Master 2 Histoire des Sciences

et des Techniques

English Booklet

Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768

Université de Nantes 2014-2015

cecile-marie.lereste@univ-nantes.fr

SYLLABUS

2

Reading Listening/Video Writing Skills Grammar Phonology

1 Aristotle Abstracts

2 Science & Islam Typical Mistakes in

English

Getting Acquainted with the IPA

Stress Patterns

3 The Royal Society and the Study of

Other Peoples Describing Data

4 Hobbes, Boyle, and

the Air Pump Experiments

Tenses Stress Patterns

5 Marvels and

Monsters

Sentence Structure and Punctuation

6 Astronomy and

Empire Modal Auxiliaries

Weak and Strong Forms

7 Of Time and the

Railroad Clarity

8 The Development of Statistical Thinking in the 19th Century

Noun Phrases Linking and Leaving

out Sounds

9 Logical Positivism Paragraph Structure and Text Cohesion

10 Lobotomies Relatives Prominence

Assessment:

This module will be assessed through a written test (open comprehension questions on an unknown text).

Documents allowed during the exam: all the lessons (including keys to the exercises) posted on Extradoc and a

monolingual English dictionary

Session 1 Reading

3

Aristotle’s Philosophy

Plato’s most famous student was Aristotle (384–322 BCE). […] Aristotle did not reject all of Plato’s philosophy, sharing a belief in the necessity of logic and some aspects of Platonic Idealism. He was, however, far more interested in the material world. Although he agreed with Plato that the world was impure and our senses fallible, he argued that they were actually all we had. Our intellect could be applied only to what we observed of the world around us. With this as a basis, Aristotle set out to create a complete system of natural philosophy. It was 5 a powerful and extremely successful project.

At the heart of Aristotle’s system were two fundamental ideas. The first was a system to provide a complete description of natural objects. The second was a system to verify knowledge that would satisfy the demands of proof necessary to convince people who lived in a competitive, even litigious, society. The combination of these two components produced the apex of Greek natural philosophy. […] 10

The first step in the description of natural objects was identification and classification. Aristotle was a supreme classifier. Much of his work was on biology, and among other things he grouped what we call reptiles, amphibians, and mammals by their characteristics, even grouping dolphins with humans. He also observed the development of chicks in hen eggs and tried to make sense of sexual reproduction.

As astute as many of his observations were, Aristotle saw them as an examination of a level of superficial 15 distinction; it was the job of the philosopher to look beyond these secondary characteristics and seek the underlying structure of nature. To do this, it was necessary to determine what aspects of nature could not be reduced to simpler components. The simplest material components were the four elements, and all material objects in the terrestrial realm were composed of these four substances. The superficial distinction between objects was the result of the different proportions and quantities of the elements that made up the objects in 20 the world.

The elements by themselves were not sufficient to account for the organization and behaviour of matter. Matter also seemed to have four irreducible qualities, which Aristotle identified as hot/cool and wet/dry. […]

While the four elements and the four qualities could describe the matter and quality of composed things, they did not explain how a thing came to be. For this, Aristotle identified four causes: formal, material, efficient, and 25 final. The formal cause of a thing was the plan or model, while the material cause was the “stuff” used to create the object. The efficient cause was the agent that caused the object to come into being, and the final cause was the purpose or necessary condition that led to the object’s creation. […]

Aristotelian Theories of Change and Motion

The three fundamental aspects of matter (elements, qualities, and causes) in the Aristotelian system cannot 30 assemble themselves into the universe; to bring everything together there must be change and motion. There are two kinds of motion. The first, natural motion, is an inherent property of matter. In the terrestrial realm all elements have a natural sphere, and they attempt to return to their natural place by moving in a straight line. However, because many objects in the world are mixtures of the four elements, natural motion is restrained in various ways. A tree, for example, contains all four elements in some proportion but it grows a certain way with 35 the roots going down because the earth element wants to go down while the crown grows up as air and fire elements try to go up. […]

Other forms of motion, particularly locomotion, required motion to be introduced to the universe. For this, Aristotle traced a chain of motion back from observation to origin. Anything moving had a mover, but that mover had to have something moving it, and so on. Take as an example an archer shooting an arrow. We see an arrow 40 fly through the air, and we can observe that it was the bow moving that moved the arrow. The archer makes the bow move by the motion of muscles, and the muscles are made to move by the will of the archer. The mind thinks (which is a kind of motion as well) because of a soul, and the body exists because it was the product of the athlete’s parents. Birth and growth are also forms of motion. The archer’s parents were created by the grandparents, and so on. To prevent this from becoming a completely infinite regress, there has to be some point 45 at which a thing was moved without being moved itself by some prior thing. This is the unmoved mover. In a sense, the unmoved mover kick-started motion in the universe by starting the great chain of action by a single act of will. […]

Aristotelian logic

While understanding the structure of matter and motion was important, such knowledge was not by itself 50 sufficient to understand the world. This was, in part, because the senses could be fooled and were not entirely accurate, but it was also because observation was confined to the exterior world and could not by itself reveal the underlying rules or structure that governed nature. That could be discovered only by the application of the intellect, and that meant logic. […] At the heart of his logical system was the syllogism, which offered a method to prove relationship and thereby produce reliable or certain knowledge. We continue to use syllogistic logic 55 today as a method of verifying the reliability of statements. One of the most famous syllogisms says:

Session 1 Reading

4

1. All men are mortal.

Major premise, derived from axioms or previously established true statements.

2. Socrates is a man.

Minor premise. This is the condition being investigated. 60

3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Conclusion, which is deduced from the premises.

The syllogism was a powerful tool to determine logical continuity, but it could not by itself reveal whether a statement is true, since false but logical syllogisms can be constructed.

