http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/218818 Sun, 19 May 2013 08:35:59 GMT 2013-05-19T08:35:59Z http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/244381 Title: The pursuit of nature: defining natural histories in eighteenth-century Britain Authors: Gibson, Susannah Abstract: Many histories of natural history see it as a descriptive science, as a clear forerunner to modern studies of classification, ecology and allied sciences. But this thesis argues that the story of unproblematic progression from eighteenth-century natural history to nineteenth-century and modern natural history is a myth. Eighteenth-century natural history was a distinct blend of practices and theories that no longer exists, though many individual elements of it have survived. The natural history that I discuss was not solely about collecting, displaying, naming and grouping objects. Though these activities played an important part in natural history (and in many histories of natural history) this thesis focuses on some other key elements of natural history that are too often neglected: elements such as experimenting, theorising, hypothesising, seeking causes, and explaining. Usually these activities are linked to natural philosophy rather than natural history, but I show how they were used by naturalists and, by extension, create a new way of understanding how eighteenth-century natural history, natural philosophy and other sciences were related. The first chapter is about the end of eighteenth-century natural history and looks at the role of the Linnean Society of London. It argues that this society tried to homogenise British natural history through the promotion of the Linnean sexual system of plant classification and through the suppression of the kinds of experimental and theoretical work described in this thesis. To understand that experimental and theoretical work, and to see what British natural history really entailed in this period, three central chapters focus on specific case studies. The second chapter shows how English-based naturalists such as John Ellis (1710-1776) approached the problem of distinguishing plants from animals, and especially about how they used chemical experiments to decide whether things such as coral and corallines should be placed in the animal or plant kingdom. The third chapter discusses sensitive plants and the overlaps between natural history and natural philosophy. It draws on case studies of naturalists who investigated things like plant motion and apparent plant sensitivity with different observational and experimental methods, and tried to explain them using various mechanical and vitalist explanations. The fourth chapter focuses on the controversy over whether plants (like animals) can be male or female and shows the theoretical and experimental tools that naturalists used to address this issue. Together, these chapters give a very detailed insight into the everyday practices and theories used by eighteenth-century naturalists and show the variety of activities that made up the field. The next two chapters focus on the identity and interactions of naturalists and show how they created a distinctive science: the fifth chapter is about how someone in England could go about becoming an authority on natural history in the late eighteenth century; and the final chapter looks outwards from Britain and examines how British natural history influenced, and was influenced by, European natural history; it uses correspondence to examine how British naturalists communicated with their overseas counterparts and what each party gained from those exchanges. Description: Pagination differs from hardbound copy of thesis held at Cambridge University Library. Mon, 08 Oct 2012 23:00:00 GMT http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/244381 2012-10-08T23:00:00Z http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/244204 Title: Corpus of Ancient Mesopotamian Scholarship/Geography of Knowledge Authors: Robson, Eleanor; Tinney, Steve; Besnier, Marie-Françoise; Clancier, Philippe; Cunningham, Graham; Reynolds, Frances; Stadthouders, Henry; Van Buylaere, Greta; Veldhuis, Niek Description: These XML files are an output of the AHRC-funded research project, "The Geography of Knowledge in Assyria and Babylonia", which ran at the Universities of Cambridge and Pennsylvania, 2007-12, under the direction of Eleanor Robson and Steve Tinney. They contain alphabetic transliterations and translations of some 600 cuneiform texts from the ancient cities of Kalhu (Nimrud), Huzirina (Sultantepe) and Uruk (Warka), along with secondary bibliography. The files are in TEI P5 format and are released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. This is an end-of-funding spin-off deposit in the first instance. The corpus will continue to be maintained and augmented. The current instantiation, with full searching and glossary functionality, is live at http://oracc.org/cams/gkab/ Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/244204 2013-01-22T00:00:00Z http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/242377 Title: You fight your way, I fight my way: Wu Wen-Tsun and traditional Chinese mathematics Authors: Hudecek, Jiri Abstract: This dissertation is about a modern Chinese mathematician’s use of traditional Chinese mathematics. Wu Wen-Tsun (born 1919), a French-trained algebraic topologist, became interested in Chinese mathematical heritage in the Cultural Revolution period (1966-1976). He claimed that his subsequent, internationally acclaimed work on the “mechanisation of mathematics” (computer proofs) was inspired by this historical interest. He thus situated his mathematical success within a nationalist framework of independent modernisation, and has become a government-promoted celebrity since the turn of the millennium. Against the standard ‘national hero’ story told about Wu, I portray his turn to the history of Chinese mathematics as a sophisticated response to political, institutional and ideological pressures on mathematics in post-1949 Maoist China. I integrate a biographical account of Wu’s career with in-depth studies of the content and influence of his mathematical work to show the fluctuations of his fortunes since his return to