ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

How Sciences End 1

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Historians have studied extensively how sciences begin. But how do they end? Previous attention to the founding, professionalization, and disciplinization of individual sciences has provided robust frameworks with which to think about the birth and growth of scientific knowledge communities. Less attention has been directed at how those same communities decay, dissolve, or evolve beyond the contemporary boundaries of science. This Symposium discusses how an ends-oriented approach to the history of science can revitalize discussions of several cross-cutting themes in our field. The tree of science, like the evolutionary tree of life, has many branches that terminate. What caused them to die out? What do their endings look like in practice? Who decides when a science is finished? Can we discern patterns through comparative study? What does the pruning of the tree of science tell us about the historical development, and present silhouette, of ‘science’ as a category?

From early modern astrology, musicology, and Sanskrit astral science (session 1) to modern Swedish graphology, Japanese Terada Physics, East German Scientific Atheism, and late twentieth century solid-state physics (session 2), the papers in this Symposium focus on ‘how’ sciences end by developing tools for tracking the agency at work when communities and institutional networks break down. In so doing, we develop a set of methodological tools for studying the ends of sciences and suggest how embracing endings can drive thematic disciplinary discourse that cuts across regional, temporal, and topical specialties in our expanding field.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Alex Aylward, University of Oxford

Individual Presentations

• On perception, mathematical violence, and the afterlife of sciences: Did the 17th century European ‘Science of Music’ really come to an end? - Yoav Beirach, Max Planck Institute for History of Science

• A falling star: History and the end of scientific astrology - Michelle Pfeffer, University of Oxford

• “The Present Confusion:” Pañcāṅkam [calendar] Reform and the Undeath of Jyotiḥśāstra [Sanskrit astral science], 1874–1955" - S. Prashant Kumar

Session Organizer

• Michelle Pfeffer, University of Oxford