1. All dogs have three legs. 65

2. Lassie has four legs.

3. Therefore, Lassie is not a dog.

The second syllogism is as consistent as the first, but because the major premise is false, the conclusion is false. The axiom “dogs have three legs” does not stand the test of observation or definition, and so the syllogism fails. Thus, it is not surprising that Greek philosophers expended a great deal of effort on the discovery and 70 establishment of axioms. Axioms were irreducible, self-evident truths. They represented conditions that must exist if the world was to function, but recognizing them was difficult. Aristotle concluded that axioms could be recognized only by the agreement of all learned men, which echoed Greek political discourse. […]

The power of Aristotle’s system was its breadth and completeness. It integrated the ideas that had been developed and philosophically tested, in some cases for several hundred years, with his own observations and 75 work on logic. It presented a system for understanding the world that was almost completely intrinsically derived. With the exception of the unmoved mover, no part of his system required supernatural intervention to function, and further, it was based on the belief that all of nature could be understood. The comprehensibility of nature became one of the characteristics of natural philosophy that separated it from other studies such as theology or metaphysics. 80

Aristotle’s system was a masterful use of observation and logic, but it did not include experimentation. Aristotle understood the concept of testing things, but he rejected or viewed with distrust knowledge gained by testing nature, because such tests only showed how the thing being tested acted in the test rather than in nature. Since testing was an unnatural condition, it was not part of the method of natural philosophy, which was to understand things in their natural state. 85

Ede, Andrew, and Lesley B. Cormack. “The Origins of Natural Philosophy.” In A History of Science in Society: From Philosophy to Utility, 1–21. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

I. Answer the following questions on the text:

a. What difference between Plato’s philosophy and Aristotle’s philosophy is mentioned at the beginning of the text?

b. What were the two major components of Aristotle’s philosophical system?

c. Present the different components of Aristotle’s theory of matter.

d. What are the respective characteristics of natural motion and of locomotion?

e. Why was logic ultimately the only path to understanding the natural world?

f. What is the problem with syllogisms?

g. According to Aristotle, how should axioms be determined?

h. What characteristics of Aristotle’s system made it such a powerful tool for the study of nature?

i. What was Aristotle’s objection to the use of experimentation?

Session 1 Reading

5

II. Match words from lines 1-28 with the translations below (in the order of the text)

Line Word or expression from the text Translation

Entreprendre qqch

Une exigence

Apogée, point culminant

Habile, astucieux-se, ingénieux-se

Sous-jacent(e)

Constituer, composer

Expliquer, justifier

Irréductible

But, objet, raison d’être

III. Translate the text from line 75 to line 81

Session 3 Reading

6

The Royal Society, natural history and the peoples of the ‘New World(s)’, 1660–1800

Suffused with the high expectations that accompanied the foundation of the Royal Society, its second charter of April 1663 proclaimed in the name of the king that: ‘We have long and fully resolved with Ourself to extend not only the boundaries of Empire, but also the very arts and sciences.’1 For the English, as for other European imperial powers, the widening sway of seaborne power did indeed converge with the expansion of the sciences since, properly to possess new territories, one needed to catalogue their products and their peoples.2 The quest 5 for suitable goods for trade in an increasingly globalized world was, as Cook has recently argued, a catalyst for such scientific values as accurate recording of data.3 Such a preoccupation was the domain of natural history, a form of knowledge to which the Royal Society was particularly committed.

Its commitment to natural history owed much to the eloquent claims made by Francis Bacon, the Royal Society’s philosophical mentor, for the possibilities that such a form of knowledge opened up. For Bacon saw natural 10 history as the bedrock for a new form of natural philosophy which would undermine the speculations of the Schools. As Bacon acknowledged, natural history was one form of the broader category of history which he linked with the faculty of memory. History in this sense was simply a form of description and, as Bacon wrote in his Description of the Intellectual Globe, ‘History is either Natural or Civil. Natural history relates the deeds and actions of nature; civil history those of men.’4 But even Bacon’s own practice indicated that the boundary 15 between natural and civil history was a wavy and uncertain one. The view that the human realm should be confined to civil history ran in the face of the fact that, increasingly, one of the major forms that natural history took was that of travellers’ accounts or works by those such as the Spanish who had systematically studied the flora, fauna and human populations of lands that European expansion had brought under their view.5

For Bacon, the study of nature included the study of man. Hence, when outlining the full extent of natural history 20 in his Parasceve (The Preparative towards a Natural and Experimental History) which formed a part of his Great Instauration, Bacon at least gestured towards the need to include the world of humankind. In sketching in rather summary form the task of the natural historian, he included attention to the physical characteristics of human beings along with ‘the way these things vary with race and climate’. The programme extended to the more cognitive aspects of humanity with histories of ‘the intellectual faculties’.6 25

The early Royal Society went much further in securely including the human world within the remit of the natural historian. […]

Such an impulse to study the human world could take either local or global forms, both of which promoted habits of empirical investigation and accurate recording.7 The Baconian concern for precise description prompted the close study of British localities and their antiquities for which Robert Plot and other Royal Society practitioners 30 of chorography were renowned, but it also helped stimulate the study of more distant societies.8 This interest in the peoples of the new worlds helps account for the early Royal Society’s interest in accounts of voyages to little-known quarters of the earth. […]

Travellers’ accounts thus naturally merged with the promotion of natural history as the early Royal Society understood it. The prominence of such accounts in the early proceedings of the society is one of the reasons why 35 a considerable amount of attention was devoted to the study of the human world. But though travellers’ tales might be diverting and were read in quantity by those, such as Locke, engaged in the development of what in the age of the Enlightenment was termed the ‘Science of Man’, they were also notoriously unreliable.9 Over time, with increasing emphasis on experiment, the methods of the Royal Society reduced the attention paid to travel