China in 1952. Wu as an individual shared the fate of the Institute of Mathematics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he worked between 1952 and 1977. I argue that Wu’s philosophy of mathematics was shaped by the utilitarianism preached by the Communist Party of China, which caused excesses especially during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), but remained a feature of Chinese science policy even afterwards. After the research hiatus of the Cultural Revolution, Wu consciously linked his research to ideology. His parallel mathematical research and history-writing since 1977 have reflected the same philosophy of mathematics and the same concerns about modernisation, national development, and independence. The dissertation uses unpublished archival material from China and first-hand interviews with Wu Wen-Tsun and other Chinese mathematicians. I relate Wu’s mathematical nationalism to theories of cultural nationalism and historicism from the political sciences, and theoretically analyse the contradiction between nationalism and internationalism in modern Chinese mathematics. Mon, 09 Apr 2012 23:00:00 GMT http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/242377 2012-04-09T23:00:00Z http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/242194 Title: Shaping science with the past : textbooks, history, and the disciplining of genetics Authors: Skopek, Jeffrey M. Abstract: Science is generally not thought of as being deeply historiographical. Although it is clear that scientists frequently write about history in their work — that, for example, they identify the significance of an advance by situating it historically, or refer to a historic source of authority in order to add legitimacy to a position — it is often supposed that the historical claims of scientists are incidental to the scientific. This thesis contests basic assumptions of this view. In a study of the textbooks of twentieth century Anglo-American genetics — of a place where the canon of a science is consolidated, as the heterogeneous approaches and controversies of its practice are rendered unified for its reproduction — I develop a novel taxonomy of the forms in which history can be written, and of the scientific functions that they can serve. Progressing from an analysis of narrative historical accounts, to latent and embedded formulations of the past, I demonstrate the ways in which geneticists used history-writing in the disciplining of the foundations, future practitioners, conceptual order, and boundaries of their science. After an introductory chapter identifying some of the ways in which the textbooks and historical accounts of a science may be contributory, rather than intellectually external and temporally subsequent, to its formation and development, I advance the central argument of this thesis in four chapters. Each examines a different form of historywriting. In the first, I explore the disciplining of the foundations of genetics, with a study of the explicit, narrative histories of hereditary science that were written in three important first-generation genetics textbooks. Identifying radical differences in their accounts of the same nineteenth-century figures, experiments and theories, I argue that these different ways of consolidating history were connected to fundamentally different ideas of the conceptual foundations of the science, and that they were used to advance divergent visions of the science’s future. I then look at the historical case-based and problem-solving method of teaching that was developed in the 1920s-1940s to convey the science of genetics. I argue that this method created 'virtual historical environments' that allowed students to learn and practice not only the principles that were studied by geneticists and were explicitly taught as rules in the text, but also the tacit skills needed to follow, find, and understand these rules. Here, history was used in the disciplining of the mind of the student. In the third chapter, I look at the 'standard historical approach' to teaching in the 1930s-1950s, exploring the establishment of this approach, the functions and consequences of literary devices on which it relied, and the ways in which the meaning of facts and theories were shaped within it. My central contention is that a notion of history was constitutive of the organizational logic, narrative structure, and inner rationality of textbook genetics, thereby performing a powerful function in the disciplining of the conceptual order of the science. The fourth chapter explores the sense of history embodied in the use of the concept of 'classical genetics' in textbooks of the 1960s-1970s. Tracing the semantic development of 'classical' from its first uses in the 1920s, I argue that this term was a politically powerful concept in the language of geneticists: at first used to define and establish sources of scientific authority, it was subsequently developed in arguments about the philosophical and ideological character of genetics, and eventually served to establish the disciplinary identity and boundaries of the science. By differentiating these various uses of 'classical', I show that the disciplinary power of this term — which is derived from the authority of history — relied on the effacement of its historicity and the situations in which it was created and deployed. With this thesis, I push the boundaries on common conceptions of what is involved in, and what should be counted as, the 'history' and 'writing' of history-writing. Advancing a novel taxonomy of the forms in which the historical can appear, I provide a starting point for further historiographical research on the subtle yet powerful ways in which the historicity of our past can make claims upon us. Tue, 30 Sep 2008 23:00:00 GMT http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/242194 2008-09-30T23:00:00Z http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/236353 Title: The Keynesian Revolution: A Research School Analysis Authors: Cord, Robert Anthony Abstract: Various explanations have been put forward as to why the "Keynesian. Revolution occurred. Some of these point to the temporal relevance of the General Theory while others highlight the importance of more