BVT 502E - Bilim Tarihi Yazıcılığı

Dersin Amaçları

By the end of the semester, students should be able to:

- identify the major historiographical traditions in the modern history of science;
- explain the methodological assumptions underlying different approaches to scientific change;
- distinguish internalist, externalist, intellectual, social, cultural, material, and global approaches to the history of science;
- critically analyze concepts such as "Scientific Revolution," "paradigm," "social construction," "practice," "objectivity," "circulation," and "global science";
- evaluate the advantages and limitations of using "science" as a historical category;
- situate the historiography of Islamic and Ottoman science within broader debates in the history of science;
- compare competing historiographical explanations of the same historical phenomenon;
- construct a historiographical argument rather than merely summarize secondary literature;
- develop a research question situated explicitly within a historiographical debate.

Dersin Tanımı

What does it mean to write the history of science? Is the historian's task to reconstruct the gradual accumulation of scientific knowledge, to explain scientific revolutions, or to investigate science as a historically situated social and cultural practice? Should historians take "science" itself as a stable category, or should they historicize the changing boundaries between science, philosophy, religion, craft, technology, medicine, and other forms of knowledge?

This graduate seminar examines the major historiographical transformations that have shaped the history of science as a field from the early twentieth century to the present. Rather than offering a chronological survey of scientific discoveries, the course asks how historians have constructed science as an object of historical inquiry.

We begin with the emergence of the history of science as a professional field and the universalist and progressivist histories associated particularly with George Sarton. We then examine the profound transformation brought about by Alexandre Koyré and intellectual histories of the Scientific Revolution, followed by Thomas Kuhn's challenge to cumulative accounts of scientific development.

The second part of the course considers the "social turn" in the history of science: the sociology of scientific knowledge, laboratory studies, historical epistemology, histories of experimentation and practice, material culture, instruments, and the social production of scientific credibility. Particular attention will be given to the work of Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer, Bruno Latour, Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, and other scholars who transformed the field from the 1970s onward.

The final part turns to critiques and extensions of these approaches. We examine feminist histories of science; science, empire, and colonialism; circulation and translation; global histories of knowledge; and recent attempts to move beyond Eurocentric narratives of scientific development.

Throughout the semester, Islamic and Ottoman histories of science will provide an important comparative and critical perspective. Rather than treating "Islamic science" as an isolated civilizational tradition, we will ask how changing historiographies of Islamic and Ottoman science reflect larger methodological transformations in the discipline. The course will therefore examine the historiographical movement from narratives of preservation, transmission, and decline toward approaches emphasizing institutions, practices, scholarly communities, patronage, mobility, textual circulation, and the social history of knowledge.

The central concern throughout the course is not simply what happened in the history of science, but why historians have told that history in particular ways.