Description:

Speaker

Harun Küçük

Title

 "Arnold Thackray's 'Science: Has Its Present Past a Future?' Revisited"

Abstract

The classic 1970 paper by Arnold Thackray, “Science: Has Its Present Past a Future?” was a broad call to revisit the historiography of science, with an eye to breaking Alexandre Koyré’s dominance in the American history of science profession. In the paper one finds a subdued sympathy for the Marxist thought from the 1930s, a hint at the destructive effects of the red scare of the 1950s, a pronounced presentism and, an invitation to introduce greater variety of sociological methods and a greater engagement with social history. In a certain sense, Thackray’s call has been largely successful in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Yet, most history of science does not read like a sophisticated and sociologically-informed Marxist analysis of the past. Indeed, the profession has only recently begun to engage seriously with key aspects of Marxism, such as political economy. In this talk, I’ll present a fresh formulation of the Marxist historiography from the 1930s and of Koyré’s reaction as a way to reframe Thackray’s call for 2024.

Biography

Harun Küçük currently serves as the Faculty Director of the Penn's Middle East Center and am an elected member of History of Science Society's Council. His first book "Science without Leisure: Practical Naturalism in Istanbul, 1660-1732" (2019) explored the relationship between monetary inflation and natural knowledge in seventeenth-century Istanbul. His primary inspirations have been the materialist historiography of science, the emerging global history of early modern science and Pierre Bourdieu's Pascalian Meditations. He is also part of a research team that investigates notions of the natural and the supernatural in the Ottoman Empire. This is a multi-year project that has generous funding from the ERC.