What is science? A historian’s perplexities

Authors

  • Patricia Fara University of Cambridge (United Kingdom).

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7203/metode.0.3915

Keywords:

science, history, theology, scientist, natural philosophy

Abstract

What is science? This deceptively straightforward question has no single answer, because science is culturally situated, and so has neither a permanent nor a universal meaning. Because modern scientific practices have different histories, they vary from place to place. The significance of science also changes over time, although current understandings are often misleadingly extended to cover the past. Science continues to change, and the science of the future may well be very different from the science of the present.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Patricia Fara, University of Cambridge (United Kingdom).

Senior Tutor at Clare College. University of Cambridge (United Kingdom).

References

Dear, P., 2006. The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World. University of Chicago Press. Chicago.

Fara, P., 2009. Science: A 4000 Year History. Oxford University Press. Oxford.

Hobson, J. M., 2004. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.

Knight, D., 2009. The Making of Modern Science: Science, Technology, Medicine and Modernity: 1789-1914. Polity. Cambridge.

Downloads

Published

2015-04-16

How to Cite

Fara, P. (2015). What is science? A historian’s perplexities. Metode Science Studies Journal, (5), 189–193. https://doi.org/10.7203/metode.0.3915
Metrics
Views/Downloads
  • Abstract
    2228
  • PDF (Català/Valencià)
    466
  • PDF (Español)
    1443
  • PDF
    234

Issue

The light of science (2015)

Section

What is science? A multidisciplinary approach to scientific thought

License

All the documents in the OJS platform are open access and property of their respective authors.

Authors publishing in the journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors keep the rights and guarantee Metode Science Studies Journal the right to be the first publication of the document, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of authorship and publication in the journal.
  2. Authors are allowed and encouraged to spread their work through electronic means using personal or institutional websites (institutional open archives, personal websites or professional and academic networks profiles) once the text has been published.

Metrics

Similar Articles

> >> 

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.