An Old Approach to a Revolutionary Regime

摘要

Charles Coulston Gillispie is nothing if not an institution builder. In the 1950s, fresh out of graduate school, he pushed Princeton University into the avant garde of what was then a new and fairly exotic discipline: the history of science. There were few academic programs in the discipline when Gillispie moved to New Jersey, and through his initiative Princeton's became one of the earliest and most prestigious in the world. (Among its early faculty members was Thomas Kuhn.) Gillispie's The Edge of Objectivity, which appeared in 1960, further helped to define the new history of science that programs like Princeton's began to teach. His other scholarship, especially on leading figures in 18th-century French science such as Sadi Carnot, Pierre Simon Laplace, and the aerial balloon pioneers Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier, did the same.