Herbert Butterfield Category

Walt Disney’s History of Science

Some interesting reading this morning. In a recent blogpost by Adam Richter, PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto, he argues that popular, American attitudes toward science derive largely from Disney World attractions, particularly  “Tomorrowland,” where “progress” is a major theme. Indeed, this theme of progress is pervasive in Disney productions. Connected with this theme […]

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The “Scientific Revolution” as a Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-century Humanist Invention

Our discussion thus far has focused on the historiographic category of the scientific revolution as the invention of eighteenth-century thinkers. But some years ago David C. Lindberg had argued, in his “Conceptions of the Scientific Revolution from Bacon to Butterfield: A preliminary sketch,” D. C. Lindberg and R. S. Westman, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution […]

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The “Scientific Revolution” as Narratology (Part 2)

In 1948 English historian Herbert Butterfield presented a series of lectures for the History of Science Committee at the University of Cambridge. There he argued that historians have overlooked an episode of profound intellectual transformation—one apparently comparable in magnitude to the rise of Christianity and that was deeply implicated in the very formation of the […]

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Alvargonzález on Whig history and the History of Science

David Alvargonzález, in his recent Is the History of Science Essentially Whiggish? (Hist. Sci. li, 2013) argues that Whig history is a necessary process of historical research. Since the mid-1970s, the labels “Whig” or “Whiggish” have been frequently used in history of science jargon to denigrate and repudiate certain histories of science which accept the […]

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