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"Introduction Narratives of Science, Old and New Overview For this book to tell its story another needs to be untold. This is because the seismic political and intellectual changes that took place globally in the nineteenth to twentieth centuries during successive stages of European colonial and economic expansion and the subsequent periods of decolonization and globalization have profoundly shaped our understandings of the preceding centuries.1 It has frequently been argued that modernity itself emerged in connection with industrialization in the long European century that began in the eighteenth century with European colonial adventures into the Middle East and Africa and ended with a world war in 1914-18, although it is far less clear what this actually means.2 Today, to attempt to reconstruct the pre-modern, pre-industrial societies before this century requires a considerable feat of imagination"--
List of contents
Preface: paths not taken; Introduction: Narratives of science, old and new; 1. A landscape of learning in the far west; Excursus: the poverty of intellectual history as a series of great men; 2. Constructing science in Morocco between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries; Excursus: the horizons of causality: how to think about causes, nature, and ghosts of scientific methods; 3. Legalizing science: the authority of the natural sciences in Islamic law; Excursus: Kuhn and the history of science in Islamicate societies; 4. Writing the mathematical and natural sciences; Excursus: Sufism and the spiritual life: balancing the exoteric and esoteric sciences; Conclusion.
About the author
Justin K. Stearns is Associate Professor of Arab Crossroad Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi, where his research interests focus on the intersection of law, science, and theology in the pre-modern Muslim Middle East. He is the author of Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean and al-Yusi: The Discourses (2011).
