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The Catholic Response to Secularization and the Rise of the History of Science as a Discipline

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Gabriel Motzkin
Gabriel Motzkin
Affiliation:
Department of HistoryThe Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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Abstract

This paper argues that the development of the history of science as a discipline should be seen in the context of the bitter nineteenth-century conflict between religion and secular culture in Catholic countries. In this context, neo-Thomist theologians were interested in formulating a Catholic strategy of accommodation to modern science and to modern social systems that would also permit rejection of both modern social theory and the positivist theory of science. While theologians such as Cornoldi and Mercier worked with the positivist image of science common in their day, Duhem opted to reformulate the conception of scientific theory. His religiously motivated assignment of a central place to the history of science – as the only way of hinting at the prospective rapprochement between the conventionalist sphere of scientific theory and the metaphysics of the real world – played a formative role in its development. Duhem's conception of the function of the history of science directed the attention of scholars in the field to medieval science as a point of origin for modern science.

Type
Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , Spring 1989 , pp. 203 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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