Free Enquiry Research Articles

<strong>Soviet Studies, Russian Studies, Ukrainian Studies... Politics, war, and ‘horizons’.</strong>

This article looks at the development of Soviet, Russian and Ukrainian Studies as academic disciplines in the English-speaking world, and considers how the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991 affected their approaches, conceptual horizons, and reception within the former Soviet space. It argues that the distinct ‘Western’ schools of area studies looking at the former USSR and its constituent republics have not simply merged with their counterparts in the areas under study, as might have been expected once the political and institutional barriers to international scholarly cooperation had been removed following the end of communist rule. On the contrary, they have survived and retained their vitality for a combination of economic and political reasons, and the narrowing scope for free academic enquiry in both Russia and Ukraine means that they are unlikely to lose their relevance any time soon.

The Decline of Comprehension in the Church of England, 1689–1750

AbstractFollowing several attempts to fashion a broad-based national church from the Church of England by reforming the Act of Uniformity (1662), the failed Comprehension Bill that accompanied the Toleration Act (1689) was the final such proposal tabled in Parliament. Although historians have examined moments when comprehension reappeared in eighteenth-century confessional discourse, less attention has been paid to connecting these moments within England's long Reformation and to explaining why the prospects for comprehension remained so dim. Its supporters claimed the Elizabethan via media in church and state to fashion a national church within a godly commonwealth by uniting Anglicans with “moderate” Dissenters. However, the High Church campaign against the practice of occasional conformity meant that comprehension ceased to be a viable political proposition by the time of the Tory landslide of 1710 and the passage of the Occasional Conformity Act (1711). The development of the culture of “free enquiry” among Dissenters further widened the gulf between them and the establishment, reinforcing the aspiration of the established church's Whig leaders for harmonious coexistence rather than unity. Despite its failure as a political proposition, Whig churchmen and moderate Dissenters continued to idealize comprehension due to their (albeit loosening) Hookerian commitment to unity in church and state.

Debility and/or Loss of Weight the Diagnostic Approach

These last few decades have given us greatly increased precision of diagnosis and therapeutic power, and we, no longer merit Matthew Arnold's rebuke. These revolutionary changes have been produced as a result of a great spirit of free enquiry, a search for facts and their explanation. Such a search is dependent initially on the development of a working hypothesis, and this is just what a tentative diagnosis is. From this point our search is for facts uncoloured by accepted authority, popular opinion or personal prejudice.In medicine Galen of Pergamum was the "Master" for many centuries, and from 200 A.D. the dead hand of Galen's authority lay upon medicine for over 1300 years. The mighty Leonardo da Vinci first questioned Galen's views and in England in 1620 Francis Bacon in his "Novum Organum" urged men to abandon their four idols-accepted authority, popular opinion, legal bias and personal prejudice. Yet, despite Leonardo da Vinci and Bacon and even the revolutionary work of Harvey in 1628, it was not until the time of Lister (186o) that medicine ceased to be a traditional empirical art bound to the words of the Master and accepted authority.There are for us three kinds of facts, viz. symptoms, signs and the results of investigations, and upon these we base our diagnosis. It is because of the difficulty in setting down an accurate account of the first of these that medicine will be for ever an art.

Minute genius: A tribute to the role of Italy in the development of science

Minute genius: A tribute to the role of Italy in the development of science

The Experimentalist as Humanist: Robert Boyle on the History of Philosophy

SummaryHistorians of science have neglected early modern natural philosophers' varied attitudes to the history of philosophy, often preferring to use loose labels such as ‘Epicureanism’ to describe the survival of ancient doctrines. This is methodologically inappropriate: reifying such philosophical movements tells us little about the complex ways in which early modern natural philosophers approached the history of their own discipline. As this article shows, a central figure of early modern natural philosophy, Robert Boyle, invested great intellectual energy into his depiction of the history of philosophy. Boyle's historical worldview was mediated through an array of textual traditions: classical, patristic, humanist and contemporary. Drawing extensively on his manuscript notes, this is examined for three topics. First, from his turn to natural philosophy in the late 1640s, Boyle combined a sceptical attitude towards philosophy's potential – stemming from humanist historicisations of the ‘speculative’ heritage of Greek philosophy – with a belief in natural philosophy's efficacy as a spiritual exercise, as performed by ancient ‘priests of nature’. Second, Boyle's attitude to the history of matter theory was far more complex than any simple comparison with ‘ancient atomism’ can convey. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Boyle held Epicurus to be a speculative and reductionist philosopher, leading him to posit a different lineage for a non-reductionist corpuscularianism which depended on exploitation of non-standard historiographical traditions. Appreciating this allows us to make an intervention in the ongoing debate about the relationship between corpuscularianism, chymistry and experiment in Boyle's philosophy. Third, Boyle's historicisation of supposedly anthropomorphic philosophies in his famous Free Enquiry (1686) exploited recent theological historiography, most importantly Samuel Parker's combination of the history of idolatry with the history of Greek philosophy, which itself relied on developments in continental sacred history. It was this historicisation, rather than any philosophical realities, which led to the positing of the mechanical philosophy as more compatible than Aristotelianism with Christian doctrine.

