What Is the History of Science?

In: History of European ideas, Band 7, Heft 1, S. 21-31

Abstract

The speech introducing the session on the history of science at a 1983 colloquium on the history of ideas in Oxford, England, is presented. The main concerns of scientific thought in the West are outlined, from the time of the ancient Greeks to the present, focusing on landmark ideas such as those of the eighteenth-century French philosophers & of Charles Darwin. The process by which scientific ideas are absorbed by a society & interact with its existing beliefs is examined. C. Waters