A liberal arts education should be faithful to its classical purpose of providing the knowledge and skills appropriate to free citizens, so to prepare them for the just and responsible exercise of their liberty and to ensure the betterment of society. Just what means best serve this end has always been subject to critical discussion and debate. In The Republic, Plato argued that, rightly studied, four mathematical sciences (arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy) are crucial to a liberal arts education, awakening the soul to reason and appreciation of the beautiful and good. These arguments placed mathematical sciences squarely in the center of western education for nearly two millenia. In the middle ages these four sciences became known as the quadrivium, and constituted a major part of university instruction, which followed completion of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) in pre-university or "grammar" school years. These Seven Liberal Arts represent an important institutional tradition in the history of science, a tradition which is reflected in (to choose but two of countless examples) the numerous attempts by Ptolemy, Kepler, and others to unify the theories of music and astronomy; and the thorough-going mathematization of theology in the fourteenth century which provided the immediate intellectual context for the medieval formulation of what later became known as Galileo's law of free fall.(a) Yet even in the middle ages the liberal arts curriculum was not without change or controversy; tensions developed between masters of the trivium and the arts masters who emphasized logic over rhetoric or, later, Aristotle's natural philosophy over that of Plato.(b)
In our day the liberal arts have been split by a rift in communication and a chasm of mutual incomprehension immemorialized as the "two cultures" by C. P. Snow.(c) There are many divides in academia; Snow's two cultures are not the only ones who fail to comprehend one other. Yet the history of science is perhaps uniquely situated to straddle existing gulfs between different fields of natural sciences, and between the sciences and the humanities, and to open channels of communication and understanding that are still largely unexploited. (See What are Science Studies?)
Anyone interested in the liberal arts must consider the relation of science to the rest of the liberal arts curriculum.(d) Though this question is complex and controversial, historians of science can reveal a more holistic portrait of the scientific enterprise, showing the scientist as a member of other cultures beyond her own, unfolding science as embedded in a significant cultural and historical context. Professional history of science takes as its primary reference not current scientific knowledge, but questions about natural phenomena as they have been posed in particular historical times and places, appreciating the intrinsic qualities of natural knowledge while unfolding its rich associations with philosophy, religion, the fine arts, politics, and general culture.
Establishing such a context for science, understood as a significant historical and cultural force, is crucial for a general liberal arts education. Yet one historian of science recently noted a "disparity between the role of science in our lives and its role in our history courses," a disparity which "demands some explanation."(e) The same could be said of the liberal arts curriculum as a whole: "Insofar as science holds a central place in our culture, we omit one of the essential driving forces and normative constraints in Western culture if we treat science as extraneous and having no history. Indeed, from a modern pont of view there is a strong defense for the thesis that the history of science in its broadest sense is part of the core of the history of Western culture."(f)
If a liberal arts education is to provide the knowledge and skills appropriate to free citizens in an age of science, so to prepare them for the just and responsible exercise of their liberty and ensure the betterment of society, then the contrast between Plato's curriculum and the contemporary situation is undesirable. The history of science is a rigorous, interdisciplinary form of cultural studies which offers a unique and critical contribution to the liberal arts core curriculum.
Notes
(a) On music and astronomy, which the Pythagoreans called "sister sciences," see (for example) Kepler's Harmony of the World (1621) and Penelope Gouk, "The Harmonic Roots of Newtonian Science," in John Fauvel et al., Let Newton Be! (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p 102. On fourteenth-century theology, see John Murdoch, "Mathesis in philosophiam scholasticam introducta: The Rise and Development of the Application of Mathematics in Fourteenth Century Philosophy and Theology." In Arts libéraux et philosophie au moyen âge: Actes du quatrième congrès international de philosophie médiévale, Université de Montréal, 27 août &endash; 2 septembre 1967, 215&endash;54 (Montreal: Institut d'études médiévales, 1969). (Back to text)
(b) John W. Baldwin accessibly discusses these tensions in his The Scholastic Culture of the Middle Ages, 1000&endash;1300 (Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1971); also cf. John Murdoch, "From Social into Intellectual Factors: An Aspect of the Unitary Character of Late Medieval Learning." In The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, ed. Murdoch and Edith Sylla (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, no. 26. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1975), pp. 271&endash;348. (Back to text)
(c) Charles Percy Snow, "The Two Cultures." In The Two Cultures and A Second Look (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp. 1-21. (Back to text)
(d) This question is capably explored by Muriel L. Blaisdell, "Mainstreaming Science: The History of Science in a Liberal Arts Curriculum," Liberal Education, 1984, 70: 27&endash;34. Cf. Blaisdell, p. 33: "Students who are learning science in courses that include historical, philosophical, and social issues are being asked to integrate the sciences into the humanities.... They are being taught a view of science that omits the myth of value-free investigation and reflects a revision of [the] epistemological status of science more nearly balancing the elements that separate science from other disciplines." (Back to text)
(e) John Servos, "History of Science in the Survey Course in American History," in Teaching in the History of Science: Resources and Strategies (Philadelphia: History of Science Society, 1989), 35. (Back to text)
(f) Eastwood, Bruce. "History of Science in the Survey Course in European History," in Teaching in the History of Science, 38. (Back to text)