2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

William␣ A. Durbin Washington Theological Union
HSS Abstracts
Rome’s Second Galileo:
Father John Zahm’s Abortive Synthesis of Evolution and Faith
The paper highlights the efforts of Rev. John Zahm, C.S.C., priest of the
Congregation of the Holy Cross and Notre Dame professor of physics and
chemistry, to champion the theory of evolution in Catholic circles in late
nineteenth century America. Fr. Zahm’s articulate, informed and short-lived
crusade to reconcile evolutionary science with Catholic tradition, coming as it
did in the anti-liberal, ultramontanist atmosphere of official Catholicism, offers
striking parallels to the Galileo case. The pattern of controversy in both “affairs”
reveals a persistent, defining issue in the science-religion relation as the claim
to the right of interpretation. Zahm, leading a small coterie of like-minded
priest-scientists, asserted his authority to reinterpret Catholic theology in light
of his interpretation of evolution. His educational agenda, his status as a
practicing scientist, his position as priest in a religious order, his flair for
popularization, his sense of vocation as a public intellectual, and his allegiance
to an Americanist view of the church—together sketch the complex framework
of his adjudicating role. Fr. Zahm’s quick rise and fall in this role spotlight
peculiarly Catholic forms of interpretive authority while suggesting elements
common to other Christian traditions. In the end, Zahm’s case indicates that
neither he nor Galileo were as much martyrs for science, or victims of religion,
as ill-fated advocates of a new magisterium.
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William Eamon New Mxico State University
“Amateur Science” in the Piazza:
The Scientific Underworld of Sixteenth-Century Italy
The early modern scientific community consisted not only of practitioners of
the traditional and established scientific disciplines—astronomy, mathematics,
optics, medicine, etc.—but of a much larger community of scientific
“amateurs,” including alchemists, distillers, pharmacists, craftsmen, artists,
and virtuosi. My paper will explore this underground community of “amateur
scientists” in sixteenth-century Italy by looking at the intellectual circles of
the surgeon and natural philosopher Leonardo Fioravanti (1517- c. 1588). From
Naples to Venice, Fioravanti engaged with like-minded experimenters who
engaged in a great hunt for “secrets of nature.” Although he failed in his various
attempts to find a princely patron, and was thus excluded from courtly scientific
circles, Fioravanti became a part of informal experimental academies in several
different cities. In my paper, I shall attempt to reconstruct Fioravanti’s various
circles and “academies” in Italy and Spain, basing my research on a database
of several hundred names of individuals whom Fioravanti mentions in his
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