14268

SoSe 19: (S) History of science in Islamicate societies (c. 750-1700)

Prof. Dr. Sonja Brentjes

Comments

In this course, we will familiarize ourselves with different aspects of the history of science in Islamicate societies: (1) historiography (2) products and their properties (3) scholars and their narratives (4) disciplinary organization and their changes (5) institutions and their knowledge spaces. We will trace some of the major historiographical debates and their concepts since the 19th century such as innovation, achievement, translation movement, decline, science in the service of Islam, or marginalization. We will ask which impact those debates and concepts have had on view held by the public in the countries of the participating students. Students will be invited to present different kinds of material on those topics from their homelands. We will discuss how those debates and concepts have shaped academic research until today. We will compare different types of textual, pictorial, instrumental, and other material products used in the mathematical sciences, map making, geography, medicine and perhaps other fields of knowledge from different historical periods and regions. We will compare their formal and intellectual properties and try to determine major scholarly practices such argumentation, demonstration, exemplification, or organization of knowledge. On the basis of secondary sources, we will survey the content of some of the fields of knowledge. We will read a few extracts from historical sources about scholars and their training and position in society and analyze a few types of narrating scholarly lives and goals in the sciences. We will study literature on the classification of the sciences from different centuries and regions and discuss their similarities and differences. At the end of the course, we return to one of the central historiographical questions since the 1970s - presence or absences of the sciences from the institutions of knowledge in various Islamicate societies. We will read influential secondary texts on this issue, pay attention to some art historical investigations, and analyze properties of those institutions on the basis of different primary sources. close