Arun Bala: Do Dialogical Histories of the Scientific Revolution Require Rethinking Scientific Method?
Speaker: Arun Bala, National University of Singapore
Title: Do Dialogical Histories of the Scientific Revolution Require Rethinking
Scientific Method?
Tuesday October 30 2012, 12:30-2:00 P.M.
203A Bethune College, York University.
Recent attempts to relocate the scientific revolution in the wider Eurasian
oikoumene by including the dialogical influences from beyond Europe that shaped
its birth and development have generally been seen as part of the movement to
write global history in many disciplines across the social, cultural and
natural sciences. However, the implications of such revised historical
conceptions for understanding the nature of scientific method have yet to be
seriously examined. This paper proposes a neo-Lakatosian model of scientific
method to take into account the way in which Chinese mechanical inventions and
cosmological views, Indian computational techniques and atomic hypotheses, and
Arabic planetary and optical theories, came to be combined with ancient Greek
ideas to generate the Scientific Revolution.
Arun Bala is Senior Research Fellow with the Asia Research Institute at the
National University of Singapore, and currently Visiting Professor, Rotman
Institute of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario. His studies include The
Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science (Palgrave Macmillan,
2006) and Asia, Europe and the Emergence of Modern Science: Knowledge Crossing
Boundaries (ed.) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
