Visiting Speakers
History and Philosophy of Science and Technology are please to host the follow speakers:
January 2008
Dr. Peter Dear
Cornell University
Date: Monday, January 28th, 2008
Time: 4:00pm (refreshments at 3:30)
Place: McClung Museum Auditorium
Title: "Science, God and Reason in Early-Modern Europe"
Science, especially since the eighteenth-century 'Age of Reason,' has routinely been associated with reason and rationality. But what is reason? This paper examines ideas about, and attitudes towards, "reason" in the seventeenth century. The apparent self-evidence of reason in the Enlightenment followed considerable agonizing during the previous century concerning the nature and validity of "rational" inferences, and God was an important underpinning for much of the talk about reason in the Scientific Revolution.
Peter Dear, the President Andrew D. White Professor of the History of Science at Cornell University, is best known for his work on Early-modern science and epistemology, historical sociology of knowledge, and history of scientific rhetoric. His books Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700 and The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World among others, are among most the most respected in current history of science.
April 2008
Dr. Carolyn Merchant
University of California, Berkeley
Date: April 21, 2008
Time: 4:00pm (refreshments at 3:30)
Place: McClung Museum Auditorium
Title: "Reinventing Eden: the Fate of Nature in Western Culture"
The mainstream narrative of Western culture is a story of the recovery of the garden of Eden. Since the seventeenth century, using science, technology, and capitalism, the New World wilderness has been transformed into a cultivated garden, reversing the precipitous fall from Eden and redeeming both nature and human beings. Fallen nature (Eve) was reinvented as a garden by male agency (fallen Adam). This modern, progressive story, however, is recast as a postmodern narrative by ecofeminists and environmentalists and as a chaotic narrative by postmodern science. Both challenges have implications for a new ethic of partnership between humanity and nature.
Perhaps best known for her work The Death of Nature (1980 and 1990), Carolyn Merchant is a professor of Environmental History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her works spans the fields of gender studies, history of science and ecology from the early modern period to the present. One of her recent works Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture shows how environmental degradation as we understand it now stems in large part from historical interpretation of the Garden of Eden and humankind’s control over nature.