"The Present Time is Eminently Scientific": The Science of Cookery in Nineteenth-Century Britain

In his 1869 household manual, The Reason Why: Domestic Science, editor R.K. Philp determined to provide “illustrations of scientific principles which bear upon the Housewife's duties; so that she may not only know that she should do a thing, but WHY she should do it, and, knowing why, perform it all the more effectively and willingly.”1 This article looks more closely at the nineteenth-century British middle classes' use of rationalized, scientific knowledge in their daily lives, particularly in their attitudes toward food and cookery. This interest in analysis and fact had a long history. The middling sorts had been inculcating literacy, numeracy, and rationality among their children since the early modern period,2 and this educational focus continued with the nineteenth-century middle classes, as business and industrial success demanded order, reason, and scientific knowledge. Charles Babbage, for one, argued that science was crucial to the advancement of manufactures, and he opined that manufacturers' sons would be among the next generation's greatest scientists.3 Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams even place the “invention of science” in the Age of Revolutions between about 1760 and 1848. An emergent professional middle class drew authority from intellectual, political and industrial upheavals that celebrated the same values of “genius, free enquiry, free exchange of ideas, objectivity, [and] disinterestedness” that defined science.4 One of the strongest cultural streams in this age was that of analysis and rationalization;5 it favored the reductive language of numbers and facts.

To What Extent is Academic Entrepreneurship Taken for Granted Within Research Universities?

We test the hypothesis that academic entrepreneurship, resisted in the past by some as being in conflict with the long-standing Mertonian norms of open science and free enquiry, has now become widely accepted within the academy, or ‘taken for granted’, as an institutional shift. Using responses to a series of attitudinal questions about academic entrepreneurship and commercialization of the university from a National Survey of Technology Transfer Office directors and faculty in the United States, we explain the variation in attitudes among faculty by academic discipline, by type of university and by previous experience as an entrepreneur. We compare the attitudes of faculty to the attitudes of technology transfer office directors to gauge the width of the gap between these two groups of stakeholders. The empirical results provide strong evidence that the commercialization of the university is by no means yet ‘taken for granted’.

Editorial, Volume 5(2)

Editorial, Volume 5(2)

Evolution of medical education in ancient Greece

he study of ancient Greece is essential for the proper understanding of the evolution of modern Western medicine. An important innovation of classical Greek medicine was the development of a body of medical theory associated with natural philosophy, i.e. a strong secular tradition of free enquiry, or what would now be called “science” (Eπιστήμη). Medical education rests upon the ancient Greek foundations and its history remains a fascinating topic for modern physicians and medical teachers.

Fits of Political Religion: Stalking Infidelity and the Politics of Moral Reform in Antebellum America

In the late 1820s evangelical Protestants created Bible, tract, and missionary societies and renewed efforts to suspend Sunday mail delivery. Deistic free enquirers responded by forming their own societies, holding public debates, and publishing newspapers and pamphlets. Evangelical reformers outnumbered free enquirers, a difference far from evident to contemporary observers, who believed instead that "political religion" and "stalking infidelity" were equally powerful cultural developments. By centering on the collective assumptions, misapprehensions, and fears that shaped ideas and motivated actions of self-avowed free enquirers as well as advocates of Christian moral reform, this article argues that the central features of antebellum American religion and politics were shaped by contests over the presence of "political religion" and "stalking infidelity" in American society. Particular attention is given to free enquiry as a lens into the broader ways that "infidelity" and organized moral reform were competitive and intertwined political positions that eventually shaped the religious and moral texture of the Second Party System. Disputes between free enquirers and moral reformers took place within a context shaped by differing conceptions of citizenship, changing understandings of civil society, and a renewed cultural interest in the memory and meaning of the American Revolution. This article pays special attention to the opportunities provided in an urban context for print circulation, sociability, and religious controversy.

Doubting the Kalama-Sutta

The Kalama-sutta is frequently cited as proof of the rational and empirical spirit of early Buddhist epistemology, ‘The Buddha’s charter of free enquiry’, according to Soma Thera. A close reading, however, calls that interpretation into question. The Kalamas do not ask what is the truth, and the Buddha does not tell them how to find it. Rather the Kalamas ask ‘Who is telling the truth?’ in what may have been the pursuit of sacred or quasi magical power through the person of a teacher. The Buddha, in turn, encourages them to adopt a set of attitudes and actions, which includes choosing a teacher. The method of evaluation that the Buddha gives, which includes the famous ‘know for yourselves’ is found to be as least as much ethical as it is epistemological and to invoke the opinion of authority and the public. The Buddha here seems to call for a decision that is partly based on faith, and the Kalamas respond not with independent research, but with an act of faith in committing themselves to (and being accepted by) the Buddha.

