Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Science and Society
- Part II Disciplines
- 10 Classifying the Sciences
- 11 Philosophy of Science
- 12 Ideas of Nature: Natural Philosophy
- 13 Mathematics
- 14 Astronomy and Cosmology
- 15 Mechanics and Experimental Physics
- 16 Chemistry
- 17 The Life Sciences
- 18 The Earth Sciences
- 19 The Human Sciences
- 20 The Medical Sciences
- 21 Marginalized Practices
- Part III Special Themes
- Part IV Non-Western Traditions
- Part V Ramifications and Impacts
- Index
- References
10 - Classifying the Sciences
from Part II - Disciplines
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
By
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Science and Society
- Part II Disciplines
- 10 Classifying the Sciences
- 11 Philosophy of Science
- 12 Ideas of Nature: Natural Philosophy
- 13 Mathematics
- 14 Astronomy and Cosmology
- 15 Mechanics and Experimental Physics
- 16 Chemistry
- 17 The Life Sciences
- 18 The Earth Sciences
- 19 The Human Sciences
- 20 The Medical Sciences
- 21 Marginalized Practices
- Part III Special Themes
- Part IV Non-Western Traditions
- Part V Ramifications and Impacts
- Index
- References
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 - 266Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
References
, “A Description of the Intellectual Globe,” in The Works of Francis Bacon, collected and edited by , , and , 14 vols. (London: Longman, 1857–74; reprinted Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: F. Frommann Verlag, 1961–3), vol. 5.Google Scholar
[], A Supplement to the New and Universal Dictionary (London: printed for the Proprietors, 1754).Google Scholar
and , The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (New York: Routledge, 1995).Google Scholar
, “The Broken Circle,” in , , and (eds.), The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)Google Scholar
, “The Evolution of the Term ‘Mixed Mathematics,’” Journal of the History of Ideas, 52 (1991)Google Scholar
, “Reflections on the History of Information in Early Modern Europe,” Scientiarum Historia, 17 (1991).Google Scholar
, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. and (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).Google Scholar
, Science and Social Welfare in the Age of Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973, 2nd ed. 1970).Google Scholar
, 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
, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, translated with an introduction by (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).Google Scholar
, “Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Essays in French Cultural History (London: Penguin, 1985).Google Scholar
, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).Google Scholar
, “Classifications of Knowledge in the Age of Louis XIV,” in (ed.), Sun King: The Ascendancy of French Culture during the Reign of Louis XIV (London: Associated University Presses, 1992).Google Scholar
, “Baconian Facts, Academic Civility, and the Prehistory of Objectivity,” Annals of Scholarship, 8 (1991)Google Scholar
, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar
, cited in , “The Alphabetical Order: Work in Diderot’s Encyclopédie,” in and (eds.), Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
, “Classification of the Sciences: The Nineteenth Century Tradition,” in and (eds.), Classifications in Their Social Context (London: Academic Press, 1979)Google Scholar
, Sympathetic Attractions: Magnetic Practices, Beliefs, and Symbolism in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Classification of the Sciences,” in , , and (eds.), Companion to the History of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1989).Google Scholar
, Philosophy as Scientia Scientiarum and a History of Classification of the Sciences (Edinburgh, 1904)Google Scholar
, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970).Google Scholar
, “Diffusion of the Writings of Petrus Ramus in Central Europe, c. 1570–c. 1630,” Renaissance Quarterly, 46 (1993).Google Scholar
, “The Eighteenth-Century Scientific Community: A Prospographical Study,” Social Studies of Science, 25 (1995).Google Scholar
, , and , “The Deutsche Encyclopädie and Encyclopedism in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” in and (eds.), The Encyclopédie and the Age of Revolution (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1992).Google Scholar
, cited in , “The Concept of Knowledge in the Encyclopédie,” in , , and (eds.), Essays in Comparative Literature (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Studies, 1961).Google Scholar
, 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
, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (London: Macmillan, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Destutt de Tracy and the Unity of the Sciences,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 171 (1977).Google Scholar
, The Palace of Secrets: Beroalde de Verville and Renaissance Conceptions of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “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
, “Bacon’s Classification of Knowledge,” in (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (Cambridge University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
, “Precepts for Advancing the Sciences and Arts,” in (ed.), Leibniz: Selections (New York: Scribner’s, 1951)Google Scholar
and (eds.), From Natural History to the History of Nature (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 2.Google Scholar
, “Observations on an Allegory: The Frontispiece of the Encyclopédie,” Diderot Studies, 16 (1973).Google Scholar
, , and , The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europe Publications, 1982)Google Scholar
, The Problem of the Unity of the Sciences: Bacon to Kant (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961).Google Scholar
, “Chemistry through the Eighteenth Century,” in (ed.), Natural Philosophy Through the 18th Century and Allied Topics (London: Taylor and Francis, 1972).Google Scholar
, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain 1660–1815 (Cambridge University Press, 1977)Google Scholar
(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
, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of the Computer and the True Art of Thinking (New York: Pantheon, 1986)Google Scholar
and (eds.), The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science (Cambridge University Press, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Encyclopaedic Spirit,” in and (eds.), Greene Centennial Studies: Essays Presented to Donald Greene (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1984).Google Scholar
, “Classification of the Sciences,” in , 5 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1968–74), vol. 1.Google Scholar
, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
, “Chemistry,” in (ed.), Supplement to the Third Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Edinburgh: T. Bonar, 1801), vol. 1.Google Scholar
, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923–58), vol. 3.Google Scholar
, “The Problem of the Classification of the Sciences in Kant’s Time,” Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, 30 (1975)Google Scholar
, “Traditional Natural Philosophy,” in and (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
, “The Nature, Scope and Classification of the Sciences,” in (ed.), Science in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).Google Scholar
, Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General, translated, with an introduction and notes, by (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963).Google Scholar
, “Reading Encyclopedias: Science and the Organization of Knowledge in British Dictionaries of Arts and Sciences, 1730–1850,” Isis, 82 (1991).Google Scholar
, “Alphabetical Lives: Scientific Biography in Historical Dictionaries and Encyclopaedias,” in and (eds.), Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography (Cambridge University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
, “Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia and the Tradition of Commonplaces,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 57 (1996).Google Scholar
- 8
- Cited by