Classifying the Sciences

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.011

10 - Classifying the Sciences

from Part II - Disciplines

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Richard Yeo

Edited by

Roy Porter

Show author details

Roy Porter: Affiliation:
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London

Book contents

Get access

Summary

Since Plato and Aristotle, philosophers of the Western tradition have placed a premium on the organization of knowledge. When knowledge is ordered, subdivided, and controlled we speak of trees, fields, maps, and bodies – metaphors suggesting definite structures and relationships. When knowledge is regarded as chaotic, overwhelming, or undifferentiated, we speak of labyrinths, mazes, or oceans – still perhaps implying that an order exists but acknowledging that it is not yet visible. The ancient philosophers endorsed the first, and positive, side of this dichotomy in two related ways: first, by privileging logically demonstrable, or at least systematically organized, bodies of knowledge as scientia or science, distinguishing them from other forms of knowledge, such as opinion, craft, or technical skills (techne); second, by seeking to demonstrate how the various sciences are related, in some rational manner, to one another in an overarching classification of knowledge. These maps or charts indicated appropriate paths of education and learning. Schemes of this kind were produced by the scholastic thinkers of the Middle Ages and they informed, and were themselves reinforced by, the pedagogy and curricula of the universities through to the Renaissance and beyond. To travel one of these paths was to master the “encyclopedy,” the circle of sciences.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 239 - 266

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.011 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bacon, Francis, “A Description of the Intellectual Globe,” in The Works of Francis Bacon, collected and edited by Spedding, James, Ellis, Robert Leslie, and Heath, Douglas Denon, 14 vols. (London: Longman, 1857–74; reprinted Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: F. Frommann Verlag, 1961–3), vol. 5.Google Scholar

[Barrow, John], A Supplement to the New and Universal Dictionary (London: printed for the Proprietors, 1754).Google Scholar

Brewer, John and Porter, Roy (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar

Brewer, John and Bermingham, Ann, The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (New York: Routledge, 1995).Google Scholar

Broberg, Gunnar, “The Broken Circle,” in Frängsmyr, Tore, Heilbron, J. L., and Rider, Robin E. (eds.), The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)Google Scholar

Brown, Gary, “The Evolution of the Term ‘Mixed Mathematics,’” Journal of the History of Ideas, 52 (1991)Google Scholar

Burke, Peter, “Reflections on the History of Information in Early Modern Europe,” Scientiarum Historia, 17 (1991).Google Scholar

Cassirer, Ernst, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Koelln, F. and Pettegrove, J. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

Clark, George, Science and Social Welfare in the Age of Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973, 2nd ed. 1970).Google Scholar

Crosland, Maurice, In the Shadow of Lavoisier: The Annales de Chemie and the Establishment of a New Science (Oxford: British Society for the History of Science, 1994).Google Scholar

d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, translated with an introduction by Schwab, Richard N. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).Google Scholar

Darnton, Robert, “Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Essays in French Cultural History (London: Penguin, 1985).Google Scholar

Darnton, Robert, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

Daston, Lorraine, “Classifications of Knowledge in the Age of Louis XIV,” in Rubin, David L. (ed.), Sun King: The Ascendancy of French Culture during the Reign of Louis XIV (London: Associated University Presses, 1992).Google Scholar

Daston, Lorraine, “Baconian Facts, Academic Civility, and the Prehistory of Objectivity,” Annals of Scholarship, 8 (1991)Google Scholar

Dear, Peter, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar

Diderot, , cited in Koepp, Cynthia J., “The Alphabetical Order: Work in Diderot’s Encyclopédie,” in Kaplan, Steven Laurence and Koepp, Cynthia J. (eds.), Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

Dolby, R. G. A., “Classification of the Sciences: The Nineteenth Century Tradition,” in Ellen, Roy. F. and Reason, David (eds.), Classifications in Their Social Context (London: Academic Press, 1979)Google Scholar

Fara, Patricia, Sympathetic Attractions: Magnetic Practices, Beliefs, and Symbolism in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).CrossRef Google Scholar

Fisher, Nicholas, “The Classification of the Sciences,” in Olby, R.C., Cantor, G. N., Christie, J. R. R. and Hodge, M. J. S. (eds.), Companion to the History of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1989).Google Scholar

Flint, Robert, Philosophy as Scientia Scientiarum and a History of Classification of the Sciences (Edinburgh, 1904)Google Scholar

Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970).Google Scholar

Freedman, Joseph S., “Diffusion of the Writings of Petrus Ramus in Central Europe, c. 1570–c. 1630,” Renaissance Quarterly, 46 (1993).Google Scholar

Gascoigne, John, “The Eighteenth-Century Scientific Community: A Prospographical Study,” Social Studies of Science, 25 (1995).Google Scholar

Goetschel, Willi, MacLeod, Catriona, and Snyder, Emery, “The Deutsche Encyclopädie and Encyclopedism in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” in Donato, Clorinda and Maniquis, Robert M. (eds.), The Encyclopédie and the Age of Revolution (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1992).Google Scholar

Groethuysen, Bernard, cited in Dieckmann, Herbert, “The Concept of Knowledge in the Encyclopédie,” in Dieckmann, Herbert, Levin, Harry, and Motekat, Helmut (eds.), Essays in Comparative Literature (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Studies, 1961).Google Scholar

