the catholic response to secularization and the rise of the history of science as a discipline

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The Catholic Response to Secularization and theRise of the History of Science as a Discipline

Gabriel Motzkin

Science in Context / Volume 3 / Issue 01 / March 1989, pp 203 - 226DOI: 10.1017/S0269889700000776, Published online: 26 September 2008

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0269889700000776

How to cite this article:Gabriel Motzkin (1989). The Catholic Response to Secularization and the Rise of theHistory of Science as a Discipline. Science in Context, 3, pp 203-226 doi:10.1017/S0269889700000776

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Science in Comexti, 1 (1989), pp. 203-226

GABRIEL MOTZKIN

The Catholic Response toSecularization and the Rise of theHistory of Science as a Discipline

The Argument

This paper argues that the development of the history of science as a discipline shouldbe seen in the context of the bitter nineteenth-century conflict between religion andsecular culture in Catholic countries. In this context, neo-Thomist theologians wereinterested in formulating a Catholic strategy of accommodation to modern scienceand to modern social systems that would also permit rejection of both modern socialtheory and the positivist theory of science. While theologians such as Cornoldi andMercier worked with the positivist image of science common in their day, Duhemopted to reformulate the conception of scientific theory. His religiously motivatedassignment of a central place to the history of science - as the only way of hinting atthe prospective rapprochement between the conventionalist sphere of scientifictheory and the metaphysics of the real world - played a formative role in itsdevelopment. Duhem's conception of the function of the history of science directedthe attention of scholars in the field to medieval science as a point of origin formodern science.

The history of science did not emerge as a purely secular discipline; it was a focalpoint of debate in the confrontation between secular and religious cultures. On theone hand, secular intellectuals sought to provide secular culture with a legitimacyderived from natural science; the history of science was supposed to provide thehistorical account of science's struggle for legitimacy, thus endowing science with theadditional legitimation of history, thereby supporting the secular view of culture. Onthe other hand, Catholic intellectuals tried to develop an aggressive defense againstsecular culture by claiming that the development of modern science could only beunderstood within the context of Catholic theology and philosophy. Thus, the originsof the history of science were anchored in several contexts: one was obviously thecontemporary perception of nineteenth-century science; a second was the proce-dures for analyzing cultural phenomena developed in the nineteenth-century human-ities and the nascent social sciences. Both were located in wider cultural and political

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contexts, the most significant being the conflict between religious and secularculture.

In this paper, I will first discuss the contextual and conceptual problems thataffected the debate between secular and Catholic intellectuals on the origins ofscience; then I shall turn to the different resolutions of this problem proposed byseveral Catholic intellectuals, resolutions that depended not only on their differingviews of their religion but also on their different images of science.

Before analyzing the place of the history of science in the conflict between religionand science, some attention must be accorded to the special relationship between thehistory of science and philosophy, since much of the impetus for the development ofthe history of science was a consequence of developments in philosophy. Moreover,general developments in the wider culture often affected the development of thehistory of science through the medium of philosophy, since philosophy was a centralfield of conflict between religious and secular culture in the nineteenth century.

In this section, I shall argue that the increasing tension between science andphilosophy, as manifested in different nineteenth-century philosophical trends, cre-ated a problematic situation for the project of a history of science as a discipline witha purely secular orientation; in turn, this unclear and disputed frontier betweenscience and philosophy created a favorable situation for the development and recep-tion of a history of science with a less purely secular orientation.

In the nineteenth century, three leading secular philosophical currents boredirectly on the problems and possibilities of a history of science. The first waspositivism. Positivism required a history of science because it viewed science ascharacterizing the highest stage of human development, and needed to show howscience had developed out of the second, metaphysical stage, into the third, scientificstage of human history. The second philosophical trend was Kantianism, for whichthe history of science was the empirical field in which the progress of the transcenden-tal activity of acquiring knowledge could be described. And the third was historicism,which had a curious affinity to positivism in viewing the history of science ascharacterizing a phenomeon belonging to a particular period, but differed frompositivism in its relativistic interpretation of the notion of a historical period.

For each of these three secular philosophical positions, the project of a history ofscience revealed a basic paradox. The problem with the positivist project of a historyof science was that positivism, like Kantian philosophy, viewed the acquisition ofknowledge as a universal activity. Since positivism understood the acquisition ofknowledge as meaning the acquisition of scientific knowledge, it had to positscientific activity as an ahistorical potential existing in all cultures. Thus the uni-versalism attributed to science in positivism conflicted with its notion of science ascharacterizing a particular era, arising at a particular time and place.

The Catholic Response to Secularization and the History of Science 205

The paradox of the Kantian view of science resembled the positivist one, but herethe problem of the empirical, historical origin of science was even more acute. Thiswas because the Kantian notion that science is a consequence of a transcendentalactivity forces the Kantian historian of science to the position that transcendentalactivities can be studied empirically, which is as much a paradox for the Kantian as isfor the positivist the notion that the originators of science often made transcendentalclaims.

The historicist view of the development of science rendered justice to the notionthat science developed in a specific time- and space-bound context, but ultimatelythis view of the history of science had to confront the paradox of according thefalsified theories of science as much status as those currently held to be true - that is,that this view ultimately implied a skeptical attitude vis-a-vis the truth of science.

These paradoxes affected the development of the history of science because of theparticular institutional context in which it developed. Because the history of sciencedeveloped in the late nineteenth century, a period in which culture was increasinglyinstitutionalized within university-located disciplines, free-floating intellectuals wererelatively less important in its development than they had been in some otherbranches of the humanities and social sciences. The relocation of culture withinuniversities encouraged the notion that the history of culture is a valid academic wayof studying culture. To the degree that science was conceived as belonging to culture,this formalization of academic life thus stimulated interest in a history of science forinstitutional reasons. In order to obtain some independence as an academic dis-cipline, the history of science had to be differentiated from a philosophy of scienceintegrated within the philosophy curriculum.

One way of distinguishing the history from the philosophy of science would be tounderstand science non-philosophically - that is, as a purely technological or experi-mental activity. This was the path often chosen by positivists, who looked to thehistory of science as a source of confirmation for their own philosophy, whilerejecting the idea of a philosophical context for scientific discovery. Evidently, thehistory of science as a discipline could not develop until the distinction betweenscience and philosophy was generally accepted. Comtean positivism popularized thisdistinction between science and philosophy, but it also viewed science as havingsupplanted philosophy. Hence for the positivists the history of science was meant tosupplant the history of philosophy. Consequently, the positivist history of sciencedeveloped in an ideological context of dialectical tension with the history ofphilosophy.

The positivists contributed two essential elements to the development of thehistory of science as a discipline: first the idea that science is not philosophy; second,the insight that it has its own history as a cultural phenomenon, distinct from thehistory of other cultural phenomena. A history of science that would negate such ahistorical specificity for the development of science could preserve the distinctionbetween science and philosophy, but would view scientific endeavor as a constantactivity in all societies; it would not be the kind of history of science we have.

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The recognition that science has a particular and specific origin in a specific cultureonly sharpened the debate revolving around the relationship between the origins ofscience and philosophy (and implicitly religion). This problem surfaced as the issueof whether the rise of modern science was a natural development of premodernphilosophy. This, in turn, almost immediately became the more specific question ofwhich premodern philosophy played the most important role in the development ofmodern science.

