HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (1)
History of Science
SECTION A
1. To what extent does the concept of “Big Science” apply to historical periods
other than the decades following World War II?
2. Does the history of science provide a firm basis for the distinction between
“science” and “technology”?
SECTION B
3. Compare attitudes to the origins and purpose of science and scholarship in
ancient versus medieval Iraq.
4. Either (a) “The passages and variations of nature cannot appear so fully
in the liberty of nature, as in the trials and vexations of art” (Francis Bacon,
1605). Discuss.
Or (b) How did the limits of what could be known about the natural
world change between 1500 and 1700?
5. What was new about natural philosophy and medicine in early modern
Europe?
6. How globalised were the sciences in the eighteenth century?
7. What effect did the French Revolution have on the sciences and medicine?
8. Either (a) What did the success of the Origin of Species owe to earlier
debates about evolutionary theories?
Or (b) To what extent is the Modern Synthesis in evolutionary theory
based on Mendel’s work?
9. Either (a) How did germs become objects of science?
Or (b) “Medical science was exactly like other sciences, except that it
took as its object the human in health and disease.” Assess this claim for
nineteenth‐century Europe.