Research Category

A Brief Note on Cambridge’s History of Science, Volume V

The next three volumes of The Cambridge History of Science series covers the modern sciences, including Physics and Mathematics (vol. 5), Life and Earth (vol. 6), and Social (vol. 7) sciences. In her introduction to The Cambridge History of Science Volume 5: The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Mary Jo Nye (ed.) informs us that this […]

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A Brief Note on Cambridge’s History of Science, Volume IV

The next installment of this series comes edited by Roy Porter, The Cambridge History of Science Volume 4: Eighteenth-Century Science (2003). Porter begins the volume by asking “What was Enlightenment Science?” According to historians, eighteenth-century science was subdued, “it lacks the heroic quality of what came before—the martyrdom of Bruno, Galileo’s titantc clash with the […]

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A Brief Note on Cambridge’s History of Science, Volumes II and III

Those looking for a comprehensive history of science, the Cambridge History of Science series are an invaluable resource. To date, volumes 2-7 have been published, its most recent being The Cambridge History of Science Volume 2: Medieval Science (2013), edited by David C. Lindberg and Michael H. Shank. The Middle Ages has been characterized—and caricatured—as […]

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Science, Progress and History: Essay Competition

The Science, Progress and History project, funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation and the University of Queensland, and as part of the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland, seeks to explore questions at the interface of history and the natural sciences, with a focus on laws, patterns and […]

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De-centring the Scientific Revolution, Paley’s Natural Theology, Mobilizing a Prophetic Newton, and Maxwell’s Design Argument

I still have several articles open on my pdf reader that are worth mentioning before I officially end my reading of The British Journal for the History of Science, and before tackling other articles from other journals and books. In discussions over the historiography of the “Scientific Revolution,” almost all the authors I have recently […]

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Preaching at the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Secularism of George Jacob Holyoake

Wrapping up a series of essays I have been reading from The British Journal for the History of Science, I now come to two interrelated and complimentary essays by Ciaran Toal, “Preaching at the British Association for the Advancement of Science: Sermons, Secularization and the Rhetoric of Conflict in the 1870s” (2012), and Michael Rectenwald, […]

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John William Draper’s “Metaphysical Pathos” in his A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe

I have been reading Donald Fleming’s John William Draper and the Religion of Science (1972) today and came to a remarkable discovery. In Chapter VIII, Fleming makes some brief comments on Draper’s A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe (1862). In Draper’s preface to this work, he says: In the Preface to the second […]

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Huxley, Agnosticism, and the X-Club

In assessing the “climate of opinion” in Victorian Britain, and more specifically the context of the evolution debates and narratives of conflict between science and religion that bolstered them, I have been engaging with a number of articles and books about prominent nineteenth-century dramatis personae, including Charles Darwin, Richard Owen, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Tyndall, […]

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Darwin’s Rhetoric of Positive Theology in the Origin of Species

In his Of Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate (2009), Ian Hesketh stresses that the Origin, “far from being the secular text it is often presented as, establishes the theory of evolution from within the Christian framework.” Indeed, “Darwin was very careful to at least appear to be writing from within the […]

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With Translation comes Interpretation: Translations of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Earlier this month I mentioned reading through a collection of essays in the 2000 issue of The British Journal for the History of Science, with an Introduction by Jonathan R. Topham. The final essay in that collection comes from Nicholaas Rupke, “Translation Studies in the History of Science: the example of Vestiges.” There Rupke argues […]

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