HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (1)
History of Science
Answer question one from Section A and three questions chosen from Section B
SECTION A
1 Have the sciences always been at war with religion?
SECTION B
2 How did existing and novel institutions affect the pursuit of either astronomy or
anatomy between 1550 and 1700?
3 ‘Mechanical philosophers applied military principles to the whole of nature.’
Discuss.
4 Why did Newton entitle his work Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica
(‘Mathematical principles of natural philosophy’)?
5 Either (a) Compare the development of experimental natural philosophy in
France and Britain in the eighteenth century
Or (b) Was there a chemical revolution in the eighteenth century?
6 Either (a) Discuss the transformation of the ‘natural philosopher’ of the late
eighteenth century into the professional ‘scientist’ of the late nineteenth century.
Or (b) How did the place of the sciences in university education change
during the mid- and late-nineteenth century?
7 Why, when first published in 1859, was On the Origin of Species a significant
book?
8 Either (a) Did Freudianism become a secular religion?
Or (b) ‘During the second half of the nineteenth century the study of heredity
moved from the garden to the laboratory.’ Discuss.
9 What did physicists around 1900 expect of the future development of their
theories? Had these expectations been achieved by the middle of the twentieth century?
10 Either (a) To what extent and by what means were biology and medicine
‘molecularized’ in the second half of the twentieth century?
Or (b) Was the proposal of the double helical structure of DNA a clever piece
of puzzle solving, an act of intellectual theft, or a profound and unexpected insight?