By this point, the positivist model was in serious trouble, since the idea of a newbeginning in the seventeenth century seemed to imply both that science is morephilosophical than the positivists thought, and, correlatively, that philosophy candevelop into something that is not philosophy, namely science. Even those whodenied the notion of the scientific revolution were often tempted to accept the ideathat science has its origins in philosophy, relocating the decisive moment to anapparent rift in medieval philosophy between religion and philosophy. In the under-lying tension between religion and science, philosophy was perched ambiguously onboth sides of the divide.

Reading the distinction between science and philosophy back into the seventeenthcentury was a natural step in the late nineteenth century, when the contemporarycultural tension between religion and science was reflected within philosophy as atension between positivism and antipositivism, although the boundaries of these twoconflicts were not drawn along the same lines. It should be noted that even antiposi-tivists shared the positivist image of science as an empirical activity; the positivistview that science is more closely linked to technology than to philosophy wasdominant until the late nineteenth century.

Positivists rejected the Kantian attempt to provide a transcendental basis forscience because it linked science to philosophy. The difficulties of positivism stim-ulated a renewal of interest in Kantianism in the late nineteenth century. Neo-Kantianism expanded Kant's transcendental conception of science in the First Cri-tique at the expense of his teleological conception of the empirical sciences in theThird Critique. The desire to reintegrate science and philosophy seemed to necessi-tate the denial of the distinction between the transcendental and the empirical. Yet assoon as neo-Kantians began to engage in historical research, they had to assume thatthe various opinions about the transcendental conditions of knowledge are notdifferent in kind from other empirical data.

Thus both positivists and neo-Kantians were agreed on the unity of science,although their interpretations were completely opposed. Since neo-Kantianism wasa reaction to positivism, it also had to accord a place to the history of science.However, it could not accept the positivist position that different transcendentalpositions are merely empirical and historical data. The difficulties of a neo-Kantianhistory of science help explain why the history of science had not originated in thefirst historically minded philosophy, German Idealism, which had assumed that theempirical conditions of knowledge could be studied from a transcendental point ofview.


The positivist project for a history of science suffered from still another malady:positivists believed that the methodology of a history of science would be identicalwith the methodology of science. In other words, the idea of the history of science asa discipline is contained in the notion of science. However, the scope of research inthe history of science has to include data that would apparently be discarded jnscientific research proper - namely, the falsified theories of science. The positiviststhus confronted the paradox of the relationship between the history of science andscience, a paradox which could have the ultimate conclusion that, just as scienceappears to negate its own history, so the history of science can appear to negate thetruth-claims of science.

This paradox derives from the positivist presupposition that theories can be takenas data for the history of science. The paradox is extended and rendered more acutewhen the history of science assumes that allegedly false theories can also be taken asdata for its investigation, for this presupposition assumes that either all theories are"nonexistent" (that all theories are ontologically of equal value), or that falsetheories are not "nonexistent," (that false theories have some kind of existence,which is not, however, the same as that of allegedly true theories). Thus the positivistversion of the history of science ironically conserved one of the paradoxes that hadconfronted an idealist historiography.

The problem facing the kind of contextual explanations proffered by the historicistversion of history of science can be illustrated by what could be called, followingHans-Georg Gadamer, the "nonsense explanation" of history. This is the mode ofexplanation used for all tradition that reason has shown to be impossible. In a secondstep, which extends this explanation to all tradition, whether true or not, "theexceptional case of nonsensical tradition has become the general rule of historicalconsciousness" (Gadamer [1960] 1975, 260). In other words, a historicist history ofscience must studiously avoid the issue of the presumed truth of scientific theories.

For an Idealist historiography, all theories must have some element of truth; forhistoricists, all theories must have some element of error. In both cases, however, thescope of the history of science must include either a philosophical or a contextualelement that would never be included in the scope of science itself.

This is especially true if the development of modern science is viewed as contin-uous. Hence the requirement that science be treated as a historical phenomenon - inthis case, that its origins must be considered in terms of a continuity that must,definition, go beyond science in order to explain its genesis - necessarily contains thepossibility of an "antiscientific" view of the rise of science.

One solution to this problem has been to deny the historicist assumption ofcontinuity, and propose the well-known theory of shifting, discontinuous paradigms.This theory of paradigm-change has the advantage of redressing its relativism bylocating the observer within a long-enduring paradigm of scientific rationality, whichthus obtains contemporary historical justification. Its disadvantage is its self-refer-entiality: it excludes the possibility of reflection on its own transcendental ground.This exclusion is fatal, since the history of science as the history of paradigm-change

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must specifically include the possibility of reflection on the transcendental basis of agiven paradigm as part of the historical description of the opinions about thetranscendental bases for other paradigms.

Since such a reflection does not refer to the truth-content of a given paradigm, itrefers the paradigm to some other ground such as a worldview, whether or not thatworld view is self-generating. As Dilthey saw, the notion of worldview embedsscience in either a psychological or a metaphysical context. In that case, the history ofscience becomes the history of worldviews, which then implies that the object ofhistory of science is not science itself.

II

These ambiguities made it difficult to formulate the project of a history of science.However, the debate about the delimitation of the field was itself a context in whichsome of the interpretative models that we apply to the history of ideas were firstdeveloped. And this context of the development of an adequate historical model forthe interpretation of the Scientific Revolution was itself located in a wider culturaland historical context, encouraging specific cultural strategies with both historio-graphic and political implications.

The history of science developed in the context of a cultural and institutionalprocess of secularization in the nineteenth century. This process differed in Catholicand Protestant countries because of the particular nature of the confrontationbetween religious and secular culture in them. Institutionally, in Catholic countriessuch as Belgium, France and Italy, organized anticlerical movements pressured thestate into a major effort to secularize the educational system.

In the nineteenth century this anticlerical effort was often linked to the aggressivepromotion of a national culture in the service of nationalist ideologies striving tounify national societies with great internal diversity. Nationalism threatened aninternational religion such as Catholicism only slightly less than did secular culture.Nationalism was also the main force behind the wide popular interest in historicalstudies.

Thus Catholics had to launch simultaneously a counteroffensive against bothnationalism and secular culture. Because both these movements used historicalarguments as justifications, Catholics needed to formulate an alternative historicalaccount of the development of modern culture and science.

In this context, the use of historical studies was equivocal. On the one hand,Catholics needed an alternative picture of history designed on the basis of theassumptions inherent in the modern historical way of defining problems. On theother hand, use of the historical method posed a religious problem, for it implied ahistorical understanding of the development of religious thought and institutions thata religion, as the bearer of eternal truth, could not accept.

The intellectual situation that Catholics were confronting was one in which histori-cal reason had replaced philosophical reason as a principal way of understanding


man's relations with the sensible world. In sum, Catholic intellectuals used thetradition of Thomism to reject the usual nineteenth-century understanding of thefunction of historical thought in understanding these relations, and at the same timeused historical thought in order to provide the basis for a possible reconciliationbetween religion and science.

Since official Catholicism did not purpose to modify the religion to suit theintellectual trends of the day, the enterprise of finding a modus vivendi betweenreligion and science stimulated Catholic intellectuals to provide an alternative phil-osophy of science, one in turn supported by their reading of the history of science.

It is useful to compare the different ways Protestants and Catholics met thesechallenges. Protestants fell into two broad groups: liberal Protestants and funda-mentalists. Liberal Protestants proposed to adapt their religion to contemporaryculture. Both they and fundamentalist Protestants tended to meet the scientificchallenge to religious culture as a challenge to be defined and resolved on the basis ofthe interpretation of Biblical text. In Protestant countries, liberals sought an accom-modation with secular culture, while fundamentalists aimed to isolate the religiouscommunity from the larger context.