Commentary 3. 'Telling the truth about genomics': Toward a societal agenda for genomics research

The issue Ruth Chadwick addresses in her paper is an important and interesting one. Until recently, while medicine as a profession was guided by a ‘service’ ideal, the moral ideal of biologists (and other scientists) was more or less oriented toward free enquiry and scientific creativity. Although they tended to see themselves as serving societal interests in the longer run, their agendas were oriented toward biological questions rather than toward societal demands.

The "Sceptical Crisis" Reconsidered: Galen, Rational Medicine and the Libertas Philosophandi

This paper reassesses the role of sceptical thinking in the emergence of the new science of the seventeenth century, in the context of the seminal but contestable History of Scepticism by Richard Popkin. It investigates the anti-sceptical essay by Galen De optimo modo docendi (on the best method of teaching), which was retranslated in the sixteenth century by Erasmus and later published as an adjunct to the works of Sextus Empiricus, in order to highlight the currency of ideas about hyperbolic doubt, and links this to the long tradition of free enquiry (libertas philosophandi) in which doubting authority is seen as a profitable exercise closely associated with the independence of philosophy from theological domination; and it argues that this long tradition (along with a number of other factors) played an important role in the emergence of the new science.

Robert Boyle's First Encomium: Two Latin Poems by Samuel Collins (1647)

The influential natural philosopher, Robert Boyle (1627-91), was the recipient of many encomia during his life and after his death. Congratulatory poems addressed to him appeared in the Latin editions of such of his works as The Origin of Forms and Qualities (1666; Latin edn, 1669) and A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (1686; Latin edn, 1687), the latter a Latin translation by Boyle's protege, David Abercromby, of a poem by 'S. R, an English noblewoman', whose identity has not been established.1 Then, after his death, a series of printed elegies appeared, in both English and Latin, with such titles as Lachrymce Philosopbice or Natura Lugens.2 In addition, Boyle was the recipient of a number of verse encomia in Latin (and, in one case, in Greek) which have recently been published as part of his Correspondence: these include poems by the Latin translator, Robert Codrington, dating from 1660; another by the virtuoso, John Beale, dating from 1663; and a curious poem by the learned lady, Bathsua Makin, probably dating from 1681.3All of these, not surprisingly, date from Boyle's mature years, after he embarked on the profuse publishing career that began with his Some Motives and Incentives to the Love of God (1659), better known as Seraphic Love, and New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects (1660), reaching a climax in the early 166Os, when he published an average of nearly 150,000 words a year. This continued, albeit at a reduced rate, for the rest of his life, so that by the time of his death he had published over forty books. This flow of publications, combined with the promotion that Boyle received from such protagonists as Henry Oldenburg, first secretary of the Royal Society, in his Philosophical Transactions, or Joseph Glanvill in his promotional work on behalf of the Society, Plus Ultra (1668), meant that Boyle quickly became established as one of the best-known intellectuals of his age - 'the English Philosopher', as it was said that he was known on the continent in the 1680s.4In this paper, by contrast, we offer an annotated text and translation of two Latin poems addressed to Boyle at a far earlier stage in his career, in January 1647 - in other words eight years before his very first publication in 1655, and over a decade before his main career as a published author began.5 At this point, Boyle was just twenty years old, and, aside from the fact that he was the youngest son of one of the most powerful men in early Stuart Britain, the 'Great' Earl of Cork, who had died in 1643, there was on the face of it little to distinguish him from other youthful aristocrats, and certainly no premonition of the area of interest - in natural philosophy - that was later to make him famous.By this time, Boyle had spent three years at Eton College, from 1635 to 1638, resulting from his father's friendship with the Provost of Eton, Sir Henry Wotton. During the time that he was at the school, Boyle distinguished himself for his studiousness, while probably also making certain of the contacts which form the background to the poems studied here.6 In 1638, Cork removed Boyle and his brother, Francis, from Eton, and in 1639 they embarked on a tour of France, Switzerland and Italy under the tutelage of the French Protestant scholar, Isaac Marcombes. From 1639 to 1641, before they set out for Italy, and from 1642 to 1644, after their return, Boyle spent time in Geneva studying under Marcombes's supervision, and it was apparently at this point that he acquired the bulk of his education: though this period of his life, and particularly the second Genevan stay, is poorly documented, a notebook survives that Boyle kept at this point, which indicates the range of studies in which he engaged, including metaphysics, mathematics, geography and fortification. In addition, in later autobiographical remarks he offered some clues to episodes in this period of his life that he saw as formative ones, particularly the conversion experience that he had at Geneva during his first stay there, and his discovery of ancient Stoicism while in Italy. …

