Focusing on historiographical debates, this collection of eight papers explores significant issues related to the history of science in Islamicate societies, medieval Latin Europe, and the academic discipline of mathematics. It delves into the interplay between science and philosophy, highlighting how these historical contexts shaped scientific thought and practices. Each paper offers insights into the evolving understanding of science across different cultures and time periods.
Focusing on the ancient sciences in Islamicate societies from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, this collection presents ten scholarly papers that explore the contextual elements influencing these disciplines. The works delve into the historical, cultural, and intellectual landscapes of the time, providing insights into how these sciences developed and interacted with contemporary thought.
This book reflects on debates among historians of science, medicine and technology as well as Islamicate societies about fundamental questions of how we think and write about the intellectual and technological past in cultures to which we do not belong any longer or never were a member of. These debates are occasioned by the manner in which amateurs have taken bits and pieces from our academic narratives and those of our predecessors, stripped them of their richness in detail and their often agonizing efforts to interpret these details, and rearranged them in simplifying and often misguided fashion as outdated stories about glory, success, priority and progress. Our texts are accompanied by reflections of professional curators and museum directors about the difficulties of translating academic research into representations that attract different groups of visitors. They are followed by experiences in northern Europe with Islamophobic adversaries of any narrative about Muslim contributions to the sciences, medicine and technologies, and in one of the Gulf States with alleged reformers of the political, economic and educational landscape of the sheikhdom and their use of such amateurish narratives for blocking efforts of critical questioning of such self-congratulatory representations.
