ABSTRACT
The purpose of this volume is to examine aspects of the history, philosophy, and culture of science in India, all of which may be encompassed in the notion of civilization. Historians have shown that what we today call “science” was earlier known as “natural philosophy” in Europe. The term “philosophy” was then considered a generic description of all forms of human inquiry. Science, in other words, simply meant knowledge. The word “natural” was prefixed to the more general term philosophy to indicate that here the study was of nature and natural phenomena as opposed to other branches of study which included grammar, rhetoric, literature, fine arts, theology, religion, metaphysics, theology, and so on. In India, too, there was no special word for science in pre-modern times. Vidya, kala, jnana, vijnana, shiksha – these and other such terms were used to denote what we today consider different branches of scientific knowledge. The range of our concerns include the culture, history, and philosophy of science in India. The assumption is that science is either supported or resisted by the society and culture in which it functions. Of course, as suggested earlier, science has its own culture, just as each culture has its own “science.” Yet by culture of science is meant specifically four things: (1) the culture out of which science emerges, as in the European Renaissance or late colonial India; (2) the kind of culture that science itself engenders once it begins to take root; (3) the interaction between the two, that is between science, with its own specific norms and methodologies, and the culture of the country or society in which it exists; and (4) the institutionalization of science and its relationship to the state, which in turns shape the type of science that is encouraged.