1 H. Lyons, The Royal Society 1660–1940: A History of Its Administration under Its Charters, Cambridge, 1944, 28. 2 P. H. Smith and P. Findlen, ‘Commerce and the representation of nature in art and science’, in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe (ed. P. H. Smith and P. Findlen), New York, 2002, 1–25, 18; and idem, ‘Local herbs, global medicines: commerce, knowledge, and commodities in Spanish America’, in ibid., 163–81, 165. 3 H. J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age, New Haven, 2007, 46. 4 G. Rees (ed.), The Oxford Francis Bacon, Vol. VI: Philosophical Studies c.1611–c.1619, Oxford, 1996, 99. 5 B. Shapiro, ‘History and natural history in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England: an essay on the relationship between humanism and science’, in English Scientific Virtuosi in the 16th and 17th Centuries (ed. B. Shapiro and R. Frank), Los Angeles, 1979, 1–55, 7, 18. 6 Rees, op. cit. (6), 479, 481. 7 C. Withers, Geography, Science and Natural Identity: Scotland since 1520, Cambridge, 2001, 37–9. 8 S. Mendyk, ‘Speculum Britanniae’: Regional Study, Antiquarianism, and Science in Britain to 1700, Toronto, 1989, 165. 9 Carey, op. cit. (13), 259–80.

Session 3 Reading

7

accounts.10 The growing focus on experimentation also brought with it an increasing stress on the need to witness 40 the process by which scientific information was produced.11 This in turn also prompted uneasiness about material which was not based on first-hand reporting by a figure with professional competence and, preferably, one who was known to and could be questioned by members of the Royal Society. Accordingly, too, the study of the human world also declined, though the pages of the Philosophical Transactions continued to carry descriptions of non-European societies throughout the eighteenth century. 45

John Gascoigne, The British Journal for the History of Science, 42, 4, 2009, pp. 539–562

I. Answer the following questions on the text:

a. Why was there a link between imperial expansion and the development of science?

b. Why was natural history so important for Bacon?

c. What were the two kinds of history according to him?

d. Was Bacon consistent in his distinction between the two kinds of history and why did it become more and more difficult to separate them from each other?

e. Why was the early Royal Society so interested in travellers’ accounts?

f. What was the problem with travellers’ accounts?

g. What factors account for the decreasing prominence of travellers’ accounts in the proceedings of the Royal Society?

II. Synonym match: In lines 1 to 19, find the words or expressions that correspond to the following definitions:

Line Word or expression from the text Definition

A controlling influence

Suitably, adequately, satisfactorily

A long search for sthg

Appropriate; acceptable

Exact, precise

Enthusiasm for something and a determination to work hard at it

Foundation, principles or ideas on which a belief or a system is based

To weaken

A limit, a distinction

10 M. Boas Hall, Promoting Experimental Learning: Experiment and the Royal Society 1660–1727, Cambridge, 1991; and P. Anstey, ‘Experimental versus speculative natural philosophy’, in The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century: Patterns of Change in Early Modern Natural Philosophy (ed. P. Anstey and J. Schuster), Dordrecht, 2005, 215–42, 220. 11 P. Fontes da Costa, ‘The making of extraordinary facts: authentication of singularities of nature at the Royal Society of London in the first half of the eighteenth century’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science (2002), 33, 265–88, 282.

Session 5 Reading

8

Marvels and Monsters

Match the pictures with the captions

A

1. Bladder Stone, framed in silver, 1652, Museum of Medical History, University of Copenhagen

B

2. Fetal Conjoined Twins Skeleton, Warren Anatomical Museum, Boston

C

3. Unicorn (Narwhal Tusk), Berlin Museum of Natural History

D

4. Amber Containing Snipe Fly, Zoological Museum, University of Copenhagen

E

5. Rose of Jericho, Nîmes Museum of Natural History

F

6. Nautilus Goblet, 17th century, The National Museum of Denmark

G

7. Molar of Mammoth, Zoological Museum, University of Copenhagen

Session 5 Reading

9

H

8. Bezoar Stones, Berlin Museum of Natural History

I

9. Cranium of Nile Crocodile, Zoological Museum, University of Copenhagen

J

10. Two Tusks of African Elephant, Zoological Museum, University of Copenhagen

K

11. Albertus Seba, Thesaurus (Plate About Mollusks)

L

12. Ostrich Egg Goblet crafted by Clement Kicklinger in 1561 for Emperor Rudolph in Prague

Session 5 Reading

10

Wonder and Wonders Ideas, CBC Radio, January 2009

David Cayley: Working with her friend and colleague Katherine Park, [Lorraine Daston] investigated the ways in which people thought about monsters, marvels and prodigies between the years 1150 and 1750. Published as 2 Wonders and the Order of Nature, the book argues that around 1750 what Park and Daston call a profound mutation took place in the way scientists and intellectuals generally thought about themselves. At that date, 4 they say, wonder became vulgar, a disreputable passion, beneath the dignity of a [serious] scientist. […] But before that time, Lorraine Daston says, a lot can be learned about the history of science by considering things 6 that lie beyond the boundary of rational explanation. Here’s her précis12 of the book:

Lorraine Daston: “It’s about […] marvels, things which undeniably happened and which do not fit [nicely] into 8 any classification [system] you have at your disposal and that leave you therefore in one of two states which turn out to be peculiarly closely related to one another. Either you are in a state of wonder, which is a positive state, 10 there’s something pleasurable about the surprise — I mean, if you were to see an aurora borealis, that’s probably the state that you would be in. Or it leaves you in a state of horror, because there’s something portentous13, 12 literally portentous, it’s an ill augury that nature is out of joint14. And our departure point was really about what kind of phenomena trigger these very specific emotional responses and how is it that one tips over15 into 14 another? What are the historical and intellectual preconditions that make wonder tip over to horror, or curiosity tip over into wonder, and that’s what the book is about.” 16

David Cayley: “Okay. What would be an example of this tipping?”

