The Discovery of Time by Stephen Toulmin

The Discovery of Time Reviews

• 
  Jeff Thomson

  A book about the evolution of our ideas and understanding of Time. Absolutely fascinating to anyone interested in the natural sciences as well those who appreciate learning about *how* our understanding of time has developed. Great insights not only into culture and society, but also the scientific evolution of our ideas in relation to their struggle against religious dogmas.
  
  Starting from the Ancients and ending up in the modern area, there is simply so much to learn from this book. Of particular interest to me was development of Darwin's idea of evolution from the ideas of geological change presented by his colleague Charles Lyell. This book not only captures the actual change in our understanding, but does a fabulous job of explaining how competing or existing ideas were incorporated into newer ones. The Greek incorporating legends and myths into their past or the foundation of geological change fueling the idea of biological changes. Highly recommend!
• 
  Adam

  Discovery of Time is a broad and passable introduction to the history of science. It’s one part of a three-book series that covers the same topic through three distinct lenses: time, matter, and the heavens. Toulmin and Goodfield review early ideas about the origins and arc of the universe, the nature of its inhabitants, and provide compelling if compressed accounts of the beginnings of modern paleontology, geology, history, evolutionary biology, and cosmology. This sort of material is always valuable to review, and it’s especially interesting to watch them emerge in parallel.
  
  But the real point of interest in DoT is its uniting thesis, the gradual realization that the universe is historical, rather than static or cyclical, in nature. The thought had occurred to me before, and I think I’d recognized it as something that separated a scientific from a pre-scientific or mythological understanding of the world. But Toulmin and Goodfield make a good case that it is almost the heart of the scientific approach. Medieval natural philosophers, as pointed out in The Wonders of Nature, imagined themselves to possess a theoretically valid understanding of the universe, and disparaged particular cases as irrelevant, products of pure chance while patterns on the broadest levels were clearly understood through a priori reasoning.
  Enlightenment philosophers developed many of the ideas that went on to become science, they too were limited by the raft of preconceived notions, largely theological, that prevented them from fully embracing the world as their main source of evidence.
  
  Indeed, DoT strongly supports the narrative that science was originated by Greeks and simply straitjacketed by the mental and political straitjacket of Christianity. This narrative appeals heavily to my own biases, so while I’m sure it’s true in its way, it would have been nice to see some counterbalancing ideas. But there are so damned many quotes in the book of scholars contemplating the age of the world, or the evolution of species, and dismissing the ideas out of hand because they conflict with the Bible, and going through endless mental contortions to reconcile mounting evidence with their firmly held beliefs.
  
  While the book is essentially an origin story for the contemporary scientific understanding of the world, cherrypicking examples that seem prescient and disparaging ideas that are clearly absurd in hindsight, they do a good job of keeping things grounded in their cultural contexts and respecting the limits of evidence available at the time. They review a number of compelling objections to Darwinism, for instance, that could only have been overturned through demonstrative evidence.
  
  Overall, DoT depicts the painstaking process by which evidence and humility chipped away at the most well-entrenched worldview in Western history and fought their way to a postmodern understanding of the world that is, while not objective in the Enlightenment sense, fundamentally engaged with its limited and subjective perspective. Toulmin makes the explicit case that rationalism and modernism are simply an intermediate phase between a theoretical and received Christian worldview and an empirical and historical postmodern one. That’s an idea that is really appealing to me, and I’m hoping he’s going to explore it more in his later book, Cosmopolis, which I just got from the library.
  
  I also found it really neat to have history included alongside natural history and the sciences. While we tend to think of history as a humanity, an inherently less applied discipline than science, this dichotomy was apparently inverted at one point. History, it seems, developed as monarchs and pontiffs sought to apply the historical record to back their claims to power, hiring lawyers and scholars to discover evidence and arguments that legitimized them against competitors. It’s also interesting because Toulmin (as a good postmodernist!) questions the dichotomy between the disciplines, foreshadowing hybrid disciplines like environmental history but more importantly doubting the importance of “motivations” as a unique determinant of human development and eventually raising the influence of structural and cultural forces to shape social destinies.
• 
  Mary

  An extremely readable account of the development not only of ideas about the history of the natural world, but the idea that the natural world even has a history. This book was published in 1965, so it ends with a brief discussion of the then cutting edge (and unsupported by much evidence) theories of cosmic origins and how the competing theories and then current research relate to past breakthroughs in theorizing about the natural world.
• 
  Frank Ashe

  A history of the concept of time. Looking at it from the perspective of another 45 years since I chose it as a book prize back in High School, I notice it only has a western European perspective. These days I'd demand a more inclusive view of humanity's ideas.
• 
  Dave Peticolas

  How humanity got hip to history.