Liberal Catholicism was a powerful movement in nineteenth-century culture, butit was unambiguously rejected by the official Church. During the period from 1830 to1870, many in the Catholic hierarchy saw their main conflict as the one within theirown ranks - the conflict with liberal Catholicism. The defeat of liberal Catholicismleft official Catholicism and anticlericalism as the remaining cultural options inCatholic countries. As Catholics and anticlericals shared a common culture, theyboth viewed secular culture as a political and institutional challenge. In Catholiccountries, anticlericals strove to separate the Church from the world, while theChurch was committed to their continuing integration. For the Church, the nine-teenth century was a period of centralization and internationalism.

As part of the ideological justification for this long-range effort, the Churchneeded to rescue the image of the medieval past from the encroachments of national-ist historians. The rejection of nationalist history did not, however, mean rejection ofthe historical method as a way of providing legitimacy for the nineteenth-centuryChurch. Although leading religious intellectuals often wrote as if they were denyingthe implications of the historical method of research for the understanding of history,they themselves used nineteenth-century tools of historical research to redesign thehistorical image of the religious past.

The defeat within the Church of early nineteenth-century traditionalism (theFrench ultramontane movement that sought to combine papalism in Church orga-nization with an organicist and somewhat progressive social theory) had left avacuum in official Church ideology at the same time as it had strengthened thepressures for increasing Church centralization. In the wake of the collapse of tra-ditionalism, all parties to the debate about the desirability of one official theologyover another were agreed that Catholicism could neither adapt its theology tomodern science, nor, like some Protestants, adopt the position that science and

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religion belong to different spheres. Since the rejection of traditionalism was also acondemnation of Lamennais' privileging of man's receptivity and passive intellectover his active acquisition of knowledge and salvation through use of his intellect aswell as his faith, any official theology emerging in the nineteenth century would haveto link will and intellect, faith and science.

Since the debate about what kind of faith often had to be formulated indirectly,religious thinkers concentrated more on the question of what kind of science wasappropriate for the linkage to faith. Implicitly, the way in which science was defined,defined faith as well. Yet Catholics were not seeking to reconcile religion to science,but rather science to religion. This contradiction between reconciling science toreligion and defining science as part of the definition of religion was ultimatelyresolved by a transposition: rejecting the secular dichotomy between faith andreason, Catholics anchored reason in their religion and turned science into a form ofbelief. This result affected the way Catholics used the history of science. WhileProtestants often seemed to emphasize the piety of modern science in their attemptto contain its challenge, Catholics thus tended to stress the rationality of traditionalreligion.

In the bitter conflict between religion and science, secularists were concerned toprove their independence of the religious heritage, and advocates of religiondelighted in refuting secular pretensions to intellectual independence. The decisivetransposition of values between religion and science took place within this context.

One effect of Leo XIII 's declaration in 1879 of Thomism as the official Churchtheology was the official legitimization of scientific rationality. As Thomism spreadthrough the seminaries of the Catholic world, Catholic intellectuals preferred to viewthe Middle Ages as a time when theology had successfully confronted the danger of anon-Christian science. The Thomist synthesis of religion and science was a model forconfronting the challenge of modern science. Their cultural agenda, therefore,required the demarcation of a boundary between modern science and modernsecularism.

The problem of integrating religion and science was aggravated by a growingawareness that science itself is not constant. As noted, the debate within Catholicismbetween those trying to define the relationship between religion and science revolvedaround the nature of science, not of religion. But the debate over which paradigm ofscience simultaneously had to confront the problem of change in scientific truth. Itwas in this context that application of the historical method to the question of thenature of scientific truth obtained its particular relevance for Catholic thinkers.

The reintroduction of Thomism changed the nature of the problem for Catholics.It gave them a fixed philosophical point from which to begin their consideration ofhow to confront modern science. At the same time, the new emphasis on Scholasti-cism meant that the task of reconciling religion and science was replaced by the taskof reconciling Scholasticism and modern science. This reorientation reinforced thetraditional distinction between theology and philosophy within the Catholic frame-work; in comparison, Protestants did not develop distinct Protestant philosophy. At


the same time, the task of reconciling Scholasticism and modern science made thephilosophy of science into a central concern for Catholics. This reconciliation couldbe pursued in two ways: either by seeking a direct connection between Scholasticismand modern science, both serving as immutable truths, or by seeking a historicalconnection. It turned out, however, that the development of an empirical, historicalargument for linking faith and science could weaken the absolute truth-claims notonly of religion but also of science.

Catholics needed an explanation for the rise of the modern secular worldview thatwould delegitimize secularism at the same time as it validated the enterprise ofscience from the perspective of religion. The obvious strategy was to work out thehistorical continuity between religion and science in such a way that the gain inknowledge in a later historical period would not call into question the truths of anearlier one. Such a historical explanation had to claim that the "essence" of sciencehad been "misunderstood" in modern times - that is, that the philosophy of scienceand scientific research are further apart than had been presumed. This "misunder-standing" itself was then attributed to contextual factors, rather than to some factorinherent in science itself, because the essence of science, if true, could not of itselfhave produced such misunderstandings. The historical legitimization of science,however, suffered from the same disadvantages as any historical explanation:namely, that a radical contextual explanation can appear to deny the truth-claims ofscience no less than a textual exposition can appear to deny those of a religious text.

The tension between essentialism and what, in a limited sense, could be calledhistoricism informed the paradox that one could claim either a historical continuitybetween religion and science or a systematic continuity, but not both at the sametime. If science and religion form part of a common system, how did they becomeseparated? On the other hand, if a seamless continuity exists between medievalreligion and modern science, then both must be without fixed essences if one can turninto the other. This problem was not clearly grasped when Catholic thinkers firstbegan to engage the question of the relation between religion and science, becausethe secular camp was then arguing for both a historical and a systematic discontinuitybetween religion and science. Religious thinkers responded by denying both atdifferent times, but eventually each religious thinker had to choose between thesetwo possibilities.

The resolution of the tension between essentialism and historicism usually con-sisted in asserting that metaphysical change and historical development are notidentical. This meant that a dualist ontology had to emerge in order to permit adistinction between history and metaphysics. This dualist ontology, however, madeeven more acute the need for formulating some reason why history and metaphysicsare nonetheless related.

The link between metaphysics and history was formulated in terms of the lack ofcompleteness of our knowledge in both domains. (An ideal of completeness denotesthe picture a scientist or theologian has of what a world would look like if he were in

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possession of all its laws. In the Critique of Judgement, Kant argued that all theoret-ical and empirical activity applies such ideals.) Historical development is influencedby metaphysical considerations because of its own lack of self-sufficiency; the impli-cation is that a complete empirical science, one in which all empirical laws would beknown, would have no need of metaphysical assumptions. Conversely, a completeknowledge of all metaphysical laws would obviate the need for either historicaldevelopment or any knowledge of empirical laws.

As noted, Catholic solutions to contextual pressures and the view of history ofscience they produced all used some version of dualist ontological systems. Most ofthose systems, however, were not full dualisms in that they imputed possible com-pleteness to only one of the two domains. A full dualism that would seek to preservean interrelation between metaphysics and the growth of empirical science would haveto claim that each domain derives its ideal of completeness from the other domain -that an ideal of completeness justifying theoretical or empirical research in a specificdomain can be imported from an entirely different domain. The proposition thatempirical science derives its ideal of completeness from a metaphysical system thusdepends on the correlative presumption that a metaphysical system compensates forits lack of closure by maintaining the possibility of an ideal of empirical closure. It isfor this reason that empirical validation could serve as a sort of closing moment for ametaphysical argument. However, this kind of resolution does not really provide ametaphysical argument with metaphysical completeness. And even if it did, since itsultimate function is to reduce the distinction between the two domains, it would beunacceptable for anyone consistently maintaining a transcendent metaphysics, asDuhem realized.

