Isis; An International Review Devoted to the History of Science and its Cultural Influences

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The history of Orthodoxy and science invites contrasts with other religious traditions. In contradistinction to the Latin West, for example, Eastern Orthodoxy throughout its history embraced the “pagan” scientific achievements of ancient Greece. Also unlike in the West, where ecclesiastical institutions often supported scientific activities, scholars in the East—in both the Byzantine and Ottoman periods— relied primarily on temporal sources to sustain their investigations of nature. Islam, with its strenuous resistance to any assimilation of the human to the divine, provides another contrasting example, as does the later Protestant justification for science grounded in the need to restore a fallen world through the application of experimental research...

This essay considers some of the major theological differences between Eastern and Western traditions of Christianity and puts forward proposals about how these might be related to the divergent trajectories of the formal study of nature in these two cultural contexts. A key difference lies in the “other-worldly” orientation of Eastern Orthodoxy and its emphasis on deification, which contrast sharply with ideas of original sin and fall–redemption theology in the West. These latter ideas came to play a significant role in the rise of Western science, with the sciences being understood as part of a practical redemptive exercise that could help alleviate the material consequences of original sin...

This essay offers a comparative discussion of attitudes to science within Jewish and Christian Orthodoxies. When it touches on the contemporary period, it deals with different varieties of Jewish Orthodoxy rather than the more liberal Jewish denominations. Debates about science and religion, rarely involving active—let alone prominent—scientists, take place within both religious traditions. The issues can be roughly divided in two categories—cognitive and social—even though the two may occasionally intersect...

“Science and Orthodox Christianity: An Overview” is an ambitious survey that reminds scholars of science in Islamic societies that the conversation between Islam and science is really a conversation between Islam and science in different contexts and that conversations between Islam and science can be found with less renowned scientific developments such as prophetic medicine. This response points out parallels in how Greek Orthodox and Ottoman Muslim scholars mediated new developments in Western European science and in how both Greek Orthodox and some Ottoman Muslim scholars propounded a mathematical humanism...

In Russia the theme of science and religion found its strongest resonance at the levels of humanistic scholarship and Christianity in general, where visions of harmony dominated and doctrinal and confessional particularity was largely absent. The fraught relations of both the Holy Synod and the Imperial Academy of Sciences with the Russian state since the early eighteenth century had the collateral consequence of minimal institutional contacts between theology and natural philosophy. Though “scientific apologetics” eventually found a place in the seminaries, scientists did not contribute to this scholarship in the nineteenth century...

Efthymios Nicolaidis et alii open their essay with what amounts to a paradox: they maintain that Orthodox Christianity “scarcely participated in the making of the new European science” but also quote John William Draper’s positive assessment of the openness of the Orthodox Church to the sciences. Whether they manage to resolve this paradox is unclear. This response to their overview suggests that they neglect two key elements: the categorical difference between medieval scientia and modern science; and the role of institutions such as universities and scientific societies...

This essay offers an overview of the history of the relations between science and Eastern Christianity based on Greek-language sources. The civilizations concerned are the Byzantine Empire, the Christian Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire, and modern Greece, as a case study of a national state. Beginning with the Greek Church Fathers, the essay investigates the ideas of theologians and scholars on nature. Neoplatonism, the theological debates of Iconoclasm and Hesychasm, the proposed union of the Eastern and Western Churches, and the complex relations with the Hellenic past all had notable impacts on the conception of science held by the Byzantine Orthodox...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Thoroughly a product of imperial Russia’s aristocratic culture, the mineralogist and geochemist Aleksandr Fersman rose to the top of the country’s scientific establishment after the Bolsheviks took control. He then remained a staunch supporter of various industrial projects through much of the Stalinist period. This essay puts Fersman’s thinking about the natural world in conversation with a quite distinctive mode of intellectual inquiry that developed contemporaneously. Eurasianism was a philosophical doctrine of a group of Russian émigrés who emphasized Russia’s unique status straddling Europe and Asia...

At the turn of the nineteenth century, at its headquarters in the City of London, the Honourable East India Company established a new museum and library. By midcentury this museum would contain one of Europe’s most extensive collections of the natural history, arts, and sciences of Asia. This essay uses the early history of the company’s museum, focusing in particular on its natural history collections, to explore the material relationship between scientific practice and the imperial political economy. Much of the collections had been gathered in the wake of military campaigns, trade missions, or administrative surveys...

This essay takes seventeenth-century Stockholm as its point of departure in discussing the many spaces to which early modern medicine belonged, in particular the court, the cityscape, the site of the pharmacy, and the city’s Collegium Medicum. It shows how scholarly medicine and pharmacy arose along with the city itself. They were a part of the city and of its many interlaced local, European, and global flows and relationships. Thus the essay offers new perspectives on medicine as part of, and a driving force behind, Stockholm’s transition from a medieval town to the capital of an early modern state, as well as the city’s integration into the early modern system of global trade...

“Practice” has become a ubiquitous term in the history of science, and yet historians have not always reflected on its philosophical import and in particular on its potential connections with ethics. This essay draws on the work of the virtue ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre to develop a theory of “communal practices” and explore how such an approach can inform the history of science, including allegations about the corruption of science by wealth or power, consideration of scientific ethics or “moral economies,” the role of values in science, the ethical distinctiveness (or not) of scientific vocations, and the relationship between history of science and the practice of science itself...

The authors of The History Manifesto respond to the Viewpoint commentary and extend the dialogue between the book's arguments and the recent historiography of science, technology, and medicine.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.