Critical Perspectives on the Historiography of "Western Science"

Beyond the Golden Age: Non-Western Science in the Persianate World (1500-1750) after the Supposed Death of Science in Islam
 
Younes Mahdavi and Peter Barker, University of Oklahoma
 
Abstract: In the first section we will explain the Decline Thesis in detail. Next we will describe the education of the Islamic scholars who are today counted as scientists and the patterns of their careers. Even the most advanced education in technical subjects like astronomy and medicine was conducted as one-to-one, teacher to student training. Since the teachers, especially in the case of astronomy, moved frequently because their main careers were in political administration or diplomacy, both education and research were distributed geographically, and seldom concentrated into what we would today call research centers. The situation was only slightly different in the case of medicine, because hospitals served as centers of teaching and research. But even so, training was provided and certified one-on-one, and students frequently travelled to many different teachers in the course of their educations. The third section of the paper describes how original research was publicized. The primary vehicle was a book genre called a commentary, which in the West has come to denote a derivative work that departs little, if at all, from the text it is commenting on. In the Islamic world, however, commentaries played the same role as research journals today, communicating new results and creating a dialogue between earlier and later research. Important works created not just chains but ever expanding cascades of commentaries, glosses and supercommentaries. In the fourth and fifth sections we apply these ideas to medicine and astronomy showing how these categories reveal vigorous research traditions in Safavid Persia and Mughal India, into the mid-1700s, and decisively refute the Decline Thesis.

"Separating the West and Non-West in Discourses of Scientific Deficiency"
Suzanne Moon, University of Oklahoma
and
"Surrounding the Adoption of 'Western Science': A Historiographical Reflection on Choe Han-Gi and His Kihak in South Korea"
Jaehwan Hyun, Pusan National University, Busan
 

Paul Keyser, Independent Scholar
"Neither Triumph Nor Telos"
and
Abigail Nieves Delgado, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Juliana Gutiérrez Valderrama, Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia
"Othering knowledge: The use of the prefix 'ethno' in science"

Michael Gordin, Princeton University
"Genghis Khan with a Nuclear Reactor: Three Centuries of 'Western Science' in Russia"
Roy Wagner, ETH Zürich
"Indian Mathematics Can’t Win"

 
Elise Burton, University of Toronto
James Poskett, University of Warwick
Suman Seth, Cornell University

"When Racial Science Became ‘Western’"

 
Claire Fanger, Rice University

"The changing shapes of science: Magic, meta-knowledge, and reality in medieval Christian thought"