ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Do Individuals Matter? Character, Community, and Controversy in the History of Science

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel explores the relationship between the individual and the community in the development of science across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It asks, in particular: How do individual scientific practitioners emerge and make a mark in their respective scientific fields? Recent work in this area has emphasized the dominance of certain scientific personas during given times and places, the proper cultivation of which enables entry into the relevant scientific community and thus the reception of a sympathetic audience. While this perspective has much to offer, what this panel proposes is to inquire more thoroughly into how an individual’s personality or character can influence scientific practice, sometimes in concert with orthodox identities but also often in opposition to them and in view of establishing new, controversial scientific theories or discoveries. The papers in this panel thus approach this issue via four distinct case-studies that take us from an analysis of the gentlemanly scientific world of William Benjamin Carpenter and mid-nineteenth-century physiology to a discussion of the romantic and imaginative scientific methodology of John Tyndall and Victorian physics, and from an exploration of the establishment of Niels Bohr’s orthodox framework of twentieth-century quantum mechanics to an examination of the competing individual styles of late twentieth-century feminist primatologists. We thus aim to show that while scientific personas were clearly important in establishing the basis for much orthodox practice in the history of science, it is also important to recognize the crucial role played by individual character and personality.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Erika Lorraine Milam, Princeton University

Individual Presentations

• John Tyndall’s “Incommunicable” Scientific Method - Ian Hesketh, University of Queensland

• Rethinking Personality in the History of Science: The Case of Quantum Orthodoxy - Kristian Camilleri, University of Melbourne

• Character, Context, and Feminist intervention in Primatology - Samara Greenwood, University of Melbourne

Session Organizer

• Ian Hesketh, University of Queensland