Digital Teaching
The texts are made available via Moodle.
Course Contents
The learning content of the exercise is to gain a new perspective on historical "facts" and their formation, to get to know questions and problems in the history of science as well as approaches, and to work on the history of science itself.
Literature
Marianne Sommer u. a. (Hrsg.): Handbuch Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Metzler, Stuttgart 2017.
Olaf Breidbach et al. (Hrsg.): Experimentelle Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Wilhelm Fink, München 2010.
Moritz Epple, Claus Zittel (Hrsg.): Science as Cultural Practice, Band 1: Cultures and Politics of Research from Early Modern Period to the Age of Extremes. Berlin 2010.
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger: Historische Epistemologie. Zur Einführung. Hamburg 2007.
Official Course Description
How we understand science is fundamental to our view of the world. However, "science" is by no means a rigid ahistorical entity, but changes itself through time and space. What "science" was at different times or in different places can therefore vary and must be questioned historically. In doing so, the history of science does not simply start with "great" actors or research personalities, but asks how and through which structures scientific knowledge was produced, transformed, and circulated. How does "objective" knowledge about something (be it the human body, the genome, or the computer) come into being? What different assumptions, apparatuses, and contexts does scientific knowledge require in order to be effective? How does scientific knowledge change when it steps out of the lab and into the real world?
The exercise aims to address these questions by means of classical texts and topics from the history of science. The exercise thus offers an introduction to basic texts of recent history of science. The aim is to generate an understanding of what the history of science is in the context of the historical sciences and how to work methodically in the history of science. Participants will be encouraged to test and reflect on the approaches to the history of science they have learned in the course on topics of their own choice.
The goals of the exercise are to gain a new perspective on historical "facts" and their development, to get to know questions and problems in the history of science as well as approaches, and to work in the history of science itself.
- Lecturer: Kevin Liggieri