Review of Victorian Scientific Naturalism: Community, Identity, Continuity. G. Dawson, B. Lightman (Eds.). University of Chicago, 2014. This anthology adds to a recent spate of publications devoted to ‘‘scientific naturalism,’’ including two other books published in 2014. This particular volume enhances our understanding of the creed and its advocates. But it also challenges its conceptual and historical coherence, despite the editors’ claims that the term should be accepted as a valid actors’ category and guide for historiography. A few of the most impressive essays in this volume challenge at least the first assertion, although this reviewer believes that the editors are correct in both claims. Published in Endeavour Vol. 39, No. 1. March 2015. Click here or on title.
Review of The Age of Scientific Naturalism: Tyndall and His Contemporaries. Bernard Lightman, Michael S. Reidy (editors). Pickering & Chatto, 2014. Published in Endeavour Vol. 38, No. 3–4 . September 6, 2014. Click here or on title.
As recent scholarship on the history of invention has shown, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century inventor was proposed as a plausible new hero of the industrial revolution. But the inventor has also been characterized as a creature of accident—of risk, poverty, madness, and premature death. By the 1820s, inventors were not only heroes of industry; they became its victims as well—“poor inventors” who suffered under poverty and oppression to bring forth the works of the mind. The case of the poor inventor was introduced and championed by advocates of inventive workers from the 1820s until the 1840s; the figure came to stand emblematically for working-class interests at large. By 1850, however, the ideological and rhetorical construct of the poor inventor was appropriated by a liberal, mostly middle-class lobby to affect the first reform of patent law in modern British history. Click here or on title.
In order to account for a shift from catastrophism to gradualism, I argue that science and literature must be referred to underlying discursive pressures mediating between cultural spheres. Rather than considering literature as appropriating the idioms of science, and/or vice versa, the social and political significations of competing epistemologies and philosophical positions within and across cultural spheres should be traced to account for changes within cultural representation. Click here or on title.
One way to understand the diverse discourse known as science studies is to consider the ways in which different camps and theorists think (or do not think) the question of history, and to consider how historical theories and methods connect with epistemologies and the possibilities for critical discourse regarding science. Can the question of historical method or theory serve as a useful guide to the discourse, perhaps even a better index for considering the issue of critical engagement, than epistemological conviction (or lack thereof)? I will explore the issue by considering the historical methods and theories of history of several interlocutors located within the discourse of science studies, in order to illustrate the possibilities for this approach. As the discussion should make clear, the historical approach is productive of comparative reading of interlocutors in terms of the possibilities for a critical discursive relationship to their objects of knowledge, as well as for demonstrating the relationship between historical method and theory, and epistemology. Click here or on title.