The tension in history of science between the history of science as the history ofideas and history of science as the history of technology and experiment - that is,between metaphysical and historical explanations of the continuity between religionand science - reflects the paradox of this dualism. Metaphysical systems and empiri-cal sciences are both self-defined as capable of formulating their own ideals ofcompleteness. A metaphysical system with an external ideal of completeness is acontext-determined metaphysical system and an empirical science with a meta-physical ideal of completeness is a theodicy.

Since both domains, then, derive their empirical ideal of completeness externallybut deny the possibility of deriving their transcendental ideal of completeness fromany source other than themselves, the empirical consequence is that the ideal ofcompleteness formulated in one domain cannot be simply and directly applied to theother domain. Importing metaphysics into science, or science into metaphysics, doesnot take place by simply taking a principle or result from one domain and consideringits value in the other domain.

I am interested here not in the formulation of ideals of completeness in one domainbut in the relations of change between the two domains, which, as noted, was aburning question for religious thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century. Thisrelationship between change in the sphere of metaphysics and change in the concep


tion of science is a relationship between their respective ideals of completeness. Thisrelation is not a self-subsisting third element but rather the way in which one domainis bounded by its relations to the other domain. A change in the ideal of completenessin one domain will then surface as a change in the ideal of completeness in the otherdomain, but these two shifts are not the same: a paradigm change in empirical scienceis not identical with a metaphysical paradigm change.

One implication of this theory is the rejection of the identity between metaphysicsand history- an orthodox Catholic position. However, it also implies, as Duhem saw,the rejection of the German neo-Kantian division between historical and naturalsciences. If history and science were really distinct reality domains, then eitherhistory or science would have to serve as a replacement for metaphysics, an unpalat-able conclusion for a religious thinker. Thus it turns out that a dualist rescue oftranscendent metaphysics depends on the commingling of history and science.

If the duty of the history of science is to trace the relations between the ideals ofcompleteness operative in metaphysics and in empirical science, and thus provide thelink between metaphysics as the deputy for religion and an ever-shifting naturalscience, the history of science must then reject the neo-Kantian division, or itscontemporary variant of distinguishing between the hermeneutical and naturalsciences, unless the history of science accepts a complete subordination to generalhistory, or to hermeneutics, and a consequent divorce from science.

Ill

The suggestion outlined in the preceding section is that the development of thehistory of science, seen from the perspective of embattled Catholicism in the lastquarter of the nineteenth century, was a result and not an origin. The history ofscience did not first arise as a discipline before it was integrated into an emergingmodern religious culture; nor did the Catholic interest in the history of science resultfrom the previous existence of a positivist history of science; rather the Catholichistory of science was constructed as a result of debates within Catholicism - debatesin which both Catholic theologians and Catholic natural scientists took part - aboutthe relationship between religion and science. In the first phase of this dialogue, thehistory of science did not play a central role.

The thought of Giovanni Maria Cornoldi, the Italian Jesuit and intransigentThomist, provides one example of how the debate over the role of science developedout of the debate over the proper Catholic understanding of history.1 The resolutionof this issue in turn depended on the question of whether there exists a Catholicphilosophy independent from theology. The challenge of traditionalism in the firsthalf of the nineteenth century had made many Catholics dubious about the possi-bility of a Catholic philosophy not strictly subordinated to theology. Thus Cornoldiconfronted the necessity of legitimating a Catholic philosophy alongside a Catholictheology (Malusa 1986, 286).

1 The following is based on Malusa 1986..

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Cornoldi based his legitimation of a Catholic philosophy, as distinct from theology,on the necessity for a conceptual link between religion and science. His polemic wasdirected against John William Draper's well-known Conflict between Religion andScience, which had appeared in Italian translation in 1876 (ibid., 288). Of course,Cornoldi's position was that science and faith should never be in contradiction.

He sought to validate this conclusion through his philosophy of history, whichbegan with the cardinal assumption that history is both the history of man and thehistory of nature. In this way, he seemed to assimilate science to history, which thenallowed him to investigate the relationship between philosophy and history withoutdealing separately with the relation between philosophy and science.

Cornoldi held that history can never be a complete science - that is, it has no idealof completeness because it can tell only a partial truth. Nonetheless, history has afunction with respect to completeness in that it serves as a limit for philosophy (ibid.,290). The function of philosophy is to allow man to project his ideal of reality andsociety onto his own future. Thus history is the limitation on the absolute humanfreedom of creation, and not the locus of an independent historical reason. Cornoldiused this argument against the view that the justification of ecclesiastical rule lies inhistory rather than in Christ's establishment in the gospel (ibid., 292).

His argument shows that one central neo-Thomist polemic was directed againstthe historical schools of the nineteenth century, and implicitly against Vico. Cornol-di's integration of history and science was based not on a historical view of science butrather on an antihistorical view ofliistory. It is unsurprising that Cornoldi wasparticularly upset at the use of the philological method in history.

Cornoldi viewed the modern discipline of history as having been created in orderto discredit the Church. However, his attack on this science of history was directed asmuch against its image of science as against its imputed anticlericalism. Against thehistoricists, Cornoldi argued that history can provide data for theories, but not thetheories themselves. Since concrete history is then not the source of truth, truth is tobe found in history by applying to the historical data a model that does not proceedfrom the data themselves. Thus a new science of history could not be derived fromeither philology or comparative history.

Cornoldi, following the French traditionalists, believed that this model of histori-cal development derives from the development of the mind: he maintained thatexamination of the Church's effectiveness in history should be undertaken as a his-torical examination of the development of the mind, however, his view of this devel-opment was such as to leave room for Christianity as a suprahistorical phenomenon.Man requires a suprahistorical intervention precisely because history cannot provideits own ideal of perfection or completeness. Religion's suprahistorical intervention iswhat allows for the fruition of man's power of acquiring knowledge. If history definestruth by limiting it, the Church defines falsehood by excluding it. This position makesthe human acquisition of wisdom dependent on the suprahistorical intervention ofChristianity, but it does not make human wisdom a consequence of religion. Onelogical outcome of this position is to place natural science in some sense between


philosophy and history, in that the development of scientific knowledge is historical.But science, like philosophy, must contain elements of eternal truth. If sciencecontains elements of eternal truth, however, it must also have its possible perfection,unlike history. In that case, the assimilation of science to history can only be partial,since concrete history can have no internal ideal of perfection or completeness.

Cornoldi implicitly resolved the paradox of the incompleteness of scientific knowl-edge (which makes science more like history) in relation to its possible perfection(which makes science more like philosophy) by refusing to conflate nature and thehistory of nature. The apparent similarity between philosophy and science wouldthen be that both provide models for reality, and as such are directed to the future,precisely because both contain eternal elements. In contrast, history is then not thehistory of knowledge.

The justification of Catholicism is then not historical. Cornoldi thus viewed thehistorian's role essentially in limitative terms, as defending ecclesiatical historyagainst false accusations rather than contributing positively to the revelation of truth.Leo XIII, on the other hand, wanted the historian to show the Church's positivehistorical role in redressing social evils. But for Cornoldi, it was more important toensure that the historian conform to the absoluteness of the institution of the Church.The removal of state restrictions on freedom of expression necessitated all the moreChurch intervention in order to protect itself.

