Research Category

The “Scientific Revolution” as Narratology (Part 3)

Following a suggestion from my supervisor, I have looked at a collection of essays contained in  European Review‘s (2007) forum Focus: Thoughts on the Scientific Revolution. Some of the essays in this journal were reproduced, albeit modified, in Recent Themes in The History of Science and Religion: Historians in Conversation (2009), edited by Donald A. […]

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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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Historiographies of the History of the Scientific Revolution

At the beginning of my research, I decided to start where I started many years ago, before I even began my time as an undergraduate. I cannot now remember how I came across it, but when I encountered John Henry’s The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (2002) in my early twenties, I […]

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Stephen Gaukroger, H. Floris Cohen, and the Scientific Revolution (Part One)

In the recent April 2013 issue of Historically Speaking, there is a fascinating forum about Stephen Gaukroger’s massively ambitious, multivolume historical project on the emergence and consolidation of a “scientific culture” in the West in the modern era. A total of four historians participated in the discussion, but the most important contributions came from Gaukroger […]

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Settling in Australia

We have been living in Australia for about two weeks now. Despite the necessary hurdles involved in an international move, overall the transition has been splendid. I will be located in the Centre for the History of European Discourses. The Centre is located in the tower of the Forgan Smith building, one of the more […]

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Progress and the Great Exhibition of 1851

Most of us know of the Great Exhibition of 1851 from our Western Civilization textbooks. It is generally interpreted as a thoroughly secular affair that celebrated progress in science, technology, and industry. For example, my “instructor’s edition” of Jackson J. Spielvogel’s Western Civilization (2006) states that it was a “symbol of the success of Great […]

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Thinking about Evolution – Early Evolutionism and Darwinism

A post in April discussed the connection between the “revolution” in biology and its often neglected metaphysical underpinnings. In this post I want to briefly discuss the development of early theories of evolutionism and the full implications of Darwinism. Following on from the impact of geological and paleontological discoveries in the early nineteenth century, evolutionary […]

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Myths about Science and Religion: That the Scientific Revolution Liberated Science from Religion

On May 12 of 2010, the general reading public witnessed a robust, if not at times acerbic, exchange between two prominent scholars of modern European history. It began with the publication of a review essay entitled “Mind the Enlightenment” in The Nation magazine by Samuel Moyn, professor of modern history at Columbia University. In that […]

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Graduate Study for the 21st Century

During my down time I’ve been paging through Gregory Colón Semenza’s Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities (2005). It is an ideal book for the graduate student. It covers topics such as the culture of graduate programs (teaching, research, and service), the politics of academic life […]

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Rethinking Secularism: José Casanova’s The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms

José Casanova’s exemplary essay in Rethinking Secularism is one of the best I have read on the subject. Casanova, a professor of Sociology at Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, engages secularism from a critical analytical angle. Because there are multiple and various ways of experiencing […]

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