Research Category
Now this…Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death
Posted on May 14, 2013 2 Comments
We live in a world of distractions. A world infiltrated by a cacophony of Internet sites, memes, and social networks; a world of cell phones and smart phones and iphones; an influx of cable channels by the hundreds, flat-screens, DVDs, HDTV and Blue-ray. In other words, a world of instantaneous and constant noise. Neil Postman’s […]
Current Research
Posted on May 8, 2013 Leave a Comment
I have finished a number of books recently, all of which I hope to post some comments on soon. These books include Neil Postman’s classic epistemological critique of a technologically obsessed culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death. I have also finished Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution, where in the Introduction he provocatively states, “There was no […]
Peter Dear’s Historiography of Not-so-Recent Science
Posted on May 2, 2013 Leave a Comment
I came across Peter Dear’s “Historiography of Not-so-Recent Science” (Hist. Sci. 1, 2012) while doing some research last week at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Memorial Library. It is a fine article, reviewing some of the most recent themes and trends on the historiography of science on the period c. 1500-c.1700; that is, on the late Scientific […]
Alvargonzález on Whig history and the History of Science
Posted on April 23, 2013 Leave a Comment
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 […]
Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science
Posted on April 11, 2013 Leave a Comment
An invaluable resource to me lately has been The Oxford Companion to The History of Modern Science, edited by J.L. Heilbron(OUP, 2003). This is not a science encyclopedia but, as the title states, a companion guide to the history of science. The time covered is limited to the modern period, from around 1550, dwelling especially […]
Myths about Science and Religion: That Copernicanism Demoted Humans from the Center of the Cosmos
Posted on March 20, 2013 1 Comment
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Dennis R. Danielson tells us, alleged that science had inflicted on humanity “two great outrages upon its naive self-love”: the first, associated with the sixteenth-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), “when it realized that our earth was not the centre of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a […]
The Secularization of the European Mind
Posted on March 18, 2013 Leave a Comment
A popular mind, even when that mind is middle class…has a need to inflate if it is to understand. It seizes upon a salient point; the point which is easy to identify; the point which is graphic, can be pictured; the point which a newspaper can make readable. In seizing upon the salient point it […]
The Enlightenment: A Genealogy
Posted on March 9, 2013 5 Comments
Dan Edelstein, associate professor of French at Stanford University, begins his The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (2010) with a provocative introduction: “Every age needs its story. In the story we tell ourselves about our values, our government, and our religions, the Enlightenment plays a starring role.” We tell ourselves that the Enlightenment was the founding moment […]
Big Questions Indeed
Posted on February 7, 2012 Leave a Comment
I recently found this website, Big Questions Online. Published by the John Templeton Foundation, it aims “ to ask and explore the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality, with a focus on science, religion, markets, morals, and the dynamic intersection among them.” One of its leading articles is an interview with Robert Bellah […]