Dokumente

The first part of the correspondence between Friedrich August Tholuck, the leading theologian of the German Revival Movement, and Edward Bouverie Pusey, later the head of the Anglo-catholic Oxford-Movement, shows Pusey as a “pupil” of his German friends Tholuck, August Neander and Karl Heinrich Sack, whom he met while studying in Germany (1825–1827). In his “Enquiry into Theology” (1828) he wrote a remarkably liberal refutation of Hugh James Rose's confessionalistic high-church criticism of the “State of the protestant religion in Germany” (1825). Based on the protestant “sola scriptura” Pusey rejected any “check and restraint over the human mind” and took the stance of what he called an “animated science” mediating between free scientific enquiry and pious belief in one's personal need of salvation from sin through Jesus Christ. Thus Tholuck's and Pusey's standpoint came to somewhat unclearly oscillate between personal experience as the fundamentum inconcussum of their belief and the endeavour to base this belief on the authority of the historically secured messianic understanding of the prophecies of the Old Testament and the factual credibility of the gospel history.

Autorität und Glaube Edward Bouverie Pusey und Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck im Briefwechsel (1825–1865)

The first part of the correspondence between Friedrich August Tholuck, the leading theologian of the German Revival Movement, and Edward Bouverie Pusey, later the head of the Anglo-catholic Oxford-Movement, shows Pusey as a “pupil” of his German friends Tholuck, August Neander and Karl Heinrich Sack, whom he met while studying in Germany (1825–1827). In his “Enquiry into Theology” (1828) he wrote a remarkably liberal refutation of Hugh James Rose's confessionalistic high-church criticism of the “State of the protestant religion in Germany” (1825). Based on the protestant “sola scriptura” Pusey rejected any “check and restraint over the human mind” and took the stance of what he called an “animated science” mediating between free scientific enquiry and pious belief in one's personal need of salvation from sin through Jesus Christ. Thus Tholuck's and Pusey's standpoint came to somewhat unclearly oscillate between personal experience as the fundamentum inconcussum of their belief and the endeavour to base this belief on the authority of the historically secured messianic understanding of the prophecies of the Old Testament and the factual credibility of the gospel history.

Waiting for post-postmodernism

Waiting for post-postmodernism

‘Fides et Ratio’, articles 64–79

Two things ought to be said at the outset. The first is that it is an event of some significance far beyond the confines of Catholicism that the Bishop of Rome should address his fellow bishops on matters of the relationship of theology and philosophy. Whatever else we may say about the document before us, it emerges from a style of church leadership which refuses to absolve itself from the task of addressing questions of the intellectual articulation of the faith. Thereby it (quite properly) asks us some hard questions about those modem conventions whereby serious intellectual work is thought to be properly located only in the open fields of free enquiry (that is, in the institution of the university) and not in the cramped domestic culture of the church. I wonder if what has made some academics cross about Fides et Ratio is that the document refuses to stay behind the sanitary cordon with which institutions of higher learning sometimes surround themselves in order to protect their interests.That is the first thing to be said. The second is this: it’s a pity that an episcopal judgment on these issues doesn’t do a better job of staking its claims. Partly it’s a matter of style: at times the document adopts the threateningly paternalistic tone of communications from the Kremlin in the 1940s and 1950s, urging Socialist realism in art or music: not the sort of thing to provoke thinkers to do their best work, so much as a summons to produce the goods to an officially-approved set formula.

Book reviews

Eleven book reviews in the July 1998 edition of Notes and Records : Robert Boyle. A free enquiry into the vulgarly received notion of nature , Edward B. Davis and Michael Hunter (eds.). P. Mancosu, Philosophy of mathematics and mathematical practice in the seventeenth century . Patricia Fara, Sympathetic attractions: magnetic practices, beliefs, and symbolism in eighteenth–century England . Alan Cook, Edmond Halley: charting the heavens and the seas . Jan Bondeson, A cabinet of medical curiosities . J.M.H. Moll, Presidents of The Royal Society of Medicine . W.H. Brock, Justus von Liebig: the chemical gatekeeper . Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830–33) , J. Secord (ed.). X–rays––the first hundred years , Alan Michette and Slawka Pfauntsch (eds.). Jack Morrell, Science at Oxford 1914–1939 . John Polkinghorne, Beyond science. The wider human context .

A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature. Robert Boyle , Edward B. Davis , Michael Hunter

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsA Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature. Robert Boyle , Edward B. Davis , Michael Hunter Guido GiglioniGuido Giglioni Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 89, Number 1Mar., 1998 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/383949 Views: 3Total views on this site Copyright 1998 History of Science Society, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.