Surprisingly little attention has been given hitherto to the definition of the laboratory. A space has to be specially adapted to deserve that title. It would be easy to assume that the two leading experimental sciences, physics and chemistry, have historically depended in a similar way on access to a laboratory. But while chemistry, through its alchemical ancestry with batteries of stills, had many fully fledged laboratories by the seventeenth century, physics was discovering the value of mathematics. Even experimental physics (...) was content to make use of almost any indoor space, if not outdoors, ignoring the possible value of a laboratory. The development of the physics laboratory had to wait until the nineteenth century. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay considers the relationship between history of science and philosophy of science from Thomas Kuhn to the present. This relationship, of course, has often been troubled, but there is now new hope for an ongoing productive interaction—due to an increasing awareness, among other things, of the mutual entanglement between the development of modern science and the development of modern philosophy on the part of both professional (historically minded) philosophers and professional historians of science. This idea is illustrated with (...) several examples, including the entanglement of Einstein's theory of relativity with logical empiricism and its precursors and the entanglement of the analytic tradition in philosophy first with mathematical logic and then (through mathematical logic) with the cognitive sciences. Against this background, finally, the essay considers the emergence of contemporary social and cultural history of science from the Kantian and neo‐Kantian philosophical traditions. (shrink)

The mismatch between common representations of “science” and the miscellany of materials typically studied by the historian of science is traced to a systematic ambiguity that may itself be traced to early modern Europe. In that cultural setting, natural philosophy came to be rearticulated as involving both contemplative and practical knowledge. The resulting tension and ambiguity are illustrated by the eighteenth‐century views of Buffon. In the nineteenth century, a new enterprise called “science” represents the establishment of an unstable ideology of (...) natural knowledge that was heavily indebted to those early modern developments. The two complementary and competing elements of the ideology of modern science are accordingly described as “natural philosophy” and “instrumentality” . The history of science in large part concerns the story of their shifting, often mutually denying, interrelations. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay considers the relationship between history of science and philosophy of science from Thomas Kuhn to the present. This relationship, of course, has often been troubled, but there is now new hope for an ongoing productive interaction—due to an increasing awareness, among other things, of the mutual entanglement between the development of modern science and the development of modern philosophy on the part of both professional (historically minded) philosophers and professional historians of science. This idea is illustrated with (...) several examples, including the entanglement of Einstein's theory of relativity with logical empiricism and its precursors and the entanglement of the analytic tradition in philosophy first with mathematical logic and then (through mathematical logic) with the cognitive sciences. Against this background, finally, the essay considers the emergence of contemporary social and cultural history of science from the Kantian and neo‐Kantian philosophical traditions. (shrink)