SECTION A
1 When did science begin?
SECTION B
2 EITHER (a) How did the institutions and organizations which supported natural
philosophy in Europe change between 1550 and 1700?
OR (b) ‘The anatomy theatre was to medicine what the observatory was to
astronomy.’ Discuss the extent to which this analogy holds true for the period 1500-
1700.
3 ‘The mechanisation of the world-picture.’ Is this what European cosmology
achieved by the end of the seventeenth century?
4 ‘The instruction we are able to get from books is soon exhausted, but
philosophical instruments are an endless source of knowledge’ (JOSEPH PRIESTLEY,
1775). Is this dictum borne out by the course of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
natural philosophy?
5 What was the importance of global trade and exploration for the development of
natural philosophy and natural history in the eighteenth century?
6 ‘It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English
society with its division of labour, competition, opening up new markets, “inventions”,
and the Malthusian “struggle for existence”.’ (KARL MARX, 1862) Does he?
7 What part did theory, philosophy and experiment each play in Einstein’s
discovery of special relativity?
8 Was the initial persuasiveness of psychoanalysis due solely to its being perceived
as the science of sexuality?
9 Theoretical physicists of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries aimed
for ‘intellectual mastery of nature’. From this perspective, was the dropping of the
atomic bomb on Hiroshima a triumph or a betrayal?
10 Was the hospital medicine of the early nineteenth-century the scientific
predecessor of laboratory medicine?
11 How did either scientific or medical research or both change as a result of World
War II?
12 Why does the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis date from the 1930s rather than the
1860s or the 1900s?
13 EITHER (a) What is eugenics, and how did its scientific status change in the
century after the term was first introduced in 1883?
OR (b) If there had been a male pill available, would Francis Galton (or his
cousin Charles Darwin) have encouraged their sons to take it?