HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (1)
History of Science
SECTION A
1 Does the history of science show that science has progressed?
SECTION B
2 “Medical ideas changed, medical practices stayed the same”. Is this true of European
medicine between 1500 and 1700?
3 How did early modern natural philosophers justify their methods of inquiry?
4 Either (a) Is magic the foundation of modern science?
Or (b) “Thus much concerning God, to discourse of whom does certainly belong to
natural philosophy” (ISAAC NEWTON, 1713). Could a Newtonian also be an atheist?
5 Either (a) Was there a revolution in electricity in the eighteenth century?
Or (b) How do you explain the changes in British science and medicine in the
decades around 1800?
6 How, when and why did the sciences become a significant part of the modern university
curriculum?
7 Either (a) Compare the importance of the laboratory and of the museum in the
development of European sciences between 1650 and 1850.
Or (b) What is the difference between ‘hospital medicine’ and ‘laboratory
medicine’?
8 Would Charles Darwin have called himself a professional scientist?
9 Either (a) Why did nineteenth century physicists stress the need for precision
measurement?
Or (b) Was Einstein’s relativity theory a response to a crisis?
10 ‘I am become death, destroyer of worlds’ (J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, 1945). How did
physics, and the idea of being a physicist, change as a result of the making and use of the atomic
bomb?
PLEASE TURN OVER/
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11 Either (a) ‘Psychoanalysis was cobbled together out of the received scientific and
medical ideas of the late nineteenth century’. Was it?
Or (b) ‘Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would
rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick’ (FRANCIS CRICK). Do you agree?
12 Discuss, with reference to the history of eugenics: