However distant or distant they may seem, history and science have an indissoluble connection that arises at the very moment that these fields of knowledge are constituted. That is why in the following lines I hope that the reader finds clarity regarding this interesting relationship, which is found in the scientist's work. To begin we must understand what history is.
History as a discipline in the field of social sciences reconstructs the past from documents and evidence (material and oral) that are classified, valued, interpreted, questioned and connected with other facts, which are subjected to critical analysis. with the intention of understanding and explaining the dynamics of past societies. The historian's intention in executing this task is to answer very specific questions that arise from the present and are asked based on the needs of his time. Therefore, historiography (which is history written from the inquiry and reflection of the past) narrates, describes and explains the past in light of the present.
The history of science is not a chronologically related account of events, nor is it a dialectic of problems and solutions of experimental practice, nor is it the description of conjectures and refutations, or the replacement of practices, theories, concepts or methods. It is a historiographical narrative that describes the process of transformation and evolution of human cognitive action. It details the historicity behind experimentation and the theories that seek to understand, apprehend and intervene in the world from the criteria of scientific rationality. In this sense, the history of science explains the path that human beings have followed to find solutions to specific problems and to learn aspects of reality.
In the narrative of the history of science, epistemic and social interconnections are detailed that constitute a diachronic content where scientific and technological transformations are only explained by a network of causal relationships and successions of an economic, political, material, environmental, and cultural order. religious, spatial and epistemic.
In the explanatory character of the history of science, epistemology (which is the study of knowledge) incorporates a historical experience on the construction, institutionalization and legitimacy of the normative elements of science, its context of justification, its claim to truth and the practical, theoretical and methodological elements. Without neglecting the sociocultural explanation of the exile or permanence of new conceptual criteria. Therefore, the history of science is, in a broad sense, science itself.
Consciously or not, the scientist uses the history of science to situate himself at a specific point in the development of certain knowledge, and then from there to new postulates that lead to novel results and, eventually, paradigm shifts. 3 Therefore, the history of science has the ability to reveal procedures that become confrontations that trigger the advancement of science.
In the 21st century, faced with the frenzy of scientific and technological development, society experiences uncertainty and disorientation in the face of the unlimited capacity of science and technology to intervene, modify and redesign the natural world. Even today it is clear that techno-scientific innovations (of a medical nature, of telecommunications, of food production and of consumer goods in general) are causing severe environmental damage, especially given the vulnerability to control biotechnological innovations. Given this concern of the present, the history of science arrives to expose –from the past– the cultural, political, economic, spatial and material reasons or causes why science and technology not only imposed themselves as valid knowledge for understand and explain the world but also to transform and market it. Thus, the present requires critical analysis and explanations from history that question the position of technoscientific knowledge in today's world.
The history of science also fulfills the function of safeguarding the heritage of local knowledge. This means that when the scientific past of a region or country is pulverized or disappears, the history of science recovers and finds practices, theories, proposals and works of moments and places with the intention of locating originality, innovation and historicity of the knowledge in a specific time and space.
In this same direction it happens that in the history of science the process of building a professional and scientific community is unraveled, for this reason it has the capacity to awaken union recognition and identity. That is the reason why ethos is found in the history of science(behavior, character, identity) of the scientist, since in the history of science, as it happens with history in general, a landscape is outlined where human beings find recognition and identity. This aspect is also related to the fact that the history of science is a mirror that reflects the terms with which science constructs the images of the future that it wishes to achieve in the universe of nature and human beings, hence it serves to create and manage new higher education institutions and show the contents of each scientific profession and where precisely one of the uses of scientific memory is found.
On the other hand, the history of science serves to make visible the way in which humans have established our relationship with the natural world based on the criteria established by scientific rationality, so that it can be found in theoretical, practical resignifications, discursive and even ontological that the production of knowledge grants, in time and space, to living beings. So the history of science shows how it is that human beings have capitalized and managed nature from the production of knowledge.
The history of science is, in short, science itself and the construction of its field as a discipline and profession. It explains how it came to be what it is, what role the scientist plays in society, how it is that science and scientists have changed the world and what have been the factors for which science became a valid instrument to understand and measure it.
The history of science not only accounts for the cognitive, conceptual and experimental evolution of science, but also, it manifests the ability to explain how science has been inserted into society. In this sense, it is not divorced from a critical look at the factors that determine the trajectory of science, but neither does it fail to narrate the feats of men and women who have made scientific knowledge the most effective tool to solve many of the great problems that faces society.
Surely the primary vocation of philosophy is to offer us a rational vision of the world. Understanding the functioning of the universe and the position of human beings in it, including our capacity to know it, is, therefore, one of the goals of philosophical thought. Science, understood as an institutionalized search for objective knowledge, is one of the main contributions that humanity has made throughout history to our understanding of the universe, and naturally, it has done so in permanent dialogue with the philosophical conceptions of each epoch, on which in turn has exerted a very important influence. Likewise, scientific knowledge has become the paradigmatic example of "knowledge", in the sense that it is generally more reliable than other types of "knowledge" whose "quality controls" are much less demanding. Since philosophy has as one of its main objects of study the very notion of "knowledge", it is also inexcusable that those who are dedicated to philosophy have a certain familiarity with what is generally more worthy of being considered as "knowledge "that is, with science. In the degree program in Philosophy, this understanding and familiarity are facilitated above all through the various subjects of History and Philosophy of Science: the first ones, offering a schematic overview of the main characteristics of the historical development of ideas and scientific methods; the latter, inviting a rational discussion about these ideas and methods. It is also inexcusable that those who are dedicated to philosophy possess a certain familiarity with what is generally more worthy of being considered as "knowledge", that is, with science. In the degree program in Philosophy, this understanding and familiarity are facilitated above all through the various subjects of History and Philosophy of Science: the first ones, offering a schematic overview of the main characteristics of the historical development of ideas and scientific methods; the latter, inviting a rational discussion about these ideas and methods. It is also inexcusable that those who are dedicated to philosophy possess a certain familiarity with what is generally more worthy of being considered as "knowledge", that is, with science. In the degree program in Philosophy, this understanding and familiarity are facilitated above all through the various subjects of History and Philosophy of Science: the former, offering a schematic overview of the main characteristics of the historical development of ideas and scientific methods; the latter, inviting a rational discussion about these ideas and methods. In the degree program in Philosophy, this understanding and familiarity are facilitated above all through the various subjects of History and Philosophy of Science: the first ones, offering a schematic overview of the main characteristics of the historical development of ideas and scientific methods; the latter, inviting a rational discussion about these ideas and methods. In the degree program in Philosophy, this understanding and familiarity are facilitated above all through the various subjects of History and Philosophy of Science: the former, offering a schematic overview of the main characteristics of the historical development of ideas and scientific methods; the latter, inviting a rational discussion about these ideas and methods.
The General History of Science IIt is a 5 credit subject taught during the first semester of the second year of the degree. It covers scientific thinking about nature from the beginnings of writing and history to the beginning of the 18th century: science in archaic societies, in Greece and Rome, the Christian and Muslim Middle Ages, and the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution in Europe . This subject will continue in the General History of Science II, which deals with the development of science from the Enlightenment to today. The fundamental objective shared by both subjects is the understanding of the ways in which science was understood and articulated throughout history, and how all of this has contributed to the formation of our current understanding of the universe and of the human being.
In this first course –as on the other hand in the other two pertaining to the subject that are part of the study plan and that are included in the following section- the aim is to become familiar with the main theoretical developments in science and ( b) with the invention and gradual construction of what we understand today by science.
This subject is part of the general subject of History of Science that throughout the course will be taken in two other subjects through which a successive and complete tour of the discipline will be made:
1. The compulsory semester subject of 5 credits General History of Science II, which is taught in the second semester of this same course, and which constitutes the continuation of the current one, extending to scientific developments until the 20th century.
2. The semester optional subject of 5 credits Aspects of Contemporary Science that will be taught in the fourth year and that will cover contents related to the last century.
In turn, these subjects are integrated into the broader subject of History and Philosophy of Sciences, which also includes the subjects of Philosophy of Science I and II, as well as Philosophy of Social Sciences and Science, Technology and Society. The situation of the subject in the second year of the degree is explained by its propedeutic nature to the exercise of philosophizing about science or reflecting on its contexts. Likewise, this character is also evident with respect to the subjects that deal with the general history of philosophy, since science, from its first steps, was a fundamental ingredient in world views.
