Social and Cultural
History of Science
DEp00W
10 March 2022
What is good science?
• Karl Popper: falsification, questioning the result
• Bruno Latour: possibility to repeat experiment
• Positivism as a measure for the quality of science
• Rational thinking gained importance over other kinds of thinking
• Mathematics as an example of correct thinking (the?!? example?)
• The process of mathematization: also done in school mathematics
(word problems)
• Physics and mathematics intimately connected, not other natural
sciences, let alone social sciences and the humanities
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk
(1850-1937)
• First president of Czechoslovakia (68 years old)
• Studied philosophy
• Met Edmind Husserl – and influenced Husserl as an older
friend and a co-patriot (both from Moravia)
• Wife: Charlotte Garrigue, American pianist
• 1882: professorship in Prague
• Inaugural lecture:
Theory of probability and sceptical thinking of Hume
-- promoted new logic: based on probability calculus
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)
• General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1913)
Francis Bacon
(1561-1626)
• Classification of sciences
• New Organon (ref. to Organon – Aristotle)
• Instaurato Magna (1620) – a comprehensive plan to
reorganise science
• Politician, lawyer, philosopher, statement
René Descartes (1596-1650)
• Discourse on Method (1937)
• Three essays:
• Dioptrics
• Geometry
• Meteorology
• NEW: not written in Latin, but in French
• „Everyone could tell true or false by the
natural light of REASON.“
• Cogito, ergo sum. / I think, therefore I am.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
• Influenced by René Descartes and Francis Bacon
(rationalism and empiricism)
• Critique of Pure Reason (1781) – revised with further works
Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel
• 1770-1831
• German philosopher
Alexandre Koyré (1892-1964)
• Russian-born French philosopher and historian of science
• 1909 – went to Göttingen to study with Husserl
• Later – Paris – Léon Brunschvig
• Opposed the October 1917 revolution
• 1919 left Russia permanently
• Taught religion and philosophy in Paris
• Worked on Hegel
Robert K. Merton (1910-2003)
• American sociologist
• 1936 Ph.D. Harvard
• 1938 Science, Technology and Society in 17th C. England
• 1941 Columbia University – professor of sociology
• 1942-1971 Bureau of Applied Social Research
• 1949 Social Theory and Social Structure
• Revised 1968
• 1946 Mass Persuasion
• 1965 On the Shoulders of Giants
• 1973 The Sociology of Science
Boris Hessen
(1893-1936)
• 1931 – The Social and Economic Roots of Newton‘s
Principia
• A. N. Whitehead (mathematician) on Newton:
„Newton was born in the year when Galileo died.“
(Science and Civilisation)
Boris Hessen: technology, industry, communication,
etc., including class struggle
Social History of Mathematics
Henk J. M. Bos (*1940) and Herbert Mehrtens (1946-2021)
-historians of mathematics
Role of history of mathematics (and also of science) – raise
awareness, call for reflection
Debates within history of science: internal vs. external –
mathematics untouched
New issues: The interactions of mathematics and society in
history (1977)
Social history of 19th Century Mathematics (1990)