Lorraine Daston: “There is a sermon that was preached — this is one of many examples, but at least it’s concrete — there was a sermon that is preached in the early part of the 17th century in Plymouth, England in which a minister berates his congregation for their wonder at Siamese twins which have recently been born in the parish. He says, ‘This should be an object of fear and horror to you. God is trying to send us a message, repent, repent before it is too late! And instead you are gawking as if it was the May fair day!’ So this is a case where the congregation has tipped from horror into wonder and there’s a certain amount of consternation on the part of the religious powers that be that this has happened. Or take the example of wondering curiosity. For us it seems absolutely axiomatic that if you see something like an aurora borealis, after that moment of gaping astonishment, your first reflex would be ‘what causes such a thing, why doesn’t it happen all the time?’ That is in no way intuitive for the people who study nature in the Middle Ages. First of all they think curiosity is a sin and secondly they think that wonder should be reserved for religious experiences, not for natural experiences, and they see wonder as very much akin to what we would call awe and fear, and therefore do not in the least think that your first reflex would be curiosity — that would be almost blasphemous — but rather a certain reverence which should follow on that experience.”

David Cayley: “Curiosity is a sin?”

Lorraine Daston: “Yes.”

David Cayley: “Following Augustine?”

Lorraine Daston: “Following Augustine, and even before that the Greek ‘periergeia’. The first meaning of curiosity is to butt your nose in where it doesn’t belong, it means you’re trying to find out whether your neighbor’s wife is having an affair, it means, still worse, trying to pry into the secrets […] of nature’s prints, God, so to investigate the things that God has hidden from us, this is an act of impudence at very least – busybodiness is perhaps the mildest form of it, and blasphemy is the worst form of it. So no, curiosity has a really bad rep until about the 16th century when you begin to get phrases that are wonderful phrases in Francis Bacon’s Great Instauration where he says ‘Look, it’s true that Adam and Eve sinned, but they sinned by seeking moral knowledge, not by seeking natural knowledge, and the reason why we have to pry into nature in order to find out how things work is because God is playing a game of hide-and-seek with us,’ and he cites a passage from the Bible, from the Old Testament about King Solomon, ‘it is for God to make secrets and it is for a King to find them out,’ so a kind of challenge, a friendly challenge that God had put before Solomon. And you begin to get a whole set of utterances like that which attempt to at least neutralize curiosity and eventually, it’s one of the few cases in the history of the vices and virtues where a previous vice becomes an unequivocal virtue, but you can see why it’s a vice.”

David Cayley: “Yes? Curiosity was never one of the deadly sins. Does it assimilate to one of the deadly sins?”

12 A précis is a concise summary 13 Portentous = de mauvais augure 14 To be out of joint = not to be working correctly 15 To tip over = basculer

Session 5 Reading

11

Lorraine Daston: “It is a very good question. It is related to one of the deadly sins, it is related to superbia, to pride, and it’s considered to be part of the sin of Lucifer before he fell. So he is proud of course, he whishes to revolt against God, but he also wants to know things that he has no business knowing. So yes I mean it is a kind of vaulting ambition, it’s allied to pride, and the other thing about it is that it’s related to avaritia, it’s related to avarice, […] so there are sins like gluttony where eventually you’re going to reach a point of satiety, you’re going to eat yourself sick and you won’t be able to have another ice cream sundae and even lust has a point of satiety, you just, it can’t go on, but curiosity is never sated. It’s like a thirst which is never slaked. And that’s why Hobbes says that it’s more pleasurable than any carnal pleasure because it is inexhaustible and passions that are inexhaustible are extremely menacing to the social order. We call it addiction in our language of the vices and virtues. It makes people completely incalculable, so people who are in the grips of a gambling passion cannot stop themselves, and all of the literature, the sort of romantic literature, the novels, that are written about scientists, it’s all about people who can’t stop. They know they should, they know they’re going to kill off their nearest and dearest if they don’t stop — they can’t stop. There’s a great novel by Balzac called La Recherche de l’absolu about a man named Balthazar Claës, who is a chemist, not an alchemist. He is a student of Lavoisier, he orders all his instruments from the best instrument makers in Paris, he is a pillar of the community, but he’s addicted to chemistry, and he destroys his family, he destroys himself because he can’t resist just one more chemical experiment. So that’s why curiosity is a vice. It’s like pleonexia in Greek, which was you know this kind of passion that doesn’t stop and knows no limits.”

David Cayley: Curiosity was a medieval vice that became a modern virtue, even if writers like Balzac and Mary Shelley continued to ponder its shadow side. This reevaluation of curiosity took place during the Renaissance, 18 Lorraine Daston says, and she thinks that one of the main reasons was Europe’s dramatic opening to the world at this time. 20

Lorraine Daston: “We think it has to do with the profound realization in the period that it happens, in the 16th and 17th century, of novelty. So you have to imagine a society which is just overwhelmed16 by a tsunami of novelty 22 — the voyages of exploration, the novelties of the Far East and the Far West. There are new stars in the heavens, there are new religions, there are new commodities17 – the European market is being saturated with things that 24 people have never seen before – they turn out in wunderkammern for example.”

David Cayley: “Wunderkammern?” 26

Lorraine Daston: “Wunderkammern are chambers of curiosity, cabinets of curiosity, and the German literally means cabinets of wonder, chambers of wonder. And these are basically a way of making three-dimensional and 28 visible all of the neat18 new stuff. […] Ostrich eggs, paper money from China, a canoe from Lapland, a two-headed snake stuffed, a cherry stone carved with the Lord’s Prayer… You name it, it’s in there. A piece of marble from 30 Tuscany which looks like a landscape, a fly in amber… This overwhelming experience of the world suddenly crowded with new things, and curiosity of course is the passion for the assimilation, it’s the appetite for the new, 32 and it’s that appetite which is kindled19 and stoked20 by the printing press, I mean the very word “news” is a creation of this period because it’s possible through broadsides, these one-page sheets that are disseminated 34 everywhere, to keep [informed] of what’s happening now. A whole new way of reading is created which is to read a whole lot of things quickly rather than reading just one book over and over again, so I think that’s what 36 triggers this reevaluation of curiosity in that period.”

