[11] March 20 - (National) style from art history to the sciences
Section outline
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"To each insight, to each system of knowledge, to each entry into social relations corresponds its own reality," claimed Lwów bacteriologist Ludwik Fleck in 1929. "This is the only true point of view." Fleck was, in part, attempting to turn Heinrich Wölfflin's art-historical "style-as-physiognomy-of-epoch" in a more functionalist direction, but largely failed in his own day. Since Merz and Duhem, however, the urge to characterize national styles of science has retained its allure, and we will discuss the various attempts to link style concepts to the sociology of knowledge.
Presentation: Rajarshi
Assigned reading:
Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1979 [1935]), chapter 2. [Russian translation]
Claus Zittel, "Ludwik Fleck and the concept of style in the natural sciences," Stud. East Eur. Thought 64 (2012): 53-79.
Suggested reading:
Arnold Davidson, "Styles of reasoning, conceptual history, and the emergence of psychiatry," in The Disunity of Science, Galison and Stump, eds. (1996), 75-100.
Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, 7th ed. (1950 [1915]).
Michael Otte, “Style as a Historical Category,” Science in Context 4 (October 1991): 233–64.Anna Wessely, “Transposing ‘Style’ from the History of Art to the History of Science,” Science in Context 4, no. 2 (1991): 265–78.Alistair Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition: The History of Argument and Explanation Especially in the Mathematical and Biomedical Sciences and Arts (1994).Alistair Crombie, “Commitments and Styles of European Scientific Thinking,” History of Science 33 (1995): 225–38.Ian Hacking, “Styles of Scientific Thinking or Reasoning: A New Analytical Tool for Historians and Philosophers of the Sciences.” In Trends in the Historiography of Science, edited by Kostas Gavroglu, Jean Christianidis, and Efthymios Nicolaidis, 31–48. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (1994).Jonathan Harwood, Styles of Scientific Thought: The German Genetics Community, 1900-1933 (1993).Mary Jo Nye, “National Styles? French and English Chemistry in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Osiris 8 (1993): 30–49.Axel Gelfert, "Art history, the problem of style, and Arnold Hauser's contribution to the history and sociology of knowledge," Stud. East Eur. Thought 64 (2012): 121-142.Deborah R. Coen, “Rise, Grubenhund: On Provincializing Kuhn,” Modern Intellectual History 9 (2012): 109–26."Dossier Ludwik Fleck," Transversal 1 (2016).Thomas Schnelle and R. S. Cohen, eds., Cognition and Fact: Materials on Ludwik Fleck, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (1986).
Robert Fox, "The rise and fall of Laplacian physics," Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 4 (1974): 89-136.
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