essay on history of science

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History of Science

This is a general paper dealing with the history of the history of science, with a special focus on historians and epistemologists who bolster their historiographic approach by making reference and/or relying on science, e.g. Popper, Bachelard, and Canguilhem

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Perspectives on Science, 2002

Jerry Obi-Okogbuo and Obinna Victor Obiagwu (Eds.), Owerri: Advanced Graphics, 2019, 22-56, 2019

This Chapter serves as handy, reliable and comprehensive guide for students to grapple with the problems of the historical development of science. It will help the reader comprehend easily the course of scientific development beginning from the ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, through the ancient Greek philosophers/scientists, down to the present century. This historical analysis is very timely because it serves to erase the erroneous impression that the Greeks and the Western world were the originators of philosophy and science. The truths of African origin of these disciplines are re-established here. We warmly recommend that this chapter be carefully studied with interest.

The presented text focuses rather on enabling access to philosophical aspects and ideological residuals found in several scientific approaches and issues. It means, analyses of conceptual schemes but also of phenomena present in their implicitly perceived background are to be dealt with. It is essays on science, its roots, and essence but also on relations of science and philosophy and also on heritage which philosophers left in science that I thematize. And it is in this sense that the presented text represents a textbook. It should try to teach how to comprehend explanatory bases and limits of philosophical and scientific knowledge but also to view things creatively, in other than a traditional way. Its task is to make bases complicated and surmise boundaries, and also to find creatively inspirations and new possible outcomes. The text is a philosophical essay (in the original sense of this word: an examination, (re)consideration, experiment). It is an attempt to ponder on a nature of sciences, methods and procedures, evidences and also on axioms and explanatory bases, but at the same time it represents an attempt to assess them. From this viewpoint, it rather complicates issues than provides answers to them and that is what the author’s intention aspires to: to induce students not to take things for granted and to try to view the world differently from the way they perceived it before. A vision of the world, clarity, looking at and thematizing of an issue which represents amatter of course (and thus which is frequently implicit and beyond doubt), noticing of an issue scientists and philosophers thought and did not thought about, but also why they believed in what they believed that is what represents the main object of the presented research.

Contrary to what I was taught in high school in the mid-1940s, science is no longer defined as an inductive methodology for immaculately conceiving culture-free truth after sifting through a huge data base of objective facts. For without some prior hypothesis to guide her, a scientist would not be able to decide which facts were relevant. Nowadays hypotheses can come from anywhere in the imagination or culture within which the scientist is working. The importance of a scientific hypothesis is that it be framed in such a way that it can be falsified when tested. Science now has a history and is part of human cultural evolution. The major premise of both these recent books is that scientific innovation needs to be understood as intricately bound to the particular time and cultural milieu in which it occurred.

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