Hampson, Norman, A Cultural History of the Enlightenment (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968)Google Scholar

Hankins, Thomas, Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1985).CrossRef Google Scholar

Harris, , Lexicon Technicum (London: Brown, Goodwin et al., 1710), vol. 2, “Introduction,” no pagination. The “Alphabetical Index” is at the end of this volume.Google Scholar

Harris, , Lexicon, 1710, vol. 2, Introduction, for the paper by NewtonGoogle Scholar

Henry, John, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (London: Macmillan, 1997).CrossRef Google Scholar

Hutton, James, An Investigation of Principles of Knowledge (Edinburgh: A. Strahan, 1794), vol. 3.Google Scholar

Kennedy, Emmet, “Destutt de Tracy and the Unity of the Sciences,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 171 (1977).Google Scholar

Kenny, Neil, The Palace of Secrets: Beroalde de Verville and Renaissance Conceptions of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).CrossRef Google Scholar

Kuhn, Thomas S., “Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science,” in The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). See also Dear, Discipline and Experience.Google Scholar

Kusukawa, Sachiko, “Bacon’s Classification of Knowledge,” in Peltonen, Markku (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (Cambridge University Press, 1996).Google Scholar

Leibniz, Gottfried W., Philosophical Writings (London: J. M. Dent, 1995), ed. Parkinson, G. H. R., trans. Morris, M. and Parkinson, G. H. R..Google Scholar

Leibniz, Gottfried W., “Precepts for Advancing the Sciences and Arts,” in Wiener, Philip P. (ed.), Leibniz: Selections (New York: Scribner’s, 1951)Google Scholar

Lyon, John and Sloan, Phillip (eds.), From Natural History to the History of Nature (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 2.Google Scholar

Martin, Benjamin, The Philosophical Grammar, 2nd ed., 1738 [1st ed. 1735], (London: J. Noon)Google Scholar

Martin, Benjamin, The General Magazine of Arts and Sciences (London: W. Owen, 1755).Google Scholar

Martin, , A Course of Lectures in Natural and Experimental Philosophy (Reading, 1743).Google Scholar

May, Georges, “Observations on an Allegory: The Frontispiece of the Encyclopédie,” Diderot Studies, 16 (1973).Google Scholar

McKendrick, Neil, Brewer, John, and Plumb, J. H., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europe Publications, 1982)Google Scholar

McRae, Robert, The Problem of the Unity of the Sciences: Bacon to Kant (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961).Google Scholar

Partington, J. R., “Chemistry through the Eighteenth Century,” in Ferguson, Alan (ed.), Natural Philosophy Through the 18th Century and Allied Topics (London: Taylor and Francis, 1972).Google Scholar

Porter, Roy, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain 1660–1815 (Cambridge University Press, 1977)Google Scholar

Rees, Graham (assisted by Christopher Upton), Francis Bacon’s Natural Philosophy: A New Source (Chalfont St. Giles: British Society for the History of Science, 1984), n. 45Google Scholar

Roszak, Theodore, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of the Computer and the True Art of Thinking (New York: Pantheon, 1986)Google Scholar

Rousseau, G. S. and Porter, Roy (eds.), The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science (Cambridge University Press, 1980).CrossRef Google Scholar

Schmitt, Charles, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983)CrossRef Google Scholar

Shackleton, Robert, “The Encyclopaedic Spirit,” in Korshin, Paul J. and Allen, Robert R. (eds.), Greene Centennial Studies: Essays Presented to Donald Greene (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1984).Google Scholar

Speziali, Pierre, “Classification of the Sciences,” in Wiener, Philip, 5 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1968–74), vol. 1.Google Scholar

Stewart, Larry, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

Thomson, Thomas, “Chemistry,” in Gleig, George (ed.), Supplement to the Third Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Edinburgh: T. Bonar, 1801), vol. 1.Google Scholar

Thorndike, Lynn, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923–58), vol. 3.Google Scholar

Tonelli, G., “The Problem of the Classification of the Sciences in Kant’s Time,” Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, 30 (1975)Google Scholar

Wallace, William A., “Traditional Natural Philosophy,” in Skinner, Quentin and Kessler, Eckhard (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

Watts, Isaac, The Improvement of the Mind, 3rd ed. (London: T. Longman and J. Buckland, 1743).Google Scholar

Weisheipl, James A., “The Nature, Scope and Classification of the Sciences,” in Lindberg, David C. (ed.), Science in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).Google Scholar

Weisheipl, James A., “Classification of the Sciences in Medieval Thought,” Medieval Studies, 27 (1965)Google Scholar

Wolff, Christian, Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General, translated, with an introduction and notes, by Blackwell, Richard J. (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963).Google Scholar

Yeo, Richard, “Reading Encyclopedias: Science and the Organization of Knowledge in British Dictionaries of Arts and Sciences, 1730–1850,” Isis, 82 (1991).Google Scholar

Yeo, Richard, “Alphabetical Lives: Scientific Biography in Historical Dictionaries and Encyclopaedias,” in Shortland, Michael and Yeo, Richard (eds.), Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography (Cambridge University Press, 1996).Google Scholar

Yeo, Richard, “Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia and the Tradition of Commonplaces,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 57 (1996).Google Scholar

Book contents

10 - Classifying the Sciences

Summary

Access options

References

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive