History 692A: Comparative Scientific Traditions
Fall 2004, Mon. 1:00 - 3:30 pm
Synopsis:
A number of years ago, the fortuitous publication of several historical and anthropological studies of science in Greece, China, the Arab world, aboriginal Australia, and Micronesia, inspired me to design a course comparing western and non-western scientific traditions. But what seemed relatively straightforward several years ago, has since become anything but. In the last five years, increasingly vocal arguments -- by feminists, historians of science, social constructivists, Third World critics, and a growing number of defenders of the scientific status quo -- about the nature of scientific authority and the role of science in the rise of the west have made the design of such a course exciting indeed! It has become virtually impossible even to begin pondering what it might mean -- or might have meant -- to do science in distant times and other places without confronting controversies surrounding contemporary western definitions of science and scientific practice. Wondering about science in ancient China, the South Pacific, or even ancient Greece leads, it turns out, smack onto the battlefields of both the science wars and the culture wars! So, rather than avoiding what once upon a time might have seemed irrelevant distractions, I have decided to grab the bull by the horns and incorporate controversy into a syllabus designed with three ends in mind: 1)to introduce you to a growing body of scholarship dealing with non-Western science; 2)to open up the historiographical issues involved in identifying and exploring "science" outside the modern western paradigm; and 3)to ponder the reasons why efforts to understand science elsewhere and elsewhen have become a magnet for divisive arguments about the moral and intellectual foundations of modern life.
Syllabus: History 692A, Fall 2004 (Save as PDF)
Course Website: http://courses.umass.edu/hist692a/index.html
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