David Cayley: This reevaluation of curiosity under the [influence] of novelty led to a new attitude towards 38 wonders, Lorraine Daston says. She finds an instance of this new attitude in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England in the early 17th century and [supporter] of a new science. 40

Lorraine Daston: “Bacon, just to give you a sense of how tightly [linked] Bacon’s position on curiosity is with an awareness of wonders in the world, when Bacon tries to clear the boards and say, ‘Look, we’ve got to start all 42 over again. The best and the brightest have been wrong for centuries. We’ve made a terrible mistake with regard to how nature works; we’ve going to just start all over again.’ He says, ‘How are we going to start all over again? 44 We’re going to have to start at the foundations, which is not explanations of how things work but just what is there in nature? Let’s take inventory.’ And he says, ‘This natural history, this reformed natural history, is going 46 to have three parts. It’s going to have the part that it’s always had, namely21 what happens usually, nature in course, and we want to include another part, which is nature wrought22, which is nature when we human beings 48 modify it, when we make machines, when we make tables and chairs, when we weave fabric, and then we want

16 To be overwhelmed with = être submergé-e de 17 Commodity = merchandise 18 Neat = cool 19 To kindle = attiser 20 To stoke = alimenter (for a fire, for instance) 21 Namely = that is to say 22 A past participle of the verb “to work”

Session 5 Reading

12

a third part, and this is going to be a history of nature out of course, a history of monsters,’ he says. ‘I want a 50 collection of wonders, of everything that happens which is new, rare, and unusual, and the reason I want that is because it will unsettle our self-evidences. The great problem with the study of nature [up till now] has been that 52 people have leapt from a few commonplace examples to the [broadest] of generalizations and then they’ve gone fearfully astray23. We’ve got to pay attention to the exceptions in nature as well as the rule if we’re going to have 54 any chance of having laws which will [include] everything in nature,’ and he says, ‘moreover, from the wonders of nature is the nearest passage to the wonders of art. If you study nature’s marvels, you’ll get hints about how 56 we can make our own marvels.’ And for Bacon the history of technology is a history, he says, where things actually get better. He says ‘look at the compass, look at the printing press, look at gunpowder. Those are three things 58 the Ancients never had. That shows that we moderns are, at least in this respect, superior. How come our study of nature, how come our science isn’t superior? We’ve been flooded with novelties of art, where are the novelties 60 of nature?’”

David Cayley: Bacon’s question received a resounding answer during the course of the 17th century, as Katherine 62 Park and Lorraine Daston are able to show in Wonders and the Order of Nature. Increasingly, Lorraine Daston says, wonders shifted from the periphery to the very center of scientific inquiry. 64

Lorraine Daston: “If you look at the annals of the first scientific societies which are founded in the middle decades of the 17th century, so there is the Accademia dei Lincei, the Lynx-Eyed, in Rome, which Galileo’s a member of, 66 there is the Academia Naturae Curiosorum, those who are curious about nature, which is founded here in Germany, there’s the Royal Society of London, founded in London, and the Académie Royale des Sciences in 68 Paris. If you look at the annals of these first scientific societies, they are [full] of reports about wonders. ‘Three suns seen in the sky,’ ‘two-headed baby born in Sussex,’ ‘rain of blood in Bavaria,’ ‘army of ants marching in 70 formation wearing what looked like baseball caps in Strasburg,’ they read like the World Weekly News, they read like the National Enquirer. […] [There] are also [alongside] the reports of the latest two-headed cat , reported by 72 none other than Robert Boyle, by the way, or Leibniz is sending in a report to the Paris Academy of Science to say ‘Dog who can bark out the word ‘chocolat’ and ‘café’,’ so it’s not just the hoi polloi who are bringing in these 74 reports, it’s the luminaries of the scientific revolution. So you do have, also, you know, mathematical articles […] [alongside] these, but this is part of the Baconian program. These people are saying, ‘Look, Bacon told us to 76 compile a natural history of pretergenerations, that’s what we are doing,’ so you get as it is the heyday24 of wonders, until about the 1730s, when a reaction sets in and it happens first in France — it happens much later 78 in Germany and in Britain — in which the French really [put] on the brakes and say that amidst all of this […] confusion, all of this variability we really must look for the regularities of nature, and they begin to develop an 80 ideology as well as a practice of systematically screening out reports of wonders. To the point where in the late 18th century, when reports of what we would call a meteor shower reach Paris, the Académie des Sciences 82 refuses to credit it until in 1802 there is a meteor shower within two kilometers of Paris, at which point even Laplace has to admit that there is such a thing. But it smacks25 too much of the wondrous. And I think this is part 84 of a really profound philosophical response to the problem of belief, so in the 17th century, you can make a mistake, but the mistake is usually incredulity, so people who are writing as natural philosophers say, ‘Only a 86 country bumpkin26 would refuse to credit the reports we’ve had from the New World about some new strange kind of fish, people who have travelled, people who have read realize that there are more things in heaven and 88 earth than have been heard of in your philosophy,’ so the sophisticated, intellectual attitude is a kind of omnivorous openness toward the most wondrous things, the things that are being reported in the Philosophical 90 Transactions of the Royal Society, or the Acta Eruditorum or the very well-named Miscellanea Curiosa in Germany. By the 1730s the pendulum is swinging and it sets the threshold27 very high and the worst sin you can 92 commit as an intellectual is credulity, is gullibility, is believing too much, and that’s where it’s stayed fixed pretty much ever since.” 94

23 Astray = away from the correct path 24 Heyday = culmination, zenith, high point 25 To smack of = to resemble 26 A country bumpkin = un péquenaud 27 A threshold = un seuil

Session 5 Reading

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I. Right / Wrong questions: read lines 1-40 and answer the following right / wrong questions:

a. According to Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston, what happened around 1750 is that wonder became a negative emotion.

b. Wonders and the Order of Nature is a book about miracles.

c. Marvels can cause two very different emotional responses.

d. According to Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston, curiosity started being perceived as a virtue in part because of the volume of new things that arrived in Europe during the Renaissance.

e. The marvels shown in Wunderkammern were very varied.

f. The printing press played a role in the reevaluation of curiosity in the 17th century.