Problems in torms around historical knowledge. History is a term that has been defined in multiple ways, but all definitions agree that it it is a type of inquisition or investigation into events that occurred in the past, it is the record of the actions performed by men.
For his part, the subject Cognitive of history is the historian, his purpose is to know the past, it is look to him for answers to his present concerns; now in the process of know any object, the common man, as well as the historian, as subjects cognitive, they resort to the near past or the remote past, to know the simplest and most complex acts of your present.
The statement suggests that all men make a reference to the past, if this statement is true, then we must ask ourselves who can be a historian? which are the motivations that the historian has when studying the object of history? which is the limit beyond which a person becomes a historian? and if so how distinguish the task of a historian from historical activity, as a reference to past, of the other non-historian men who are dedicated to looking for another type of knowledge?
These problems are epistemological in that they concern primarily to the knowing subject-object relationship known in the field of history, which generally raise questions such as: is historical knowledge a knowledge of laws? Is immediate knowledge founded in some way of human experience? Is historical material fundamentally conceptualizable or just intuitive? Are there categories in history? Is history a science natural? What is historical truth and how does it differ from other conceptions about true? Do historical judgments refer only to individuals or, well, to some universal class? Are the purported historical regularities different from thenatural laws?
The above problems do not exhaust the so-called methods of historiography; such as criticism of sources and other questions, these are not considered properly philosophical, but they are related to the possible methods of presentation, organization and rational justification of historical material (induction, deduction, description, classification, etc.), problems largely epistemological.
The task of the historian is that of the historian. In general, history is the task of the historian, his. primary purpose is to determine what actually happened; how the historian could not witness past events, so it is seen in.
For various reasons, the history of science is a central area for contemporary humanities. On the one hand, it is a central axis of science and technology studies, since it contributes, together with the sociology of science, most of the empirical studies on which it is possible to base the reflection and adequate analysis of science and technology.
The relationship between the history of science and the philosophy of science has traditionally been one of competition and mutual fertilization (there was talk of "forced marriage", but also of "crazy love"), and the panorama today has expanded to include many other studies on science and technology.
On the other hand, the history of science provides one of the most fruitful links between the fields of science and the humanities, being firmly anchored in both. In its methodological and scriptural traditions, history incorporates the nucleus of Western humanist thought, but when it must investigate the scientific phenomenon in all its dimensions, it is forced to make room for the ways of understanding and proceeding of science and technology. This makes the practice of the history of science an intense, diverse and highly satisfying intellectual activity; as well as useful.
Recent years have witnessed a dramatic development of studies in this area, and our images of science and technology have been enriched and strengthened by it. It is no longer possible to understand the technoscientific phenomenon without locating it in its historical and geographical dimensions. The history of science is no longer just the history of great men and great theories; Today it has become inescapable to understand the history of science and technology in the diversity of situations and contexts that in fact have occurred and do exist. The history of science in Mexico and in the Ibero-American region has therefore grown in importance and in urgency.
The Master in History of Science: Science, History and Society (UAB, UB and UPC) is a pioneering master in the history of science, with a consolidated track record of more than ten years. The master's degree explores the social and cultural dimensions of science, technology and medicine . You will have the opportunity to analyze examples from very different disciplines and periods with which we will ask you relevant questions about the development of science: how is scientific knowledge produced and managed? What relationships does it have with questions of a social, political, economic nature or cultural? How is scientific and technological heritage defined and managed? How is it communicated?
We offer you two specialties :researcher , who places emphasis on the skills
of an academic career; and professional , which enables you to work in
areas such as scientific communication, museology or the management of scientific heritage.
With a teaching staff of specialists both in the history of science, medicine and
technology, as well as heritage management and scientific communication, we will prepare you to
dedicate yourself to historical research and scientific communication
The master offers a unique perspective of science in society and promotes an effective dialogue between the scientific and humanistic cultures. Among the areas of applicability of this knowledge are:
- the teaching of the History of Science;
- research in the History of Science;
- Science teaching at different educational levels;
- the teaching of History, Philosophy and Humanities, at different educational levels;
- museology and management of scientific heritage;
- archival and library science in scientific fields;
- cultural management and industry;
- scientific journalism and communication;
- the publishing industry and the management of scientific policies.