This chapter is concerned with the decline of Greek and Roman poetry and the rise of European culture in the Middle Ages. The decisive difference between the ancients and the moderns concerns poetry in the widest sense, that is, the culture of beauty. A number of fragments address this difference. The significance of Christian hymns and the Psalms for the European nations is discussed, with particular attention to national traditions in music, language, and the sciences. A distinction is made between the way the northern and southern European traditions use tone and alliteration. The culture of Arabic is seen as a strong influence on the culture of medieval Europe, passing through Spain by way of the troubadours. The difficulties in defining national character or national poetry are discussed, and the value of medieval poetic arts in Europe is described as an awakening of independent thinking and unencumbered judgement. This makes the medieval poetic arts of Europe a gay science, an expansion of the fields of science, and a general unification of the nations.

This chapter will examine the notion of theology as a science in some summae from the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth century, exploring the works written both by secular masters and members of the religious orders.

Only two complete works on the philosophy of mathematics survive from Antiquity, Iamblichus’ De communi mathematica scientia and Proclus’ commentary on Euclid’s Elements Book I. Chapter 21 lists works by Proclus concerning mathematics and the sources he used in these works. Concentrating on Proclus’ commentary on Euclid, I describe his conception of the ontological status of the objects with which mathematics is concerned: these objects are originally concepts innate in human soul, forming part of its very nature, concepts which the mathematician then seeks to articulate, project, construct through various methods so as to constitute an elaborated science. I present also the distinctions made between the mathematical sciences and their methods, the importance of mathematics for other sciences (both superior and inferior to it), and Proclus’ relations with other mathematicians of his time.

The substantive discussion begun in Chapter 2, particularly on interpretation, is continued in Chapter 3 through the prism of progress. Collective understandings of state violence, including torture, are understood to have changed over time, with what was historically conceived as permissible coming to be condemned as reprehensible. Changing understandings of pain and punishment, it is argued, are sociopolitically contingent, with legal assessments of torture too beholden to this broader context. On this register, the chapter charts the broader contours of the central shifts in prevailing social and scientific views, values and knowledge, as channelled or challenged through judges and taken to constitute torture’s sociality. This has culminated, it is argued, in a script of ‘progress’ driving the anti-torture field.

This concluding chapter elaborates on the main themes that have run through this book. It argues for the unity of knowledge in the natural sciences, the arts and humanities, and the hard and soft social sciences (section 1); discusses eclecticism and experimentalism as a compelling intellectual response to navigating the risk-uncertainty conundrum (section 2); illustrates different forms of coping with the risk-uncertainty conundrum with the help of punditry, scenarios, and forecasts (section 3); draws out the implications of the complementarity of risk and uncertainty for moral luck, policy, and pragmatism (section 4); and, returning to worldviews, points to the affinities that science and religion share in our coping with the risk-uncertainty conundrum (section 5).

This chapter describes the excitement surrounding scientific progress as a driver of medical progress in the Cold War and subsequent theoretical and practical challenges. Medicine, for skeptical theories, was a powerful example that there is no such thing as knowledge that continually approaches the truth, that even the body is historical, and that knowledge is always a tool of the powerful. From the medical side, some respondents were adamant that scientific knowledge about the body is “real” and that medicine is uniquely immune to uncertainties inherent in relativistic accounts of knowledge. The chapter concludes by analyzing two recent examples, evidence-based medicine and health artificial intelligence, which have been praised as objective examples of a particular kind of medical knowledge progress. Throughout, I show the implications for medical progress of larger debates about the progress of knowledge, as well as how an excessive focus on biomedical knowledge gains neglects other, important dimensions of progress.

This chapter examines the assumptions, concepts, and narratives historians use to study US relations with the natural world: with biological and chemical agents, environmental and physical phenomena, natural resources, and plants, animals, and microbes. Looking beyond the experiences and activities of human beings, it asks how non-human actors and forces can help explain the history of foreign relations. It surveys some of the key medical, scientific, and environmental issues that have shaped the history of foreign policy and international affairs, with an eye toward the methods scholars can employ to analyze these topics most profitably. Although studying these subjects can present methodological challenges, this chapter offers tools and strategies for overcoming those potential roadblocks. Becoming more attuned to medical, scientific, and environmental topics, as the chapter shows, challenges our assumptions about foreign relations in productive ways, offering fresh perspectives on conventional narratives and novel ways of studying the past.

African popular intellectuals in colonial Freetown, Sierra Leone, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced public writing in which they lamented the danger of reading ‘like a European’, or quick and mechanical reading practices, which they argued led to the degeneration of the ‘African mind’. This chapter’s case study of Orishatukeh Faduma’s 1919 Sierra Leone Weekly News column, ‘How to Cultivate a Love For Reading,’ reveals how contributors in Freetown reimagined transatlantic public anxieties about race, nationhood, and madness to encourage local readers to ‘read like an African’, which meant slowly, selectively, and critically. Through public writing, Faduma and other popular intellectuals turned globally popular understandings of racial madness on their head to generate the ‘right’ kind of African reader. They used the press to produce a distinctly African literary culture in between the local and the global, and thus used literacy as a social vehicle of colonial self-making.

The growing professionalisation of the law and the natural sciences owed much to the spread of the empire – and Cambridge intellectuals would benefit more than most from these processes. Natural philosophers travelled across the empire amassing botantical, geological, and antiquarian collections and expanding scientific knowledge, with much of the credit for their findings owed to local enslavers or enslaved Africans. Britons with financial investments in slave-trading organisations also donated to found professorships. In the case of the law, experts in international law and treaty-making, particularly Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, applied their expert knowledge to cases concerning piracy, plantation holdings, and imperial companies. As with missionary organisations, the problem of enslavement continued to be a source of debate in the eighteenth century, as philosophers of natural law and rights considered the ethical justifications for racial enslavement.