II. Read the text from line 41 to the end and answer the following questions:

a. According to Bacon, what was the first step in rebuilding natural philosophy?

b. What were the three parts that should make up natural history according to him?

c. Why was a history of wonders important to his project?

d. What could you find in the annals of the first scientific societies?

e. What happened in the 1730s?

f. How does Lorraine Daston explain the change in philosophers’ attitude toward the wondrous between the 17th century and the 1730s?

Session 7 Reading

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Did you know…?

1. How many sunrises are there on Venus each Venusian year? a. 1 b. 2 c. 5 d. 6

2. What was the rotation period of the earth in its infancy? a. 3 hours b. 6 hours c. 9 hours d. 12 hours

3. By how much does our day lengthen every 62,500 years? a. 1 millisecond b. 1 hour c. 1 minute d. 1 second

4. Who was the signalling of noon particularly important for in Roman times? a. Lawyers b. Merchants c. Soldiers d. Slaves

5. Legend has it that the first ‘alarm clock’ was invented by whom? a. Aristotle b. Socrates c. Pliny the Elder d. Plato

6. What is the origin of the word “clock” in English? a. It apparently derives from the word ‘cloc’h’ in Scottish, which meant “regular”. b. It apparently derives from the word ‘cloccare’ in Italian, which meant ‘to oscillate”. c. It apparently derives from the word ‘clocca’ in medieval Latin, which meant “bell”. d. It apparently derives from the word ‘clokos’ in Greek, which meant ‘age’.

7. When was the Greenwich meridian decided upon as the Prime Meridian? a. 1884. b. 1918. c. 1732. d. 1548.

8. Shortly after his moon landing, Neil Armstrong was invited to 10 Downing Street. Who did he propose a toast to on that occasion?

a. To clockmaker John Harrison. b. To Galileo. c. To Newton. d. To Einstein.

9. Where does the sexagesimal division of our time system come from? a. From the Egyptians’ number system. b. From the Babylonians’ number system. c. From the Maya’s number system. d. From the Celts’ number system.

10. When did all bells in Paris start striking the 24 equal hours rather than the canonical hours? a. In 300 BC. b. In 500. c. In 1370. d. In 1632.

11. How was usury defined in the Middle Ages? a. It was defined as an exorbitant rate of interest on money loaned. b. It meant loaning money. c. It meant loaning money at interest, whatever the rate of interest. d. It meant using money.

Session 7 Reading

15

Of Time and the Railroad

[…] Our story begins in 1784, when within one year's period of time the mail coach system was instituted in England. Let's first look for a moment to the way things were before 1784. Ever since mechanical clocks began to chime from church towers, Europe had been a jumble of different local times. Not only did some cities begin their day at noon and others at midnight, but each set its clocks not to a broad man-made zone of time as we do, but to the true sun time of its particular spot on the earth's surface. If you traveled to another city, you found out 5 what time it was when you got there. When the pendulum clock arrived in the late seventeenth century, it had no effect on this hodge-podge; it just made each local time more accurate.

This was fine, since it was a world in which the fastest speed depended on the horse. Until the mid eighteenth century, travel on land was no faster than it had been in Julius Caesar’s time, and many roads were so bad that wheeled traffic nearly ceased during the winter months, leaving people stranded in their towns and villages. The 10 only vehicles doing any traveling worthy of the name were ships at sea. During the eighteenth century, roads began to be tarred […].

Without these tarred roads, the metamorphosis in travel (and hence in time) couldn't have gotten off the ground, but its real origin occurred in 1784, when a mail-coach system was put in place throughout England by John Palmer, MP of Bath. These coaches carried mail and also had room for passengers. What was really revolutionary 15 about them was that they kept to a strict timetable. The drivers carried watches and the horses often died from being driven too hard in order to stay rigidly on schedule. Soon other coach services came into being, all with precise arrival and departure times. Their fierce competition was based primarily on the reliability and speed of their schedules.

Even though England is a small country aligned in a north-south direction, local time at places west of London 20 can be up to twenty minutes behind it, and to the east seven minutes ahead. Until the mail-coaches came along, these different local times had presented no problem at all. Although the coachmen managed to set their watches ahead or behind to make them conform to the various local times, a problem which would plague travelers for the next hundred years had reared its ugly head.

It would take the arrival of the railroads in the second quarter of the nineteenth century to reveal just how ugly 25 it was. With their greater speed, it was impossible for trains to match their time to all the various local times, and they tended to keep the time of the city from which they originally departed. The many railroad companies which sprang up within just a couple of decades had enough trouble keeping their timetables in synch with one another so that passengers could make connections; they could do nothing to prevent new passengers from missing trains because their clocks were set to local time. The problem was so annoying that clockmakers began to make 30 watches with two dials, one for local and one for railway time. In the United States, none other than Henry Ford designed such a watch.

The railroads solved the problem among themselves by gradually agreeing to all keep London time, as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was called. By 1848, nearly all of England's railway companies were on GMT, which made them conform to one another but solidified the wall that had arisen between railway time and local time. In France, 35 the railroads all kept Rouen time, which differed from that of Paris by five minutes, so that Paris railway stations kept their outside clocks five minutes ahead of those inside. A similar bifurcation occurred on the rest of the continent and in the United States, and its resolution in tiny England was blissfully easy compared to the problems in a huge country like the United States.

