General provisions

The Department of History of Science and Ideas is responsible for the course

Entry requirements

For admittance to the course one is required to be accepted to the Master of Humanities programme or to have a corresponding competence

Learning outcomes

The students will

- understand the meaning and overall importance of demarcating science from knowledge

- learn that this process of delineating the boundaries between modern science and knowledge is part of a long historical process in which political, cultural and economic transformations on a global scale took place

- acquire an understanding of important historical and epistemological conditions which gave rise to and shape this modern science

- understand that the establishment of science as a most authoritative form of knowing is deeply entangled with the historical process of socially distinguishing between those who work with their hands and those who work with their heads

- learn that it is equally entangled with the construction of the cultural divide between the scientific "West and the Rest"

Content

What is it that we call "science"? What do we want to do in distinguishing it from "knowledge"? The conventional answer has held mathematics and physics to epitomise modern science, relegating most other subjects and intellectual activities to the domain of "knowledge". However, in the past decades, at the same time as they have undermined the traditional understanding of its practice, many scholars have also revisited the content of modern science thereby blurring the traditional frontiers between "science" and "knowledge". Furthermore, they remind us that originally the terms episteme, scientia, scienza, science, Wissenschaft, meant knowledge or skill in general.

This course will focus on a historical period — from the 18th to the mid-19th centuries — of political, cultural and economic transformations on a global scale in which the very boundaries between modern science and knowledge were being delineated, the former denoting a more authoritative form of knowledge, safely demarcated from "ordinary knowledge". This linguistic divide is often also mirrored both by a social distinction between those who work with their heads and those who work with their hands and a cultural divide between the scientific "West and the Rest". The age of Enlightenment thus provides a critical period for exploring the fruitful and reciprocal interactions between science and other forms of knowledge. We shall thus examine this cultural process of the creation of these distinctions and its effect on the establishment of the exact sciences, a question of great current importance when the latter are losing their pride of place to other disciplines and this map is again being contested and redrawn.

Instruction

The course will consist of lectures and seminars

Assessment

Examination will include active participation in seminars, writing

and defending papers, organising and convening a seminar. Grades will

be given according to the Swedish grading system and the ECTS grading

system. The following grades will be used: Väl godkänd VG (corresponds

to A and B), Godkänd G (corresponds to C,D or E), Underkänd U (corresponds

to Fx or F)

Other directives

Competences:

The students will

- acquire a critical awareness of the reciprocal interactions between science and other forms of knowledge past and present

- obtaining skills of judging the current process of globalisation of knowledge and its consequences

- learn that history of science is a field which can contribute to a better judgement of these actual processes