anecdotal evidence, such as Keynes.s relations with the Cambridge "Circus.. However, no systematic effort has been made to bring together these and other factors under one recognised framework of analysis. This thesis attempts to fill this gap by making use of a well-established tradition of work within the history of science literature devoted to identifying the factors which help to explain why certain research schools are successful and why others fail. This body of work is based primarily on the ideas of Jack Morrell and Gerald Geison. More specifically, Morrell and Geison make use of a combination of 14 intellectual, technical, institutional, psychological and financial factors which, they argue, help determine the relative performance of research schools. We apply the research school approach to the development very specifically of macroeconomics in the 1930s and 1940s. Our findings suggest that it does indeed provide a reasonably coherent explanation as to why the revolution in macroeconomics witnessed during this period was specifically labelled "Keynesian., this despite the fact that Keynes was far from being the only economist attempting to gain dominance for his ideas. Thus, as well as Keynes, we apply the same research school analysis to the cases of Hayek and Kalecki and use it to explain why they were overshadowed by Keynes. On a final note, although it is clear that Keynes independently possessed a number of the attributes necessary to establish a successful and sustainable research school, the thesis also identifies the theories and activities of Marshall as providing an important foundation from which Keynes was able to mount his own revolution. Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/236353 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/226170 Title: A reverse counterfactual analysis of causation Authors: Broadbent, Alex Abstract: Lewis’s counterfactual analysis of causation starts with the claim that c causes e if ~ C > ~ E, where c and e are events, C and E are the propositions that c and e respectively occur, ~ is negation and > is the counterfactual conditional. The purpose of my project is to provide a counterfactual analysis of causation which departs signigicantly from Lewis’s starting point, and thus can hope to solve several stubborn problems for that approach. Whereas Lewis starts with a sufficiency claim, my analysis claims that a certain counterfactual is necessary for causation. I say that, if c causes e, then ~ E > ~ C — I call the latter the Reverse Counterfactual. This will often, perhaps always, be a backtracking counterfactual, so two chapters are devoted to defending a conception of counterfactuals which allows backtracking. Thus prepared, I argue that the Reverse Counterfactual is true of causes, but not of mere conditions for an effect. This provides a neat analysis of the principles governing causal selection, which is extended in a discussion of causal transitivity. Standard counterfactual accounts suffer counterexamples from preemption, but I argue that the Reverse Counterfactual has resources to deal neatly with those too. Finally I argue that the Reverse counterfactual, as a necessary condition on causation, is the most we can hope for: in principle, there can be no counterfactual sufficient condition for causation. Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/226170 2007-11-20T00:00:00Z http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/218820 Title: Teaching natural philosophy and mathematics at Oxford and Cambridge 1500-1570 Authors: Hannam, James Abstract: The syllabus in natural philosophy and mathematics was radically changed in the course of the sixteenth century with new subjects, textbooks and methods introduced. Education became more practical and less dependent on medieval antecedents. Printing technology improved textbooks and made it possible to replace them with newer versions. Following sweeping syllabus reform around 1500, the Cambridge Master of Arts course was heavily slanted towards humanism. The old scholastic textbooks were rejected and replaced with modern authors. The purpose of natural philosophy was explicitly to illuminate the providential work of the creator, especially through natural history (a newly developing subject in the sixteenth century thanks to newly translated and promulgated Greek texts) where examples of God’s work were there for all to see. Oxford remained wedded to scholastic texts although the trivium was reformed along humanistic lines. Cromwell’s visitors in 1535 outlawed scholasticism by decree but gave little indication of the alternative (their white list stipulating only Aristotle). The solution adopted by the Oxford masters was to import the Cambridge syllabus and textbooks wholesale. When the evangelical regime of Edward VI reformed the universities in 1549, the humanist natural philosophy syllabus was adjudged appropriate, especially those parts promoted by Philip Melanchthon at the University of Wittenberg. However, the visitors’ background at court meant they valued ethics and politics more highly. The Reformation itself left natural philosophy largely unaffected although the barrier preventing Catholics from entering clerical careers after 1558 appears to have encouraged some to remain philosophers. In mathematics, the 1549 visitation was highly significant. Cambridge University’s initiative in 1500 in employing a university lecturer in the subject was in danger of stagnating due to inappropriate appointments. However, John Cheke’s statutes in 1549 promoted the use of modern textbooks of practical arithmetic, finance and surveying useful to the centralised Tudor state. He also introduced the new subject of geography as a result of his contacts at court with merchants and explorers. The thesis concludes that during the second half of the sixteenth century, English students could expect a mathematical and philosophical education comparable to that of their Italian peers. This was sufficient to provide graduates with the knowledge they needed to carry these subjects forward in the seventeenth century Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:00:00 GMT http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/218820 2008-04-21T23:00:00Z