Although there was some grousing about the provinces being lorded over by London, in very short order the 40 English did the only sensible thing by taking the next step: they gave up their “real,” local times altogether and set their town clocks to railway time. By 1855 nearly all public clocks in the British Isles were set to GMT, which effectively put all parts of Britain into one time zone, although such a concept had probably not yet arisen in anyone's mind.

How were these distant cities able to know precisely what the Greenwich Mean Time was, and why was it such 45 a paragon of accuracy? To answer the second question first: GMT was checked by astronomical observation of certain “clock stars” everyday at the Greenwich Observatory, and the Observatory's electrical Standard Clock was corrected to the new reading obtained from the stars. […] The electrical telegraph had been invented in 1839, and by 1851 telegraph lines had been laid alongside the major railroad tracks. In 1852, a plan masterminded by the Astronomer Royal George Airy (1801-1892) was put into effect: time signals from the Observatory's clock 50 were transmitted along the telegraph lines (in the form of electrical impulses) to electrical clocks and time-balls throughout England.

Railways, government and post offices, and of course telegraph offices received the time signals, and for a fee, private subscribers (usually jewelry stores and clockmakers) could also be hooked up to receive GMT. […]

Session 7 Reading

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In the United States as in England, the railroads were the primary motivation for the change to a more standardized time, but because of its size, the process was more complicated here. Total American railroad mileage increased tenfold between 1840 and 1860, and at least in the East, trains were everywhere. As in England, each railroad tended to keep the time of the city in which the line originated – there were about eighty different timetables in use at mid-century. Needless to say, making connections between trains was chancy in the extreme. […]

Late in the 1840s, monthly timetables coordinating the various lines began to be issued, but it was always an uphill battle for the traveler.

In order to further alleviate the confusion, regional time zones began to be put in place. By the early 1850s, all New England railroads ran on the same time, kept accurate by daily telegraphic time signals from the Harvard College Observatory. In the next two decades, other pockets of standardized time were created around New York, Albany, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Chicago, all of them controlled by time signals telegraphed from observatories.

[…] By the 1870s, astronomers were coming up with plans to standardize time, but they didn't have the influence to put them into effect. The vast majority of people didn't travel enough to see the virtue of the idea, and even the railroads, focused as they were on profits, were content to let timetables help people navigate the crazy quilt created by the various railway times crossed with the local time of each station they passed through. Nevertheless, during the 1870s several national committees were formed to study ideas for standardizing time. The first plans concerned only the railroads – it seemed to be unthinkable to touch local time. […]

Astronomers and even some railwaymen […] conceived of giving up local time altogether and making railway time the only time. This was such a radical notion that it took a decade of discussions and lobbying of railway managers, city governments, and time signal merchants for a consensus to be reached among those who would have to be involved in implementing the change.

To help explain how it all came together, we need to look at an instrument most of us regard as just an oddity of New Year's Eve. Today we are literally surrounded by extraordinarily accurate timepieces – our quartz watches are more regular than the earth's rotation, and our telephone and radio time signals are connected to even more accurate atomic clocks. It wasn't like that back in 1883. On New Year's Eve, millions of people across the nation tune in to Times Square to watch a giant ball drop at the stroke of midnight. So far from being a modern oddity, this ball is actually a relic from the past. As early as 1833, such balls served as public time signals – to ships in harbors and rivers and also to people in towns. In 1861, there were time-balls not only in Greenwich, London, and Washington, D.C., but also in Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Madras, Calcutta, Sydney, and Quebec. Each of them was connected to an observatory so that they could deliver the most accurate time possible. By 1883, many major American cities had a time-ball, and people would stop for a moment at noon and correct their watches by it. It was the primary time standard to which the person in the city street could turn with confidence.

Previously, most time-balls had shown local time. If they could be made to reflect rail time instead, local time would instantly be abolished, at least for city people. That was part of what the lobbying of city governments, time signal merchants like Western Union, and even observatories was all about. The observatories had to agree to telegraph the new time, and city governments had to be willing to run their schools, courts, and other functions according to it. Western Union had to agree to sell the new time instead of the local time, which had always been its stock in trade.

Newspapers took stands for (and occasionally against) standardized time, and served as forums for a vitriolic debate on the issue. […] The mastermind behind the ultimately successful effort to instate standard time was William F. Allen, a career railwayman devoted to its cause. Eventually, his lobbying efforts paid off: the observatories agreed to send the new time signal at precisely 12 noon on November 18, 1883. It would be disseminated to post offices, government offices, and time-balls, and the railway lines also issued precise instructions for changing their schedules.

It happened as simply as that. In a moment it was over, and a revolutionary new map of time blanketed the United States. Because it didn't involve the enactment of any law, there were of course pockets of dissent, but within a year eighty-five percent of all towns of more than ten thousand inhabitants were on standard time. It wouldn't be nationally legalized until 1918, and then only as a by-product of the legalization of daylight saving time.

Jo Ellen Barnett, Time’s Pendulum: From Sundials to Atomic Clocks, the Fascinating History of Timekeeping and How Our Discoveries Changed the World, Plenum Press: New York, 1998, pp. 114-127.

Session 7 Reading

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I. Answer the following questions about the text:

a. What change did the pendulum clock bring?

b. Why were there so many different local times until the mid-nineteenth century?

c. In what ways did the mail-coach system have an effect on local times?

d. Why was the railroad such an impetus for harmonizing the different local times?

e. Why is the adjective “real” between brackets on line 41?

