Lecture

Introduction: Experimental History of Science

In courses (2)

HUM-402: Experimental history of science I

The course allows students to learn by doing about the history of science, and the role played by experimentation, technical skills or material objects in the production of knowledge. Students will ex

HUM-466: Experimental history of science II

Description

This lecture introduces the Experimental History of Science, focusing on the infrastructure of science, Deluc's experiments, and the Making and Knowing Project. It covers topics such as technical skills, theoretical assumptions, and data analysis. Students will explore historical experiments, laboratory seminars, and digital development, as well as the interpretation of historical documents and the role of archives in experimental history.

Instructors (2)

Simon François Dumas Primbault

Simon holds a PhD in the history of science from the joint programme of the European University Institute (EUI, Florence) and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS, Paris). His doctoral dissertation focused on the drafts and working papers belonging to two natural philosophers of the second half of the 17th century – Galileo’s last disciple Vincenzio Viviani in Florence and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Hannover – and could be described as a work of historical anthropology of knowledge. By addressing the ink-and-paper materiality of these supposedly purely intellectual operations that scatter the mechanical and physico-mathematical papers of Viviani and Leibniz, he aims at seizing knowledge and scholars in statu nascendi. Studying closely down to the most subtle details of the activity of the scholars’ hands on the paper of their notes, and with the support of anthropology, history of art, literature, or history of emotions, Simon hopes to flesh out anew a historical epistemology too conceptual and positivist still.

Ion-Gabriel Mihailescu

Official source

Related lectures (1)

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Introduces mechanics, differential and vector calculus, and historical perspectives from Aristotle to Newton.