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Attendance is free; please send an email to steven.vandenbroecke@ugent.be to confirm your presence.

This meeting is sponsored by the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium (RASAB) and held under the aegis of the National Committee for Logic, History and Philosophy of Science.

1. Description

It is a truism that the face of past science changes in step with present notions of science. What are the precise implications of this for history writing on science, both theoretical and practical? Our one-day symposium focuses on this question, by encouraging historians of science to articulate their views and experiences concerning the relation between present situations, past realities, and objects (such as science) which cross this divide. This focus entails many questions, which may or may not be addressed by our participants. Is past science to be understood on the model of an object which we increasingly know and master? Or is past science rather to be understood on the model of the rear view mirror: a mere index and reflection of our own passing notions of science?

What are the unexplored options and desiderata for historians of science working in the 21st century? For which specific audiences should we be writing? Which immediate effects should narratives of past science ideally carry with such an audience? Is our purpose best served by collections of exemplary micro-histories, or is there still a place for grand narrative? If so, how can liminal phenomena (religion, magic, dissimulation) be properly integrated? How far can/should historians go in undercutting received wisdom after the science wars? Does the material turn in history of science call for different conceptions of history writing? These are only a few of the questions that will be considered.

2. Programme

3. Abstracts

Bart Karstens (Amsterdam), Liquid Present, Liquid Past

Science is often considered to be the hallmark of modernity. To become a scientist then typically is a modern vocation. It follows that views on modernity are strongly related to the way we think of science. For example, Bruno Latour’s posthumanist philosophy of science is supported by the idea that ‘we have never been modern’. Others however, continue to use the concept of modernity and divide it into phases. The latest phase is the period we currently live in. It has been identified as post-postmodernity, late modernity, high modernity and liquid modernity. The latter term stems from sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and in my view is the most interesting of these concepts. I will discuss the concept of liquid modernity, and focus on the challenges living in a liquid society poses to us according to Bauman. The most important challenge is the disappearance of previously stable points of reference, which triggers the need to establish these. I will then argue that the science studies face exactly the same problem, after falling prey to the strong current of epistemological relativism in the past few decades. This problem has featured in recent discussions on approaches to the study of science. I will discuss suggested solutions and, as some are still quite tentative, sketch the direction in which these solutions are heading. They include: focus on the role of virtues (or values), revaluation of expertise, search for dynamic conceptions of the notion of structure, and introduction of new concepts such as the concept of ‘cognitive goods’. These solutions have in common that they all offer some form of stability, which facilitates an analytical framework to study the history of science. All participants are invited to reflect on the potential fruitfulness of these frameworks for the study of the past.

Geert Vanpaemel (Leuven), The End of Discipline or How Science Became Public Knowledge

One of the most exciting trends to come out of the field of Science and Technology Studies, has been the articulation of a completely new understanding of science. Instead of using a narrow, technical emphasis on the theoretical organization of knowledge, confined within institutional or disciplinary boundaries, scholars, reflecting the concerns of science policy makers, now frame science within a much broader view of e.g. ‘knowledge production’ or the ‘national science system’. Within the science system, many stakeholders, including teachers and journalists, contribute to public forms of knowledge that are constantly being (re)configured, appropriated, negotiated and circulated. It is understood that science is being co-produced with social power systems, and that it is always tangled up with economic, political, industrial and legal practices. These approaches challenge the traditional narrative of the history of science as a history of ideas, and create new opportunities for making history of science relevant to contemporary debates. In my paper, I will focus on the concept of ‘public knowledge’ as one way to enlarge the scope of historiography and to include the wider range of stakeholders that make up for an effective science system.

Steven Vanden Broecke (Gent), Writing histories of astrology: why and how should we do it?

The notion that magic and modernity are somehow alien to one another has become difficult to defend. Recent historians have shown that far from being a historical anomaly, the thriving culture of magic and occultism in fin-de-siècle Europe was a full-fledged child of modernity. The same idea has been pursued by historians of early modern Europe. Early modern alchemy, we now know, was fully conversant with the new natural philosophies, experimental cultures, and artisan traditions. As early as 1970, Michel de Certeau analyzed the waves of demonic possession which ripped through 17th-century France as a symptom of modernizing changes in the relation between theology, medicine, and the State. Astrology too has been identified as a source of scientific expertise at many Renaissance courts, where it informed a new culture of political prudence and self-fashioning. Likewise, it has been demonstrated that the story of Copernican astronomy cannot be told outside the broader framework of astrology’s naturalizing approach to foreknowledge.

