By Paul Horton.
In the introduction to his widely used introductory text, The Scientific Revolution, Steven Shapin, a professor of the History of Science at Harvard, caused quite a stir in mid 1990s academic and public circles when he provocatively proclaimed that “[t]here was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution,” effectively challenging the accepted paradigm in the field that pushed the idea that what made Europe exceptional was a series of discoveries in the fields of astronomy and mathematics that culminated in Newton’s Principia.
Indeed, if we are to listen to contemporary historians of science describe their field today, twenty-five years beyond Shapin’s declaration of independence quoted above, it would seem that they are describing a different history altogether.
The former Director of the Max Planck Institute for Science in Berlin and presently a member of the Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago, Lorraine Daston, maintains that current history teachers are forced into “the uncomfortable position of teaching our students a narrative that we know is gravely flawed if not outright false, as shown by three decades of the best research in the field.” (Daston, “The History of Science as the History of Knowledge,” Know V1N1, Spring 2017, 133). As Director of the Max Planck Institute, Daston assembled a strong group of scholars who dug deep into the global origins of scientific ideas that created the foundations for the theories, calculations, observations of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton that concluded that Islamic, Chinese, and South Asian achievements that were known by these exceptional progenitors of the European Scientific Revolution. And similar “soul-searching” is presently going on in other fields according to Daston:
Medievalists point out that the traditional division between “Latin” and “Muslim” science is nonsensical when referring to intellectual traditions with common origins and countless exchanges…; historians of science and empire argue that it is CONTINUE READING: Interrogating European Exceptionalism: The Scientific Revolution - Living in Dialogue