Between the two World Wars an extensive body of writings appeared in the United States explicitly or implicitly on the historical development of the sciences. I am not referring to the vast literature of popularization in magazines and newspapers but to substantial works, often in book form, coming from various intellectual and scholarly traditions. Only a few examples are classifiable by later standards as professional history of science. Following Arnold Thackray, one can designate some authors as ‘proto-historians’ of science. Most (...) of the writings, including those of the ‘proto-historians,’ have distinctive attributes: methods, attitudes and goals, reflecting traditions other than professional history of science or even the general history exemplified by the American Historical Association's membership of that era. What follows is a bird's eye view of a past of interest for its own sake and for clues about the professionalization of history of science after 1950. (shrink)

The ArgumentScience consists in progress by innovation. Scientists, however, are committed to all kinds of traditions that persist or recur in society regardless of intellectual and institutional changes. Merton's thesis about the origins of the scientific revolution in seventeenth-century England offers a sociohistorical confirmation of this revisionist view: the emergence of a highly rational scientific method out of the religious-ethical sentiments of the English Puritans implies that scientific knowledge does indeed grow out of – and not really against – customary (...) modes of thought.In tracing the intellectual origins of this view back to the religious controversy between Protestants and Catholics, the essay demonstrates that the essential conflict between them with regard to natural science stemmed from their antagonistic conceptions of tradition and its function in the production of genuineknowledge– of religious as well as of natural affairs. Whereas the Protestants believed only in those truths that are immediately revealed by God to each man through his reason, the Catholics adhered to truths that are related to men or “made” by them through culture and history. (shrink)

The ArgumentA brief review of the Merton thesis shows that its restriction to England is arbitrary. An example from the historiography of modern physics suggests the possible payoff of an ecumenical Merton thesis and the means to explore it. A summary of the careers of men who practiced science literally in the church – men who built meridian lines in Italian cathedrals – indicates the range of social support of astronomical studies by Catholic institutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.