Such an attitude on the part of leading Italian neo-Thomists was one factor in thedecline of historical studies in Italy toward the end of the century, in comperison withthe previous period when liberal Catholics had avidly investigated ecclesiasticalhistory. The Catholic quest for a modus vivendi with modern science did not neces-sarily imply a reconciliation with modern historical studies.

The immediate effect of orthodox neo-Thomism was thus to hinder the research ofmedieval Scholasticism, even while the image of knowledge which neo-Thomismpropagated made medieval Scholasticism the central focus of Catholic interest.Because history had to follow a set philosophical scheme, the orthodox neo-Thomisthistory of medieval thought had to be written in such a way as to distinguish it bothfrom other philosophies and from the context of medieval life. In place of thepositivist scorn for medieval thought, the neo-Thomists substituted the philosophicalachievement of medieval thought as a standard by which to measure other intellec-tual developments. From this position, study of the relationship between religion andscience was less fraught with ideological danger than was the study of the history ofthe Church.

The Catholic Church appeared to be of two minds concerning the relationsbetween religion and science. Specifically, the pressures for ideological orthodoxywere much stronger in the Roman and other Italian academies than outside Italy,because the pope consistently refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Italian state.

The papacy's long-range plan envisioned the establishment of Catholic institutionswhich could compete scientifically with lay institutions, along the model of theCatholic university of Louvain in Belgium, the first institution of its kind in the

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modern world (Aubert 1975,151). Louvain, however, was not a neutral example. Ithad been at the center of a drawn-out dispute concerning the possible danger of aninstitutionalized liberal Catholicism during the papacy of Pius IX. Until the 1880s, itoften appeared in the Belgian nuncios' Vatican correspondence as if liberal Catholi-cism were the main danger faced by the Catholic Church in the modern world.2

Leo XIII concluded that the Louvain experience had shown that the establishmentof a Catholic university, where both scientific research would be pursued, andtheology would be taught separately to priests, was insufficient to maintain Catholi-cism's cultural position in the modern world. Hence he envisioned the creation ofanother faculty at Louvain, in which the focus of interest would be denned asCatholic philosophy's relation to the natural sciences. This plan eventually maturedinto the Higher Institute for Philosophy at the University of Louvain, which played acentral role in denning Catholic attitudes both to science and to the history ofCatholic philosophy in the period before World War I. After the Belgian bishops,resentful of foreign interference, had rejected the Pope's first Italian nominee for theposition in Louvain, Leo XIII serendipitously conferred this controversial task onDesire Mercier, the future Cardinal Archbishop of Malines, who was largely un-touched by the burning controversy in Belgium between liberal and ultramontaneCatholics in the previous period.3

Mercier had heard Charcot in Paris and was especially aware of developments inexperimental psychology (De Raeymaker 1952, 55). In contrast to Cornoldi, hisattitude to the problem of the relations between religion and science was that the keyto the harmonious resolution of these relations lay in establishing religion's rapportmore with the experimental than with the theoretical sciences. His vision of theInstitute was of an environment in which Catholic philosophers could interactdirectly with experimental scientists so as to integrate their findings immediately intothe corpus of Catholic philosophy. Each faculty member of his institute had to dealwith a particular science. He reserved psychology for himself. Of his colleagues,Thiery focused on physics and psychophysics, Nys on chemistry, Deploige on econ-omics, and De Wulf on historiography (Malusa 1986, 409 [n. 23]). Mercier alsoencouraged Catholic students of philosophy to attend lectures in the experimentalsciences.

2 The Vatican files for 1876-78 are replete with denunciations of Belgian liberalism. See for example,File 256/1, where in a Catholic response of 5 May 1876, Catholic liberals are condemned as the worst brandof liberals. Interestingly, these kinds of denunciations disappear almost completely after the death of PiusIX, which was followed by the forced departure of the nuncio Vannutelli on 28 June 1880. The reports ofthe nunciate's temporary administrator are much more moderate in tone. In part, this was a reflection ofthe newly found unity of all Catholics in face of the threat posed by the anticlerical government. See Simon1961a, 166. In part, however, the Nuncio was writing for a changed audience, in the person of Leo XIII,who pursued his policy of scientific modernization in Belgium precisely at a time when the polarizationbetween Catholics and anticlericals was at its peak.

3 This controversy continued to poison the atmosphere at Louvain, where the pope's new impulse wasnot well-received by all the faculty. The Belgian bishops, who were the university's overseers, were alsoreluctant to create a new chair in philosophy. See Simon 1961b, report of session of 17 August 1881, p. 135.The pope proved firm on this issue but did not persist in his desire to name the Dominican HyacintheRossi. See De Raeymaker 1952, 43.


While Cornoldi promoted a particular view of how science can be understoodwithin the framework of Catholic philosophy, Mercier wanted to ensure that Catholicphilosophy conformed to experience, which he viewed as the basis of any scientificknowledge. He did not share Cornoldi's notion of the unity of science. Yet Cornoldiwas not the only late nineteenth-century thinker who believed that the question ofthe unity of science had theological implications; this attitude could be perceived inMach, Husserl and Duhem as well.4

Believing as he did in the unity of science, Cornoldi held that a theorem taken fromone particular science cannot contradict a theorem taken from another particularscience. Their apparent contradiction derives from the relative imperfection ofknowledge. It is the privilege of philosophy that it does not share this dilemma of theparticular sciences, since it deals with general essences, while the object of theexperimental science is the singular (ibid., 412). Thus Cornoldi did not believe thatexperimental science can proffer any knowledge useful for the research of generalessences, whereas he clearly did not hold the reverse to be true.

Mercier took the opposite position: he did subscribe to the possibility of a risethrough induction from the particular to the general level (ibid.; Simon 1960,61-64).Consequently, the philosopher, approaching science from the opposite direction,must deal with concrete objects so as to recognize the objects of his reflection.Mercier thought that the main problem of philosophers was that they tended toreflect on an already digested science - that is, the science that reached them hadalready been canned into generalizations and systems. Instead, he aimed to bring thephilosopher to the concrete process of scientific research.

Both Cornoldi and Mercier were struggling with the then dominant inductive andempirical conception of science. Cornoldi, the more intransigent of the two, wasseeking an internal way of correcting what he viewed as the excessive positivism ofthe sciences, whereas Mercier, as it were the more modern, was content with theimage of science then prevalent and was suggesting a reform in the praxis of theCatholic philosopher. His idea was to direct the attention of the Catholic philosopherless to the body of scientific knowledge and more to the scientist's activity ofknowing. This activity of knowing, however, could be studied only empirically; thephilosopher would thus become to some degree the empirical observer of theresearch process, to which he would bring his synthetic sophistication.

Mercier's willingness to experiment with the praxis of the philosopher was comple-mented by a positive but somewhat inflexible conception of the degree to whichscience has succeeded in discovering particular truths; whereas Cornoldi had a muchmore relative image of the specific truths of particular sciences, which he viewed asconstantly changing. Furthermore, it was Cornoldi who argued that scientific the-ories could sometimes derive from "passion and pride," i.e., that the determinations

4 For Mach, see Sommer 1987, chap. 15: "Protestantismus, Cartesianismus und theoretische Neu-gierde," esp. p. 364; for Husserl, see Schuhmann 1977, 37. In Winter semester 1893-94, for example,Husserl entitled one of his lecture courses "Der Theismus und die moderne Wissenschaft." For Duhem,see below.

