History and Philosophy of Science among the Kiwis
University of Calgary’s Margaret J. Osler spent seven weeks as a Visiting Erskine Fellow. Here she writes about the pleasures of teaching in New Zealand, as well as the occasional cultural gulf.
I never did see a Kiwi (the feathered kind), but I met many Kiwis (the bipedal, featherless, rational kind) during the time I spent at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. The very well-endowed Erskine Fellowship Programme is designed to overcome the university’s geographical isolation by bringing in foreign academics (about 71 per year) and by funding local academics to ply their trades in foreign venues.
My fellowship brought me to the Department of Philosophy, where Philip Catton, a philosopher of science trained at the University of Western Ontario, has created – almost single-handedly – an undergraduate program in History and Philosophy of Science (bearing the acronym HAPS). Although he carries most of the program’s core courses, his work is supplemented by Clemency Montelle, whose appointment is in the Department of Mathematics and who is a specialist in ancient mathematics who did her graduate work at Brown University, and Andy Pratt, a chemist who reads widely in history and philosophy of science.
In New Zealand, a three-year undergraduate program leads to a Bachelor’s degree. If a student is contemplating graduate study, a fourth year, called the Honour’s Year, leads to a Bachelor’s Honours degree. The following courses comprise the undergraduate HAPS program: HAPS101, Cultures of Inquiry and the Origins of Science; HAPS201, The scientific method debate; European science 1200-1700; and HAPS202/302, Theory, measurement, reality; World science since 1700. I parachuted into a six-week chunk of Philip Catton’s HAPS 201, teaching a short survey of the Scientific Revolution. I used the manuscript of my forthcoming book Reconfiguring the World: Nature, God, and Human Understanding (under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press) as the main textbook for the course, in part to get feedback from real students. Selections from primary sources supplemented the book, and the paper for the course required the students to deal with a single primary source in some detail.
The 12 students enrolled in the course came from a wide variety of backgrounds and levels of study. There were undergraduates majoring in HAPS, Philosophy, and various sciences. One mature student is a science journalist working towards a diploma in HAPS. A woman from the island nation of Seychelles (population 100,000) is pursuing a M.A. in Science Education so that she can return home to teach the local school teachers how to teach science. And there were several graduate students, each taking the course to enrich their studies in Philosophy, Biology, and Physics, respectively. Because the class was small and met twice a week for two hours, there were many opportunities for discussion. In general, I found the students more engaged with the material and more willing to contribute to discussions than my students at the University of Calgary, where, however, most of my classes are very large lecture courses. Philip Catton attended all my classes and joined the discussions, usually adding questions and insights from a philosophical perspective.
In addition to teaching, I presented four research seminars, two to the Philosophy Department seminar, one to the History Department, and one at a weekend Philosophy retreat at one of the university’s field stations, this one at the seaside town of Kaikoura, a three-hour drive north of Christchurch. Four times a year, Philip Catton takes a group of about 25 students and faculty members on retreats to each of the four field stations. The activities include talks by both members of the faculty and students, outdoor activities like hiking or beach-combing, and lots of informal discussion of topics in philosophy. Notable among the speakers at Kaikoura was Yann Montelle, who gave an engaging and well-illustrated talk about his experiences studying early cave art in France. Discussion of his topic led to extended discussion about the emergence of early philosophy in Greece. Aneta Cubrinovska spoke about her work in the philosophy of mathematics. And I gave a talk on “The Other Side of Isaac Newton.” Despite the extremely informal atmosphere at the retreat, audiences were attentive and discussions were extensive.
The HAPS program at the University of Canterbury suffers from a shortage of personnel. Philip Catton regularly teaches an overload, often doubling his regular course load, in order to sustain the program. He is also running a program in the Philosophy of Mathematics. There is real need there for a full-time historian of science, either in the HAPS program directly or in the Department of History. Like many other universities today (including my own), Canterbury is experiencing cutbacks in funding, particularly in the Humanities. The university is in the midst of a reorganization of departments and schools, the consequences of which for HAPS are not immediately evident.
A visit from Ruth Barton, who teaches at the University of Auckland, enriched my understanding of the problems historians of science face in the antipodes. In New Zealand, their numbers are few, distances between them are long, and isolation is a problem that must be addressed deliberately. Close relations exist between scholars in New Zealand and their counterparts in Australia. Clearly the Erskine Programme is an important resource for addressing these issues. The Otago/Sydney Early Modern Seminar, jointly coordinated by Peter Anstey (University of Otago) and Stephen Gaukroger (University of Sydney), meets every two years for a workshop on topics in early modern history of science and philosophy. This year’s seminar in Sydney, to which I gave a talk, consisted of presentations in a workshop setting, full of new ideas and lively exchanges among an impressive group of scholars.
The secular nature of Kiwi culture was striking and was particularly evident in the students’ almost total ignorance of the Bible or religious issues more generally. This emerged as a problem for me because issues about religion and theology are central to the history of science in the early modern period. I needed to explain references to the Bible and even tell them that “Genesis” and “Revelation” were parts of the Bible. This gap in their background made it hard to explain the urgency of theological issues as they bore on astronomy or theories of matter in early modern natural philosophy. For these students, Galileo’s troubles with the Church were simply another example of their perception of religion as an oppressive and anti-scientific force. In all honesty, I should add that even in Alberta, which is one of the northern reaches of the Bible Belt, my students’ ignorance about religion is striking. (One of my students once asked me whether Jesus had anything to do with Christianity. And this was not the cynical question that some modern sophisticate might raise!) Maybe these are signs that we need to revive some – contextualized and modified – version of Western Civ. Certainly, North Americans’ preoccupation with religion and questions about the relationship between science and religion appeared in a new light. These concerns may not be universal, even in a “western” country like New Zealand. My encounter with this issue led me to reflect on the fact that the obsession with such issues may be essentially an American (as in the U.S.) problem.
While I was in New Zealand, I was invited to give a talk in Dunedin at the University of Otago, the southernmost university in the world. In addition to its remarkable location, the University of Otago benefits from a long tradition of the history of philosophy. Peter Anstey, my host there, is Professor of Early Modern Philosophy and coordinates the “Early Modern Thought Research Cluster.” He has published on Robert Boyle’s philosophy and John Locke’s interest in medicine. Although Peter took me on a wild drive between lunch and my afternoon talk in hopes of seeing an albatross at the colony at the tip of the peninsula (“A perfect day for sighting albatrosses,” he declared as gusts of ocean winds beat against our faces), none came into view. The albatross and the local penguins joined the kiwis among the class of local birds I never saw.
Despite my many failures at bird-watching, I had a wonderful time in New Zealand. I enjoyed living with Philip Catton and his wife Judith in their hillside home overlooking the Canterbury Plains. Conversations and friendships with colleagues were stimulating. And the experience of an academic culture that is simultaneously different yet in many ways familiar provided numerous opportunities to reflect back on my own.
August 2008