Doctoral Dissertation Research: Assembling the Science of the Future: Epistemic Virtures in the Exact Sciences, Physiology and Literature of Post-Enlightenment France (1780-1840)

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Introduction This award is a doctoral dissertation improvement grant. It supports research on the history of scientific and literary work in post-Enlightenment France with a focus on the normative conditions for acquiring knowledge that emerged as science and creative writing evolved into separate, autonomous pursuits. In particular, the award funds archival research on the letters of Pierre-Simon Laplace and manuscripts of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Archival research will serve to reveal their strategies for developing and promoting criteria for knowledge associated with the exact sciences and physiology. Intellectual Merit The works and correspondence of these two major scientists and public figures have not received due attention. These documents are pertinent to understanding the contentious character of the dispute involved in the process of mutual definition that made referring to literature and science as distinct fields possible in France. The project aims to show that the emergence of separate scientific and literary fields characteristic of modernity came at the price of networks that spanned an integrated cultural space. The project will involve methodological and theoretical innovations that facilitate relating both scientific and literary texts, and history of science and science studies methods in new ways. Broader Impact. The theoretical and methodological innovations to be implemented in this project should be applicable to a range of other historical contexts where the dynamics organizing competition and innovation are weak, decentralized or in flux. In addition to planned publications in professional journals, this innovative approach will be the subject of two academic seminars at UC-Berkeley, one focused on methodological concerns for discussion with literary and history of science scholars from Berkeley, and the other on integrating primary and secondary history of science texts into undergraduate curricula.