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in science's theory-formations were not always internal in a given science, but at thevery least psychological, if not contextual (ibid., 415). While Cornoldi could notcompletely accept the assumption of continual progress in empirical science, Mercierwanted to apply the late nineteenth-century model of scientific progress tophilosophy.

Mercier also defended the freedom of scientific and philosophical research, reject-ing its apologetic misuse on the basis that every act of thought is itself a free thoughtand thus implies freedom. He could find support for this position in the decision ofthe First Vatican Council which posited that the decision for belief is free, i.e.,contingent and rationally justifiable (ibid.).5 Mercier, then, interpreted the role ofThomism as being simultaneously the promotion of openness in science and thestruggle against the atheistic and antiphilosophical misuse of science.

The strategies of Cornoldi and Mercier both demonstrate that as a result of thereintroduction of Thomism, the defence of philosophy becomes part of the defenceof religion. One could not be a Catholic and take an antiphilosophical position. Thenext step was that philosophy of science became part of the religious investigation ofthe relation between religion and science. Orthodox neo-Thomists were, however,largely unsuccessful in imposing their views on the issue of which philosophy ofscience should be adopted - in contrast to their relative success in organizinginstitutionally a philosophical orthodoxy.

The course that Mercier began teaching at Louvain was quite unlike any othertaught in the Catholic world. Namely, he designed a course using philosophical textsas texts in the history of science. Covering Aristotle, Thomas, Galileo, Descartes andNewton, Mercier surveyed them in terms of their theoretical, technical and humanprogress at the same time (ibid., 417). The purpose of this approach to the problemof progress through the use of the history of ideas was to show the common groundbetween science and philosophy. It depended on the notion that progress takes placein philosophy as well as in science.

The distance from Cornoldi's position could not have been greater, since Cornoldidid not believe in progress in philosophy and was unclear about how progress inscience could be measured. Progress could be measured only in relation to anabsolute standard, but the history of modern science was not yet developed to thepoint where it was clear how science could be organized and evaluated in relation tothis absolute standard. Cornoldi therefore reached almost the same conclusion aboutscience that he had formulated about history: that the history of science cannotprovide us with a guide for understanding either nature or the procedures of scienceitself (ibid., 419).

Cornoldi's skeptical position did not prevent him from supporting Mercier'sinstitute or promoting investigations of the relations between religion and science athis own institute in Rome. Both saw this problem as an institutional and pedagogicalproblem. Both were concerned with the implication of teaching the history of science

5 For the decision of the First Vatican Council, see Andresen and Denzler 1982, 589.


in the late 1880s - that is, before the establishment of the chair for the history ofscience in Paris in 1892 (Kragh 1987, 11).

In sum, because of their preoccupation with the relations between religion andscience, leading Catholic thinkers before Duhem were well-aware of the need for ahistory of science. One problem they faced was that the image of science theyconfronted was mechanistic and positivist. They were therefore well-disposed both tothermodynamics and to scientific theories of contingency - which at first did notmean conventionalist views of scientific theory, but rather theories that built con-tingency into natural processes.6 They also encouraged the interest of Catholicstudents in the philosophy of science.

Their stumbling block, however, was the lack of a well-thought-out ideal ofcompleteness in their contemporary theory of science. They had three options. Theycould make philosophy accord with science by giving up the ideal of completeness inphilosophy; or they could assert some kind of discontinuity between philosophy andscience, which is virtually the same thing; or they could suggest that philosophyprovides the ideal of completeness for science. None of these solutions was satis-factory. The first two solutions threatened the presumption of rationality in philos-ophy, which is closely bound up with the ideal of completeness, and the last suggestedthat scientists do not know what they are doing- that is, that science cannot provideitself with its own rationality. The history of science might have arisen as a disciplinehad it not addressed this problem, but it would not have had the same significance forthe philosophy of science.

IV

It is tempting to follow Pietro Redondi and consider Pierre Duhem's view of thecharacter of the history of science as part of the crisis of positivism in the philosophyof science at the end of the nineteenth century (Redondi 1978). Redondi sees thecrisis of positivism as an immanent crisis in science stemming from the revolution inmathematics in the second half of the nineteenth century (ibid., 24). The revolu-tionary expansion of mathematics called into question the naive belief in sense dataon which positivism seemed to be based. Consequently, the history of science wasdeveloped at the end of the nineteenth century as part of the drive to transcendComte's image of scientific knowledge, which was no longer suitable to the state ofmathematical theory.

At the end of the nineteenth century, however, positivism was attacked from twoquite different directions, which is one reason why we possess so incoherent a pictureof its decline. On the one hand, those who claimed that human consciousness isirrational, such as the followers of Freud and Nietzsche, questioned the validity of

6 For thermodynamics, see Paul 1979,114,125-29; inter alia, it was easier to explain miracles with themodel of contingency, pp. 17-18. On science in Catholic institutions of higher learning, see Paul 1985,chap. 6.

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using experience as a basis for rational interpretation. That is, they rejected thenotion that the translating of experience into consciousness is a rational process. Onthe other hand, those who believed in the existence of ideal entities, (among them,Cantor and Husserl), could not accept the positivist denial of such entities. In theproject of a history of culture such as that of the Warburg school, both these trendscame together.

However, Duhem's rejection of atomic physics shows that he never accepted theexistence of ideal entities in science. In this sense, his rejection of the positivist viewof the history of physics was not derived from the mathematical revolution. In manyways, his image of the data gathered by scientific research conformed to the positivistnotion of data still current in the late nineteenth-century empirical sciences, althoughhis explanation of the validity of scientific research was quite different. BeforeBachelard, it did not appear as if the history of science had a role to play in thatphilosophy of science which was developed as a consequence of the mathematicalrevolution.

Duhem was well aware of the debates among Catholic intellectuals about therelations between religion and science. He was a member of the Societe Scientifiquede Bruxelles, which had declared its official adhesion to Thomism in 1890 at therequest of Leo XIII (Paul 1979, 171, 173). Duhem also attended the Third Inter-national Congress of Catholic Scientists in Brussels in 1894, one of five internationalcongresses of Catholic scientists held between 1888 and 1900, at which obviously theissue of the relation between religion and science provided the central focus fordebate.7

Duhem's work provided revised accounts of both the way in which scientificresearch is conducted and of the history of science. It is important to note, however,that these two accounts did not really hang together. On the one hand he wanted toavoid writing a history of science in which theories are generated from an historicallypreexisting conceptual situation, but on the other, he wanted the history of science tobe such that it provides the criterion of validation for scientific theory.