This chapter invites consideration of Bloomsbury as the Biography group. It details Bloomsbury’s founding and defining contributions to the “New Biography,” particularly in theoretical and creative works by Harold Nicolson, Virginia Woolf, and the most influential British biographer of the past century, Lytton Strachey. Focusing its attention most carefully on the latter two, it explores how both Woolf and Strachey, as “spiritual” writers of the modernist age (Woolf, “Modern Fiction”), understood biography as a means of revealing personality, while diverging on some essential matters. Woolf, whose initial understanding of biography as an art evolved into a more subdued description of it as (mere) craft, anticipated that this aim might be accomplished through archival assiduity over time by a succession of fact-bound biographers, each bringing a different perspective to facts, old and new. Strachey, for his part, who always considered biography an art form, thought such an aim might be accomplished in the present, using fictional means to reveal both the personality of the nominal biographical subject and the personality of the biographer. This chapter finally reads Strachey as the most important progenitor of biographical fiction.

This chapter summarizes the aims, scope, and contents of the book. Both science and humanism have evolved over hundreds of years, and both are associated with influential forms of inquiry into the world. Throughout this evolution, humanism and science have been intimately connected, in ways that are crucial for thinking about whether, as a significant strand of humanist thought contends, the sciences can (or can be relied upon to) enhance the welfare of humans, other life, and the environment. It is clear that there is no necessary connection between scientific inquiry and social or moral progress; the sciences have facilitated both significant goods and significant harms. Faced today with pressing challenges to the well-being of people and the planet, our attitudes toward science call for renewed scrutiny. With chapters spanning the history of entanglements of forms of humanism and science up to the present, and case studies of the value implications of the sciences, this book asks us to think about what relationships between science and humanism we should build for the future.

Michael Holroyd’s claim that science was “unheard of” in Bloomsbury is refuted in this chapter. It begins by asking how “science” and the “scientific” signified in Bloomsbury: how far science was equated with facts, with theories, or with processes of inquiry; how far it was identified with dogmatic attitudes, with rationalism, or with open-mindedness. It then asks what educational experiences shaped the attitudes of Bloomsbury men towards it, with a particular focus on their formative experiences at schools such as Eton College and St Paul’s School, and where Classics dominated the curriculum, and at Clifton College, which was unusually progressive in the seriousness with which it treated science. Finally, it considers how science was treated in two Bloomsbury periodicals, Desmond MacCarthy’s New Quarterly (1907–10) and The Nation and Athenaeum in its Bloomsbury period, 1923–31.

The concern of this chapter is with varieties of philosophical humanism and their own conceptions of the nature and significance of science. After an initial characterization of major themes in Renaissance humanism, it describes three main varieties that are evident in twentieth-century European philosophy – humanism as essentialism, humanism as rational subjectivity, and existential humanism. Different varieties of humanism are associated with different conceptions of science, some allied to the sciences, others antipathetic to them, while yet others offer subtler positions. The upshot is that there are different tales to tell about the relationship of (varieties of) philosophical humanism to (conceptions of) science, only some of which fit popular modern celebratory claims about a necessary alliance of humanism and science. If we take a wider look at the history of philosophy, we find ongoing experimentation with forms of humanism and explorations of diverse ways of understanding and evaluating scientific knowledge and ambitions. What we find is what we ought to expect of social, creative, epistemically sophisticated, self-expressive creatures: endless variety.

Humanism, conceived as a worldview concerning, among other things, how we understand ourselves and our relationships with others, and science, conceived as a family of forms of inquiry into the world, are deeply interwoven over our intellectual and cultural histories. This chapter considers their co-evolution as a prelude to the present, reviewing formative aspects of Renaissance humanism and deepening associations of values central to the Enlightenment with precursors to modern science, en route to an arguably peculiar situation today. While some past, humanist conceptions of the aim of science seem intimately connected to the idea of making a better world – one featuring better and more widespread human and planetary flourishing – contemporary thinking seems largely devoid of normative discussions of what science itself is for. This chapter offers reflections on a possible return to a humanist conception of the role and promise of science.

What counts as scientific writing has undergone massive changes over the centuries. Medical writing is a good representative of the register of scientific English, as it combines both theoretical concerns and practical applications. Ideas of health and sickness have been communicated in English written texts for over a thousand years from the Middle Ages to the present, with different traditions and layers of writing reflecting literacy developments and changing thought-styles. This chapter approaches the topic from the perspective of registers and genres, considering how texts are shaped by their functions and communicative purposes and various audiences. Some genres run throughout the history of English: remedy books were already extant in the Old English period. Another core genre, the case study, mirrors wider scientific developments in response to changes in styles of thinking: medieval scholasticism is gradually replaced by a growing interest in increasingly systematic empirical observation. The establishment of learned societies from the seventeenth century onwards gives rise to new genres like the experimental report, and concomitant disciplinary advances and technological developments in the following centuries gradually pave the way for modern evidence-based medicine. Today medical advances are communicated in digital publications to a worldwide readership.

In philosophy of science, Mach’s account of thought experiments is more often described as relevant for contemporary usage than Ørsted’s. In this chapter, I survey recent Kantian accounts of thought experiment, arguing that the leading views inspired by Kant in philosophy of science remain broadly empiricist. This tendency may be due to their focus primarily on the role of thought experiments in the sciences. In later chapters, I will argue – against recent Kantian views – that Kant understood cognition more broadly to include not only sensory perception but also mathematical construction. Acknowledging that cognition does not always require empirical fulfillment opens new ways of understanding how thought experiments work in philosophy, which may rightly differ from their use in the sciences.