In my talk I will discuss two aspects of the crisis situating History of Science in the Humanities. First, I shall argue that different kinds of contemporary ideologies have negatively impacted the ability of researchers to study past sciences holistically with a commitment to source-critical analysis, evidence-based argumentation, and critical thinking. Despite my appreciation of many critical demands raised by scholars adhering to postmodernist, postcolonial, or feminist positions, it is time to evaluate critically the negative effects these and other ideological orientations have had on the solidity of academic work in many humanities, including history of science. My main criticism is directed against the transformation of once valid rejections of mainstream academic approaches into mere weapons of denigration of previous generations of scholars and of approaches that focus on scientific components of past cultural activities such as mapmaking. Second, I will highlight the appropriation of history of science in Islamicate societies by laypeople and commercial enterprises and the effects this shift in producers of historical narratives about past sciences has in the eyes of students and colleagues in other fields of the humanities.

In my talk, I will focus on aspects of the crisis conditioned by economic and labor market developments, the increasing failure of established evaluation models, and the growing degeneration of academic polite discourse. Since several years, we observe a progressing deregulation of the academic labor market with severe consequences for students and scholars alike. I shall pay special attention to the problems colleagues face when working in spaces between academic research and IT. Such problems include the evaluation of their labor as mere services lacking creativity entitled to copyright protection and the denial of ownership of their work results, that is of the data they produce. I will argue that this set of problems threatens to enlarge and sharpen the current crisis. In addition to the impact of economic and labor market issues, the increasing failure of evaluation models of academic qualities such as the peer review system and the practice of patronage has led to a devaluation of fundamental skills in combination with short-sighted hiring practices owing to a distorted application of principles of identity politics. These harmful effects are aggravated by the changing demands for a discursive behavior that vilifies older generations of scholars and their work, while discouraging the application of the most cherished property of academic work – critical analysis and thinking. The effects of this increasing loss of academic debate culture are an empty rhetoric of praise, learning, and comfort and a hype production of excellence, exclusiveness, and megalomania.

This co-presentation addresses the current crisis in the history of science, proposing a renewed vision for the field’s future. We define the mandate of the discipline as the study of historical answers to enduring questions about the distinctions and boundaries within science. The history of science has a particular object of study: historicized answers to demarcation questions. These questions concern the distinctions between scientific and non-scientific ways of relating to the world, and how these distinctions have emerged. We contend that this crisis has arisen from two main sources: the imposition of contemporary analytical categories that either unduly constrain or excessively broaden the field’s focus; the constraints on our ability as historians to grasp how historical actors conceived, acquired, and practiced science. Our new approach of “relational rationality” aims to transcend these challenges, advancing a vision that embraces both longue-durée and global perspectives. This reorientation frames the field as an exploration of how past experts related to reality, nature, and each other through values, methods, and tools that evolved across time and place. Science, in this light, emerges as a fluid epistemic category, remaining inherently human-centered. Our approach also acknowledges scientists as a distinct epistemic community dedicated to safeguarding and advancing this knowledge about reality and nature. Drawing on medieval examples, I highlight how relational rationality draws out historical shifts in scientific inquiry, the requisites for becoming and being a scientist within diverse communities, and how it thereby overcomes the two main sources of the current crisis of our discipline.

In this presentation, I argue that the history of science is the study of historical answers to enduring questions about the distinctions between science and not-science, as well as relationships between sciences. Specifically, I propose that the history of science has a particular object of study, namely, historicized answers to demarcation questions. These questions concern the distinctions historical actors make between scientific and non-scientific ways of relating to reality and nature.

Drawing from early modern debates about the scope, domains, and relations between philosophy, theology, and medicine--specifically concerning the human soul-body union and the Christian sacraments--I propose that the history of science can and should focus on how historical actors understood and created the values and aims of science as distinct from other ways of engaging reality and nature, as well as distinctions between the sciences. "Doing" science, according to this approach, is not a transhistorically unique practice; the historian is foremost interested in how specific actors understood and enacted the uniqueness of science and the sciences. This allows the history of science to position itself in relation to the history of knowledge, the history of technology, and the broader discipline of history; moreover, it allows and encourages the combination of methods from social history, cultural history, the history of ideas, material history, and the history of philosophy.