Duhem's theory of scientific theory-formation is well known. Briefly, he rejectedthe role of experiments in theory-formation (despite his empirical notion of data).8

He did not even believe that physical theory arises as a consequence of the necessityof explaining experimental laws; on the contrary, theory plays a decisive role in theformulation of experiments. But since he did not believe that scientists choosebetween theories according to historical criteria, he had to provide another account

7 For Duhem's participation, see Jaki 1984,112. For the International Catholic congresses, see Aubert1975, 154, n. 11.

8 "Our Energetics does not follow the Newtonian method. True, it admits an experimental origin to theprinciples it formulates, inasmuch as they are suggested by observation and seek several times the adviceof experience for the modification of their statements. However, these experiences, although explainingthe historical origin of the principles, do not bestow any certitude on these principles. The principles arelaid down as pure postulates, arbitrary decrees of human reason; they are considered to have sucessfullyfulfilled their role when they yield numerous consequences that conform to the experimental laws.Compliance with the teaching of observation is therefore not required, as the Newtonian method wouldhave it, at the outset of physical theory, but rather at its end" (Duhem 1987, 334).


of the criteria of selection. As Redondi has argued, the key weakness of Duhem'stheory of theory-formation lay in his choice of the criteria for selection, which hebelieved were ultimately intuitive and aesthetic (Redondi 1978, 39-̂ 40). Duhem'sappeal to a bon sens did not resolve this problem because his history of science wasnot the history of bon sens. The survival of the doctrine of bon sens in his thinkingcannot be explained as a late echo of Mennaisian Traditionalism; I think it is theresult of his largely empirical notion of scientific data.9

In what follows, I will consider Duhem's position from the point of view ofmetaphysics rather than from that of science, because his conception of the functionof the history of science will then become clearer. The role of the history of science asa mediation between metaphysics and science cannot be clearly grasped from theperspective of the scientist alone.

Duhem's notion of metaphysics was that it was both transcendent - in the sense ofbeing transcendent to the process of knowledge - and also the system for theexplanation of nature. He could legitimize his empirical notion of data by referenceto this objective metaphysical order, inverting the post-Kantian prejudice - accord-ing to which a theory without data is presumably more metaphysical than a theorywith data; for Duhem, data are both physical and metaphysical (that is, data have thestatus both of sense realities, as they would for empiricists, and also of entitiesbelonging to the metaphysical order of God's creation). Theory is neither empiricalnor metaphysical. The extreme implication of this conception would be that the idealmetaphysical order would not be concerned with metaphysical realities but only withsensible or physical realities. His thing-in-itself was then not the metaphysical ensrealissimum, but rather a perfectly empirical one. Only in this way could he believe,as he did, that knowledge converges with reality. Hermann Cohen thought thatprogress in knowledge takes place because knowledge constitutes reality; Duhembelieved that progress in knowledge of a pregiven world occurs because knowledgecannot develop into a metaphysical knowledge.10

Duhem thus believed two contradictory principles: (a) the theories of positivescience are an object of study for metaphysics, but (b) these theories have nometaphysical meaning. Therefore the interest of science for philosophers is like thatof the source for the historian; to borrow a phrase from Reinhard Koselleck, science

9 "An experiment in Physics is not merely observing a phenomenon. . •. An experiment in Physics is theprecise observation of a group of phenomena, accompanied by the interpretation of these phenomena;this interpretation replaces concrete data, actually gained through observation, with abstract and symbolicrepresentations that correspond to the data by virtue of the physical theories accepted by the observer"(quoted in Duhem 1987, 335).

10 On the one hand "The physicist must admit that it would be unreasonable to work toward theadvancement of physical theory unless that theory were the increasingly clear and precise reflection ofmetaphysics. Belief in an order that transcends Physics is the only raison d'etre of physical theory" (ibid.,337). But on the other hand "Through an analogy the nature of which lies beyond the grasp of Physics, butthe existence of which imposes itself as certain on the physicist's mind, we suppose that it corresponds everbetter to a certain transcendent order" (ibid). In other words, for the scientist, belief in metaphysics is anepistemologically necessary but unconfirmable belief: "We admit that physical theory may attain a certainknowledge of the nature of things. But we consider this knowledge - of a purely analogic nature - to be thegoal of the theory's progress, the limit it constantly approaches without ever reaching it" (ibid., 338).

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has the right to veto metaphysics. Instead of philosophy defining the limit for science,science thus defines the limit for philosophy, which may help explain why the logicalpositivists were intrigued by Duhem, despite his very different set of opinions.

Nonetheless, metaphysics for Duhem possesses a quality that makes it indispens-able. Namely, it is metaphysics that provides causal explanations, a type of argu-mentative rhetoric that Duhem wished to expunge from science (Jaki 1984, 346).Hence metaphysics has a closer relation to reality than physics, since physics isneither a metaphysical explanation nor a set of general laws founded on experimentand induction, but rather a construction (Paul 1979, 139).

In Duhem's extreme dualism theories are neither real nor metaphysical, whiledata are both. In this way Duhem drew a line between theory and experiment at thesame time as he set a boundary between metaphysics and scientific theory. Withouteither metaphysics or empirical reality, however, scientific theory would be radicallyincomplete: one construction could never be better than another one of the infiniteset of possible mathematical models for the same set of facts. A theory is then betterwhen it explains more facts; but it does not falsify a previously held theory, which canbe understood as having a more limited scope. In this sense, then, scientific knowl-edge is continuous.

While data cannot falsify scientific theory, data, however, unlike scientific theory,can falsify metaphysics. This paradoxical result is the consequence of holding thatmetaphysics is the locus of explanatory hypotheses. In itself, theory could not falsifymetaphysics, since metaphysical explanations and scientific constructions belong totwo different domains: falsification can take place only within the same domain,which is why metaphysics as the ultimate explanation of reality can be falsified bydata. The implications of this conclusion for metaphysics, however, are not that themetaphysicians can ignore science because of the difference between the meta-physical and the scientific domains. On the contrary, the metaphysician must be ascientist, since he must be in possession of the data of science, which are his limitcases for cosmological explanation (ibid., 150).

Metaphysicians, however, must also have a knowledge of science other thanknowledge of the data. They must also know the ideals of completeness operative inscience, despite the fact that science is always radically incomplete. Since cosmolog-ical explanations operate on the levels of ideals of completeness, and metaphysiciansby definition claim to explain all of reality, the ideal of completeness in metaphysicsmust in some sense accord with the ideal of completeness in science. This accord,however, is not an identity, because then the domains would ultimately coincide.Duhem thought therefore, that the accord between the ideal of completeness inmetaphysics and that in science is one of analogy (ibid., 152).

From where are metaphysicians to derive their knowledge of the ideal of complete-ness in science, since it cannot be read out of an individual scientific model, given thatthe different although true scientific explanations of the same set of facts can becontradictory? If different true explanations of the same set of facts could not belogically contradictory, Duhem could not assert that the same set of facts are


susceptible of an infinite number of explanations. Metaphysicians therefore mustderive their knowledge of the ideal of completeness operative in science from asource other than the scientific explanations current in their own context. Namely,they must read them out of the evolution of scientific explanations - that is, metaphy-sicians can derive their knowledge of the ideals of completeness in science only fromthe history of science.

This justification for the history of science, taken by itself, would legitimate thehistory of science as a discipline in terms of considerations that are external to theresearch process itself. While Duhem did not think that scientists must know thehistory of their science in order to engage in scientific research, he did believe that thehistory of science has another function, one that is internal to the research process.He used the history of science not only as the delimiting link between metaphysicsand scientific theory but also as the way in which the relation between theory andexperiment can be understood (cited in Redondi 1978, 30). Duhem believed that theaccord between theory and experiment in science is not an a priori or systematicconnection, for otherwise experiment could falsify theory. This connection is rather ahistorical connection.

The history of science is, then, the key link in physics itself between the over-arching theory of physics and the explanations of experimental laws. According toDuhem, it is the history of science which allows us to believe that physical theory is anever-clearer reflection of physical reality (Paul 1979, 152). This view of the philo-sophical and scientific function of the history of science as the only place whereprogress in science can be registered required Duhem to hold that the history ofscience is continuous: there can be no sudden breaks in scientific knowledge.

