Long-Term Developments in the History of Modern Science, Philosophy, and Culture

Recent decades have seen a remarkable expansion of research on modern thought across science, philosophy, and culture. Despite its great merits, however, this expansion has reinforced the tendency to focus on individual authors, local contexts, and the immediate reception of one author by another. As a result, contemporary research rarely asks how developments that unfold across long temporal arcs—sometimes spanning several generations, sometimes crossing disciplinary boundaries—can be understood. Reassessing these approaches as well as exploring new directions, this cross-disciplinary conference addresses the question of how long-term developments in modern science, philosophy, and culture can be conceptualized. Which tools, methods, and models allow us to make sense of the ways in which conceptual, scientific, and cultural textual productions emerged, persisted, interacted, transformed, and dissolved across time? Which twentieth-century perspectives on long-term intellectual developments across the modern world can be transferred from one disciplinary context to another? By bringing together researchers from a range of disciplines—e.g., history of science, history of philosophy, history, history of ideas, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies—the conference aims to stimulate dialogues on these and similar questions.