II. Synonym match: Find the words or expressions in the text that correspond to the following definitions:

Line Word or expression from the text Definition

A mess, a mixture, a jumble, a potpourri

Precise and exact

To cover sthg, usually a road, with a dark, viscous material

A timetable

Ferocious, extremely intense

Dependability, faithfulness

For something unpleasant to become a problem that people have to deal with

To grumble, to complain

Reasonable, rational

Apotheosis, outstanding example, quintessence

A payment for a service

Session 9 Reading

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Logical Positivism In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg, July 2009

Melvyn Bragg: Hello. The Vienna Circle was a group of philosophically trained scientists and scientifically trained philosophers who met on Thursdays in term time in Vienna in the years after the First World War. Out of their meetings there emerged what is being called a revolutionary new doctrine: logical positivism. It rejected great 5 swathes of earlier philosophy, from meditations on the existence of God to declarations on the nature of history, as utterly meaningless. The logical positivists were trying to re-mould philosophy in a world turned upside down not just by war but by major advances in science. Their hero was Albert Einstein. When the Nazis took power, they fled to England and America where their ideas put down new roots and went on to have a profound impact.

With me to discuss logical positivism are Barry Smith, professor of philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy at 10 the University of London, Nancy Cartwright, professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and the University of California, and Thomas Uebel, Professor of Philosophy at Manchester University.

Barry Smith, what’s the basic idea at the core of logical positivism? How radical was it?

Barry Smith: This is very radical. Here we have the Vienna Circle, very impressed by science, by developments in logic and mathematics, especially developments in physics, say, but they were also very depressed by the 15 lamentable state of philosophy. You have competing philosophies, metaphysical views about the nature of reality, the ultimate nature of things, and these views are locked into pointless dispute, where you can’t see how to make any progress. Now the positivists in the Vienna Circle think ‘we’ve got to give philosophy a new job. It has to contribute to the advance of knowledge in the same way science and logic can contribute.’ So they decide that philosophy doesn’t have a doctrine to tell us, it doesn’t have a subject matter of its own. Philosophy becomes 20 a method; it’s a way of analyzing the statements and the logical structure of theories. It’s a way of deciding which statements are statements of science that are factual, meaningful, can be tested and contrasting that with statements in logic and mathematics which are true not because we test them, but because they’re true by definition. ‘Two plus two equals four’ follows from the meanings of the words that we use. Now this new method makes philosophy largely about demarcating meaningful talk, which can be rigorously tested, from the 25 meaningless talk of metaphysics which had pretensions to describe some sublime set of facts, some transcendental reality beyond the ordinary.

Melvyn Bragg: Well that’s an excellent overview. Can we just go back a little bit and tell us some of the people involved, how did they get together, did they discover that they had- what did they discover- well obviously they discovered that they had this notion in common. 30

Barry Smith: Yes, so the beginning of the movement is really when in 1922 Moritz Schlick is appointed to Ernst Mach’s chair in Vienna and he gathers around him a set of scientists and mathematicians and philosophers, very scientifically minded philosophers, and these are people who are ambitious. They want to make progress; they want to see how they can make a genuine contribution to the exciting ideas that are going on around them in physics, in logic and mathematics. They’re impressed with Russell and Frege’s attempt to reduce mathematics 35 to logic, they’re impressed with the new physics of Einstein, and they say ‘these are people who are telling us something we need to know, so we as philosophers can’t be locked in these pointless disputes,’ so really the kind of philosophy that had been going on where you make claims that are un-testable, they cannot be decided, we don’t know what sort of experiences we would use to tell whether or not one theory was true and another was false, they rejected them as meaningless. 40

Melvyn Bragg: Can you pick out one or two more people? You mentioned Schlick. Can you give our listeners an idea of two or three other of the key figures we will be returning to in this discussion?

Barry Smith: Yes, I think the three key figures are Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath. So we can see Schlick as the sort of the leading figure around whom the Vienna Circle gather, but more dramatic I think is the involvement of Otto Neurath. He’s a sociologist, he’s a social scientist, and he has a conception really of the movement that’s taking 45 place as part of a larger social movement. He’s interested in the unification of science; he’s interested in a community of philosophers and scientists working together. In a sense this is philosophy by committee because you’ve got a lot of different views, but they’re trying to figure out what they all think and what they share in common. In between them you have Rudolf Carnap, perhaps the most influential figure of the movement. He is a superbly good logician, he is very inspired by the works of Russell, and he creates a way of rigorously testing 50 scientific theories.

Barry Smith: So in Vienna, and we know what they’re coming out of, and we’ve got a few, we’ve got the main key players there. Nancy Cartwright, can you give us some sense of the scale of what they were rejecting?

Nancy Cartwright: Yes. Barry talked about them wanting to transform philosophy, but that’s only a small part of what they wanted to do. I think transforming philosophy was a tool, or possibly a side-effect, because they were 55 interested in transforming society. These people had gone through World War I. Otto Neurath had observed the

Session 9 Reading

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ability to really regulate the economy and achieve the ends we needed to provide weapons, and organize society to get all the munitions and food and clothes to the troops and he also, they also noticed that there’s not just the science of physics that was opening up and coming up with fantastic, fascinating new results, but there was a huge increase in skills and information in statistics, and they really did believe that with the proper use of 60 scientific knowledge and social scientific knowledge, one could transform society. […]

I think that they were also part of a movement, I don’t know whether they were, I don’t want to say that they were the cause of it, but they were the spokespeople for a movement to scientize the study of society, so that the idea that you were scientizing philosophy was only a part of it, they were scientizing the study of society and they were, they moved along with the idea that you could construct a better society by evidence-based policy, 65 which is all the rage at the moment.

I. Answer the following questions on the text

a. Who were the members of the Vienna Circle? Where and when did they meet?

b. According to Melvyn Bragg, what were they trying to do and in what context?

c. Why were the logical positivists depressed about the state of philosophy?

d. What did they think philosophy should be about?

e. When and how did the movement begin?

f. Who was Otto Neurath?

g. What does Nancy Cartwright think the logical positivists wanted to do?

h. What larger movement were the logical positivists a part of according to Nancy Cartwright?

II. Synonym Match

Line Word from the text Synonym/definition

A large amount of something, much of sthg

Completely

Useless, meaningless

A description of the main features of sthg, an aperçu

Real, true

The size of sthg, especially when it is big

An unintended consequence

Correct