Duhem never asserted that modern science is a product of Christianity, but he didbelieve that Christianity is an indispensable auxiliary in scientific development (Jaki1984, 231). It was Duhem who first convincingly emphasized the medieval origins ofmodern science, but the way in which he did so drew him ever further away from thepositivist view of science to which Mercier had sought to reconcile Thomism.

It should be noted that the new interest in the medieval had preceded Duhem. Thehistory of the modern interest in medieval arts and letters dates from Romanticism,and neo-Scholasticism had made medieval theology and social thought widely avail-able. Thus the rediscovery of the medieval history of science, when seen in thecontext of modern interest in the medieval, was the end, not the beginning, of a longprocess during the nineteenth century.

Duhem's history of science was not well-received, although its conclusions werespeedily incorporated into the arsenal of the emerging discipline.11 His position wasoften misunderstood. Secularists viewed Duhem as extending the domain of scienceto areas that had been previously untouched - that is, into philosophy. Catholicsattacked Duhem for the opposite reason: they feared that his reception woulddestroy the respect for scientific reason and experimentation that they had been

11 On Duhem's reception, see Paul 1979, 162-178, and Jaki 1984, 406-21.

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striving to inculcate in their students. By questioning the historical basis of modernscience, Duhem appeared to be questioning the laboriously worked out reconcil-iation between Thomist religion and contemporary science. What both factions inthe polarized culture of prewar France neglected was Duhem's point de depart for hishistorical considerations precisely in the issue of the relations between religion andscience.

One long-range effect of Duhem's work was the discrediting of the Renaissance asthe age in which modern knowledge originated (Ferguson 1948, 33-38). Duhemviewed the Italian Renaissance as merely the inheritor of Parisian Scholasticism. Inthe years that followed, several historians of science began to characterize theRenaissance as an age of decline. For example, Hans Hahn of the Vienna Circle usedDuhem to buttress his view that logic had attained a peak in Scholasticism that itwould not reach again until the "critical mathematics" of the nineteenth century(Hahn [1934] 1988, 115).

Elevating the medieval at the expense of the Renaissance, however, had anotherlong-range consequence: it required a reevaluation of the famed Renaissance redis-covery of antiquity, and of the role of antiquity itself. The continuity betweenantiquity and the present could be maintained only if the medieval was included(e.g., Heidegger) - whatever one's view of the Renaissance - with no break betweenmedieval and modern. Or the break between the premodern and the modern couldbe located before the Christian Middle Ages, leading either to the rejection of therelevance of antiquity, or to the rejection of the medieval and the modern takentogether (to some degree Lowith and Strauss). Thus the cultural effect of therediscovery of medieval science was to call into question the cultural agenda ofnineteenth-century scientism.

Of course, Redondi is generally correct in correlating this view of the history ofscience to the increasing importance of mathematics in the philosophy of science atthe end of the nineteenth century, although I have suggested that Duhem's specificlinks go in another direction. But as Helge Kragh has noted, historians of medievalscience often had a neopositivist image of science, whereas those who, unlikeDuhem, emphasized the seventeenth century also emphasized the mathematizationof modern science (Kragh 1987, 77). Those who, like Koyre, rejected Duhem'sversion of the history of science, were often heirs to a modern secular Platonisttradition, trying to rescue antiquity from the attack of the medievalists by locating itsrediscovery in the seventeenth century.

The secular Platonist conception, however, tends to combine the logical orderingof reality with its metaphysical ordering. Duhem opposed this position vehemently.He understood the logical ordering of reality as having a different provenance than itsmetaphysical ordering. Because the logical ordering cannot be simply deduced from


the metaphysical ordering, it can serve as the confirmation of reality's metaphysicalordering.

This position was convergent with the late nineteenth-century dissolution of theCartesio-Kantian epistemological unity between logic and ontology. While thisseparation was fruitful both for the development of modern logic (Frege) and formodern ontology (Heidegger), it did not release Catholic thinkers from their inher-ited obligation of querying the ontological status of logic. In this sense, nineteenth-century positivism was insufficiently radical because it was ontologically skeptical. Itwas Duhem who first used the denial of the ontological status of one domain to affirmthe ontological status of the other. However, Duhem was still traditional, in that heviewed the approximation of scientific procedure as being part of our system ofknowledge and not part of nature itself.

It was Jacques Maritain who perceived the consequences of Duhem's justificationfor the history of science (Paul 1979, 174). Maritain subscribed to the traditionalThomist position, according to which the rational element in any science must derivefrom metaphysics. He viewed Duhem as having turned to the history of science inorder to compensate for his lack of a unified metaphysics. In this view, the history ofscience replaces metaphysics. Duhem, however, did not argue that the history ofscience is an ultimate reality, uniting metaphysics and science. It is an open questionwhether this metonymic role of the history of science can be ontological as well asepistemological.

Seen in terms of its cultural effect, however, the history of science, like the historyof ideas (whether Cassirer or Lovej oy), has taken on the role of a founding discipline,replacing metaphysics in a limited sense. Its ability to take on this role, however, isbounded by its capacity to provide ideals of completeness for a given culture. Insofaras its ideals of completeness are drawn from sources outside itself, it must remain aself-limiting rather than an inclusive discipline. Ultimately, the "secularization" of aculture that believes in science as its official religion entails skepticism as to theideological meaning of science.

In this paper, I have sought to argue that the way the history of science developedas a discipline in the early twentieth century was affected by the emphasis placed onmedieval science. This reconceptualization of the relations between medieval andearly modern science was facilitated by the Catholic program for dealing with thechallenge of modern secular culture. This context helps explain the historical signif-icance of the early twentieth-century debate about the origins of the scientificrevolution.

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Aubert, Roger, 1975. Geschichte der Kirche. Vom Kirchenstaat zur Weltkirche, vol.V/I. Zurich.

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De Raeymaker, L., 1952. Le Cardinal Mercier et Vinstitutsuperieur dephilosophic deLouvain. Louvain.

Duhem, Pierre, 1987. "An Account of the Scientific Titles and Works of PierreDuhem," Science in Context 1(2)-333-48.

Ferguson, Wallace K. 1948. The Renaissance in Historical Thought. Cambridge,Mass.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, [1960] 1975. Wahrheit und Methode, 4th ed. Tubingen.Hahn, Hans, [1934] 1988. "GibtesUnendliches?" Reprinted in Hans Hahn, Empiris-

mus, Logik, Mathematik, 115-40. Frankfort.Jaki, Stanley L., 1984. Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem. The

Hague.Kragh, Helge, 1987. An Introduction to the Historiography of Science. Cambridge.Malusa, Luciano, 1986. Neotomismo e Intransigentismo Cattolico. II contributo de

Giovanni Maria Cornoldi per la rinascita del Tomismo. Milan.Paul, Harry W., 1979. The Edge of Contingency: French Catholic Reaction to

Scientific Change from Darwin to Duhem. Gainesville.— , 1985. From Knowledge to Power: The Rise of the Science Empire in France,

1860-1939. Cambridge.Redondi, Pietro, 1978. Epistemologia e storia della scienza. Le svolte teoriche da

Duhem a Bachelard. Milan.Schuhmann, Karl, 1977. Husserl-Chronik. Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls.

The Hague.Simon, A., 1960. Le Cardinal Mercier. Brussels.— , 1961a. Instructions aux Nonces de Bruxelles (1835-1889), Analecta Vaticano-

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Department of HistoryThe Hebrew University of Jerusalem

the catholic response to secularization and the rise of the history of science as a discipline

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