Departmental Research Seminar with Professor Jim Secord

Our departmental research seminar talks will take place on Wednesdays during term time from 15:00 to 16:30, in room 005, 48 Old Elvet, Durham, DH1 3HN.

This week's speaker is Professor Jim Secord from the University of Cambridge.

Jim is a Emeritus Professor at the Department of History of Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.

Title: 'What is the History of Science a History of?'

Abstract: A shift towards what is often termed the 'global' has highlighted long-standing ambiguities about what it is that historians of science study. How is the field to encompass detailed understandings of practices dominant during the past two centuries as well as cultural traditions extending across the world and tens of thousands of years into the past? This paper, based on a draft chapter of an introductory book I am writing, offers some thoughts on this question. Understood as craft practice rather than as an abstracted body of knowledge, science has the aim of ascertaining phenomena through close engagement. This involves socially valued expertise at a high level, while simultaneously involving entities beyond the human, and forms of labour of many kinds. This is of course a very broad definition. What we identify as art, music, theology, divination, architecture, tool-making, engineering, the culinary arts, and medical practice can all be characterized as craft activities involving socially sanctioned roles for highly skilled expertise. These similarities are an advantage, for relations between these activities have always been subject to friction, and that is what historians of science study.