry about nature, each adapted to the peculiar constraints implied by its environment. The interpretative drive of Eschinardus and a whole group of “modern astronomers” is (...) here seen as pushing beyond the traditional task of “saving the phenomena,” towards celestial hermeneutics which is thoroughly experimental and mathematical. In spite of the insistence on physical interpretation of celestial phenomena, Eschinardus' astronomical discourse is yet constrained by a complex game of intellectual-political considerations. Commitment to the Thomistic organization of knowledge, which sets a boundary between a science of motion and the “geometry of heavens”, suppresses any impulse to ask about the mechanical causes of celestial appearances. The Copernican cosmology is thus rejected qua an attempt to cross this guarded boundary. Chouet in Geneva, by contrast, frees himself from these constraints on the organization of natural knowledge. By strictly separating philosophy from theology, he can combine physics and astronomy, favor a Copernican cosmology and adopt a Cartesian mechanistic worldview. Moreover, unlike the Jesuit Eschinardus, Chouet seeks toexplainnatural phenomena in terms of causes, rather than justinterpretthem. Yet he does so within a philosophical discourse largely scholastic in nature, which best suits the conservative institutional framework in which he teaches. Whereas the Jesuit Eschinardus employs a new type of discourse without severing his links with the traditional Thomistic worldview, the Calvinist Chouet adopts a new Cartesian worldview and adapts it to a largely traditional type of discourse. (shrink)

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The ArgumentWritten as one book, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England has become two. One book, treating Puritanism and science, has since become “The Merton Thesis.” The other, treating shifts of interest among the sciences and problem choice within the sciences, has been less consequential. This paper proposes that neglect of one part of the monograph has skewed readers' understanding of the whole. Society and culture contributed to institutionalization of science and the directions it took, neither one exclusively. Four (...) aspects of the neglected chapters are examined: their theoretical underpinnings, the conceptions providing foundations for this part specifically and for the monograph as a whole; their comparative neglect, attributed partly to the absence of a cognitive constituency for their claims; the problem of problem choice in science in Merton's work; and the Merton monograph and later social constructionism:their differences and affinities. (shrink)

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The ArgumentA brief review of the Merton thesis shows that its restriction to England is arbitrary. An example from the historiography of modern physics suggests the possible payoff of an ecumenical Merton thesis and the means to explore it. A summary of the careers of men who practiced science literally in the church – men who built meridian lines in Italian cathedrals – indicates the range of social support of astronomical studies by Catholic institutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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The ArgumentScience consists in progress by innovation. Scientists, however, are committed to all kinds of traditions that persist or recur in society regardless of intellectual and institutional changes. Merton's thesis about the origins of the scientific revolution in seventeenth-century England offers a sociohistorical confirmation of this revisionist view: the emergence of a highly rational scientific method out of the religious-ethical sentiments of the English Puritans implies that scientific knowledge does indeed grow out of – and not really against – customary (...) modes of thought.In tracing the intellectual origins of this view back to the religious controversy between Protestants and Catholics, the essay demonstrates that the essential conflict between them with regard to natural science stemmed from their antagonistic conceptions of tradition and its function in the production of genuineknowledge– of religious as well as of natural affairs. Whereas the Protestants believed only in those truths that are immediately revealed by God to each man through his reason, the Catholics adhered to truths that are related to men or “made” by them through culture and history. (shrink)

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Between the two World Wars an extensive body of writings appeared in the United States explicitly or implicitly on the historical development of the sciences. I am not referring to the vast literature of popularization in magazines and newspapers but to substantial works, often in book form, coming from various intellectual and scholarly traditions. Only a few examples are classifiable by later standards as professional history of science. Following Arnold Thackray, one can designate some authors as ‘proto-historians’ of science. Most (...) of the writings, including those of the ‘proto-historians,’ have distinctive attributes: methods, attitudes and goals, reflecting traditions other than professional history of science or even the general history exemplified by the American Historical Association's membership of that era. What follows is a bird's eye view of a past of interest for its own sake and for clues about the professionalization of history of science after 1950. (shrink)

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