Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Popularization of Science: popular science, gender and nationhood. Science has different goals. Science can be used for political means. On the hand, I examine the concepts of popular science, it popularization in different historical contexts and its gender approach. In this blog, on the other hand, I study an English and a French case studies. Therefore, I focus on the popularization of English in the 19th century. On the other hand, I convey how the ideas of French science followers shaped an idea of French nationhood at the end of the XIXth century. During that period there were competing ideas of nationhood and there was one which highlighted the importance of science for the building of Frenchness. This work adds bibliography.
Department of History
HISTORY, SCIENCE, POPULARIZATION AND NATIONHOOD
Introduction
Why is history still considered boring?
Why not write the history of sexuality as Jacques Le Goff did? Why do not analyze printers and publications as Peter Burke did? Why not teach that science has sex as Londa Shiebinger argues? Why to still believe that men such as Galileo Galilei, Nicolás Copernico, Isaac Newton or Thyco Brahe are scientist when they were natural philosophers. They studied the lower ranks of knowledge of the university because it was not a theoretical knowledge as law and theology were during this period. It was merely practical.
Nowadays, scientists still wonder why Isaac Newton devoted so much time to alchemy. Scientist ignore that Issac Newton was a natural philosopher and in his day alchemy was a science. His famous Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was many of his long writings about alchemy[1]. For many historians, the work of Isaac Newton represents both the crowning achievement of the Scientific Revolution and the moment at which the world, and our ways of knowing it, became recognizably “modern.” Many late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century thinkers agreed:
Department of History
Georgetown University
No comments:
Post a Comment