First productive day for a while

So a good productive day today - the first for ages. Produced about 12 pages of notes from the articles I've been reading recently and read a reasonable amount.

The main notes of the day were on Charlotte Methuen's article, Maestlin's Teaching of Copernicus. I have continued to focus much of my History of science reading on the early Copernicans. Methuen's article continues some themes apparently developed from her book, Kepler's Tubingen. This, in turn, was based on her PhD thesis. One issue that it did raise that I have been wondering about recently is the extent to which such "primary" source research requires a good knowledge of Latin. I read somewhere that Latin work is often "outsourced" to other people in the process of this research. I do find it hard to believe that so many historians of science would have sufficient knowkedge in this area themselves. Hard to say.

I have also taken notes on Hanson's The Irrelevancee of History of Science for Philosophy of Science. I have read a few things by Hanson over the years and have always found him quite a tough writer - his particular "rhetorical style" does not seem to suit me very well. This article comes from the very start of the "historical turn" in the philosophy of science and seems to reflect many of the points that this turn developed. I was particularly taken by the anology between Eurler-Bernoulli theoretical hydrodynamics and logical empiricist P of S, compared with the practical concerns of engineers and historians.

Also took some very brief notes on a couple of early Isis reviews/articles. These covered a couple of early Copernicans in England (not just Thomas Digges). More interestingly perhaps, were a couple of book reviews, including Francis Johnson's Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England. This is also available at the Bodleian. I seem to remember this from years ago - is this one of the works Frances Yates admired as she began to do her own work on Bruno?

Two main blocks of reading today. First of all, Curtis Wilson's Newton and Some Philosophers on Kepler's Laws from Journal of the History of Ideas. I was first attracted to this by the somewhat odd title. What is means is this. Kepler's laws have been taken to be exemplary cases of induction and Newton is considered by many to have used them as a key part of his own process. Indeed, some philosophers have argued that Newton's laws are deduced from Kepler's (and Galileo's), but more commonly, the strict contradiction between K & G with respect to N has been stressed (e.g. Popper). Wilson's article reviews the manner in which Newton viewed Kepler's law and sketches a much more circumspect account of how important they were for him. He them considered three accounts by Mill, Whewell and Pearce of this same episode. Overall, a very interesting piece of work - yet another example of history of science showing how over-simplified philosophy of science can be.

And secondly today, I finally read Westman's Three Responses to the Copernican Theory: Johannes praetorius, Tycho Brahe and Michael Maestlin. This is his contribution to the volume The Copernican Achievement (which he also edited) and which I copied at the Bodleian just before Christmas. Interestingly, much of the section on Meastlin seems to conflict with Methuen's paper (unless Methuen is taken as considering only Maestlin's textbook and disputations). Westman seems pretty clear that Maestlin was a Copernican, citing many comments on Maestlin's copy of De Revolutionibus.

This is a prime example of exactly the sort of work I would like to have been able to produce. I have come across about a dozen articles by Robert Westman and all have been excellent - and I'm not just saying that because he replied to my email query so quickly the other week!

But reading this sort of article does highlight the deficiencies in the "History of Science" component of the P and H of S MSc at LSE. Works like Methuen's and Westman's should be a key component of the H of S part, but the P seems to dominate so much. I wonder if this if the case for other History of Science courses. From my review of UCL's, I suspect it isn't.

I have also begun to notice something about the way in which academic papers link to earlier work - this is a clear result of the large scale literature reviews I have been doing. For instance, the quote that Lakatos uses at the start of History of Science and its Rational Reconstructions which I used in a recent article submission to Rerum Causae is unattributed to anyone there - is it a Lakatos motto or is it such a common phrase that it doesn't need attributation? It actually appears earlier than Lakatos in the Hanson article discussed above. That article, in turn, is extremely similar to Feyerabend's 1970 article Philosophy of Science: a subject with a great past. A month of so ago I was reading an article by Ann Blair on Tycho Brahe vs Copernicus, yet though this covered much of the same theme as Westman, there was not a single reference to the paper discussed above. So I am beginning to suspect a far more complex nature to academic writing. I suspect I may have far too pure a view of this process.

As part of this work, I have arrived at a new list of books to look for at LSE when I return next Tuesday. These are mainly based on my current wish list at Amazon - surprising how many on this list turned out to be at LSE. I am very excited about getting these out next week.