Readings in the History of Science

The history of science meetup will continue with discussion of Ian Hacking’s ‘Representing and intervening’ on July 9. We got up to page 25 in our last meeting, and we left off discussing aspects of different kinds of realism. We’ll pick up from there. Although we didn’t get through the first 40 pages last time, the following two chapters on positivism and pragmatism form a kind of pair. In view of keeping them together let’s read through page 65. If you need a copy of the Hacking book send an email to kachelme@gmail.com with ‘send Hacking book’ in the subject line.
After discussion of Ian Hacking’s ‘Representing and intervening’ we will read Nancy Cartwright’s ‘How the laws of physics lie’. Although Hacking has differences with Cartwright, he does often mention her, and it will be useful to read the two works in sequence to get the full picture. After these sojourns into realism we will take up where we left off with the wave theory of light. This will include concepts of force and nascent ideas of field in the 18th and 19th century, mathematical developments, and thermodynamics.
Readings will include:
Jan Rychlewski, ‘The origins of Newton’s mechanics. mass, force, and gravity’--- Sandro Caparrini and Craig Fraser, ‘Mechanics in the Eighteenth Century’--- Helmut Pulte, ‘Jacobi’s Criticism of Lagrange: The Changing Role of Mathematics in the Foundations of Classical Mechanics’--- Ivor Grattan-Guiness ‘The Varieties of Mechanics by 1800’--- Niccolò Guicciardini, ‘Newton's Mathematical Legacy in the Eighteenth Century’

This group is more historical and less philosophical (we can even be anti-philosophical at times). Much of the ground we’ll be covering will be in the spirit of Thomas Kuhn. We will be working our way into the 20th century, starting from the 17th century. Enroute they will be plenty of opportunity to look at larger perennial issues such as cause, law, mechanism, and experiment. A previous incarnation of the group made it as far as considering the work of Ernst Mach. In this incarnation we intend to make it further into the quantum world. Neither of us is an expert in the history of science. We come at this with a lot of curiosity and a desire to avoid platitudes, and bring to the group our complementary perspectives from the social and physical sciences.