HST 390/388 B Spring 2025: Victorian Natural Philosophy
This course fulfills a degree requirement for those majoring in History and Philosophy of Science or minoring in History of Science. It is also open to all history students as a junior seminar.
While scholars such as Deborah Harkness have argued for the use of the word "science" in English as early as the 16th century, by tradition the history of science has seen nineteenth-century Britain as the site of definition for modern usages of "science" and "scientist". Victorians negotiated over the establishment of specialized disciplines, such as geology; over proper methods to arrive at the truth, by reference to the history of science distilled into philosophy; over the relationships between science and religion; over evolution in biology and energy in physics; and over the place of science as a bulwark of social orthodoxy. We will sample readings on all of these topics, discussing them in class, and each student will pursue a topic of particular interest.
The seminar is designed to help students make the transition from lecture courses in history to the kind of independent work expected of history majors in the senior year. Each member of the seminar will practice defining a research topic, generating a bibliography, writing a literature review essay, and producing a project proposal and a research plan.
This is a W course.