HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (1): History of Science
SECTION A
1 “Though historical writings on the sciences have traditionally given practitioners
the leading parts, their audiences have in fact played more important roles.” Discuss.
2 What general turning points, if any, should be recognised in the history of the
sciences?
SECTION B
3 How did new instruments change astronomy between 1500 and 1650?
4 Compare the different meanings of ‘anatomy’ for William Harvey and Robert
Fludd.
5 Either (a) Were there any significant connexions between the concerns of
manufacturers and of natural philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?
Or (b) How did precision measurement affect the sciences of chemistry and of
electricity in the eighteenth century?
6 “No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” (JAMES HUTTON, 1785) How
did naturalists’ attitude to Scriptural history change between 1650 and 1800?
7 Either (a) How does the history of medicine reflect general changes in the sciences
in the decades around 1800?
Or (b) Using tuberculosis as your example, describe and explain how views of
disease changed between the eighteenth and the end of the nineteenth century.
8 Explain German physicists’ antipathy to Naturphilosophie.
9 Was the Manhattan Project a triumph of engineering, rather than of science?
10 How did relationships between science and its publics change after 1945?
11 Either (a) How does the history of the oral contraceptive pill illuminate the role of
women in the history of science and technology?
Or (b) “Freud is the Darwin of the Mind.” (ERNEST JONES) Why did he have
this reputation?