At the same time, traditional restrictions for any history of marginal science seem to remain in place. For instance, astrology’s historical position and legitimacy are usually premised on its relation to official scientific and pedagogical institutions. Indeed, astrology tends to be interpreted as an art whose academic credibility before c. 1630 was dependent on outside sources of support (e.g., belief in the equivalence of words and things, an Aristotelian cosmology which upheld the distinction between super- and sublunary realms or the reality of celestial influence). Likewise, astrology after 1630 has usually been portrayed as collateral damage to the rise of intellectual modernity.

These restrictions suggest that there is still work to be done towards a historiography of astrology which has the ambition of marrying a longue durée description of astrological culture with a symmetrical explanation of that culture: that is, towards a historiography which does not assume that “what come to be seen as true and false beliefs are (…) different types of social phenomena requiring different techniques of analysis” (Collins & Pinch 1982, p. 17). But how to implement this ambition, and why?

Anne Staquet (Mons), Quand la science se dissimule

Écrire l'histoire des sciences pose toute une série de difficultés : il faut à la fois faire comprendre les enjeux d'hier et ceux qui se sont greffés sur ces questions jusqu'à aujourd'hui. Cela ne se réduit évidemment pas à donner les informations dont disposaient le scientifique et ses contemporains, contexte compris, car il est particulièrement difficile de faire abstraction de ce que l'on sait aujourd'hui pour se replonger dans le passé. Cette difficulté est encore exacerbée lorsque la découverte scientifique est telle qu'elle remet en cause plusieurs autres éléments de la société. Prenons le cas de l'héliocentrisme. C'était loin d'être une question purement scientifique. Face à une telle question, ses défenseurs ont adopté des positions assez diverses : de l'affirmation pure et simple, à l'affirmation suivie de l'abjuration jusqu'à l'exposition volontairement ambiguë. C'est ce cas, à partir des Principes de Descartes, que je voudrais étudier tout particulièrement en montrant comment une telle question, où les deux positions sont aussi opposées, peut être présentée entre les lignes. Je conclurai en réfléchissant aux problèmes spécifiques que rencontre aujourd'hui l'histoire des sciences pour présenter les cas manifestes de dissimulation des positions scientifiques.

Dominique Pestre (Genève), Writing a history of science and knowledge on a global scale. Reflections on the past five centuries

The aim of this talk is to survey the most interesting elements to come out of a project which mobilized 70 people – the writing of a global History of science and knowledge from the 16th Century to today. Published in three volumes in October 2015 by Seuil (1500 pages), this history seeks to understand how science and other forms of knowledge interacted and evolved, as did their place in the cultural, political, economic and social worlds. It looks at the spaces where these forms of knowledge originated and tries to understand how the successive globalization processes which occurred over time contributed to the creation and expansion of science.

Sven Dupré (Utrecht), Revisiting Embattled Territory - Towards A History of Knowledge for the Early Modern Low Countries

In 2015 ‘Embattled Territory. The Circulation of Knowledge in the Spanish Netherlands’ was published. Edited by Sven Dupré, Bert De Munck, Werner Thomas, and Geert Vanpaemel, the volume aimed at writing a history of science which was integrated in a more general historiography of the Spanish Netherlands. In this paper I will reflect on the opportunities (and limitations) of the approach of the book. In particular I will focus on the consequences of (1) the global turn, (2) the material turn and (3) the political turn, for the writing of the history of science in the Low Countries. How shall we deal with the interconnectedness of the Southern Netherlands with the Spanish Empire? What are the effects of focusing on knowledge instead of science? And should we make history relevant for policy debates?

Kenneth Bertrams (Bruxelles), Legitimate Historique, Illegitimate History: the Strange Case of Jean Pelseneer’s Historique des Instituts Internationaux de Physique et de Chimie Solvay

Shortly after the Second World War, the Belgian historian of science Jean Pelseneer was entrusted the difficult mission to make an inventory of the archival collections of the International Solvay Institutes of Physics and Chemistry (which had organized the famous Solvay conferences since 1912). Pelseneer soon realized that “this material (…) could provide the substance” of a useful Historique of the Solvay Institutes. The manuscript composed of 120 pages was completed by 1949. To Pelseneer’s greatest dismay, however, it was never published. More aptly said: the draft was discarded by the Board of the Solvay Institutes which considered it as out of scope. Today, Pelseneer’s Historique has become an instrumental source for the history of Solvay Institutes, but also an unexpected contribution (and inspiration) to the historiography of the history of science in the first half of the 20th century in a larger perspective and context. With this case study, I intend to elaborate on the relationships between official and unauthorized historical-writing, as well as on the outcome of history of science as a legitimating science (Legitimationswissenschaft).