History, Science and God: the life and thought of Sir Herbert Butterfield

历史、科学与上帝：赫伯特·巴特菲尔德爵士的生活与思想

• 批准号: AH/G002789/1
• 负责人: Michael Bentley
• 金额: $ 3.78万
• 依托单位: University of St Andrews
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2008 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FG002789%2F1
• 关键词: History; Science; God; life; thought

My biography of Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979) brings back into focus a man whose life has dropped below the radar of historians, political scientists and theologians in recent years. Once regarded as a major public intellectual with a wide audience, Butterfield now needs urgent revival in a world that is returning to the issues he did most to champion: a spiritual understanding of life, a sophisticated and sensitive reading of history and the necessity for seeing the history of historical writing as a key to understanding. But there were aspects that contemporaries often misssed, not least Butterfield's adherence to a view of science-in-society and the place of scientific method in representing the past - a view more relevant than ever in a world disturrbed by Dawkins's assumed destruction of God from a scientist's perspective. In some respects Butterfield's life was a placid one: Fellow and eventually Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and with a reputation resting on his writing and broadcasting. The writing has come to substitute, however, for the man and people write about him as though they need only to connect the books with a thin vein of narrative. We can do better than this through his private journals and an archive of his early work, both of which have been made available to me by the family. In addition I have found a rich cache of letters from the Black Hole of the 1930s (see Research Context) which transforms our understanding of Butterfield's conception of love and sexuality. What emerges is an intellectual figure of considerable significance who established important links with America and Germany, who spent frequent and uprorious periods in Dublin, who established the Villa Serbelloni as an academic centre on Lake Como with Rockefeller money and chaired for a number of years the British Committee for the Study of International Relations which produced a distinctive treatment of its remit. What made Butterfield more famous than any other facet of his work was perhaps his championing of two causes: the history of science as an academic subject,of which I provide a full account, and the idea of historiography as a subject of study. We might understand this term to mean an attention to and explanation of differering perceptions of the past at different times and in different cultures. For us this has become so normal a notion as to be part of the profession's outlook. But it was not so in the 1950s when Butterfeild undertook to promulgate its importance. Since I have written a good deal about the subject I am well placed to discuss this part of Butterfield's thought and lend it a location in British historiography as a whole. Finally, we should not ignore Butterfield's relationship to many distinguished figures of his time who are woven into the story here - the scientific genius Joseph Needham, the luminous political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, a raft of distinguished historians, some of which he brought together in a special number of the TLS that he guest-edited in 1956, and European figures of the significance of Percy Schramm or Raymond Aron. The result will a substantial monograph of around 160 000 words written for a general audience - the one that Butterfield himself addressed.

我的赫伯特巴特菲尔德（1900-1979）传记使人们重新关注一个近年来生活在历史学家、政治学家和神学家雷达之下的人。巴特菲尔德曾被视为一位拥有广泛受众的重要公共知识分子，如今，他急需在一个回归到他最努力倡导的问题上的世界中复兴：对生活的精神理解，对历史的复杂而敏感的阅读，以及将历史写作的历史视为理解的关键的必要性。但也有同时代人经常忽略的方面，尤其是巴特菲尔德坚持科学在社会中的观点，以及科学方法在代表过去方面的地位--在一个被道金斯从科学家的角度假设上帝毁灭而感到不安的世界里，这种观点比以往任何时候都更相关。在某些方面，巴特菲尔德的生活是平静的：研究员和最终的主人彼得豪斯，剑桥，并与他的写作和广播的声誉。然而，写作已经取代了这个人，人们写他，好像他们只需要把书和一个薄薄的叙述联系起来。我们可以通过他的私人日记和他早期作品的档案做得更好，这两个都是由家人提供给我的。此外，我还发现了大量来自20世纪30年代黑洞的信件（见研究背景），这些信件改变了我们对巴特菲尔德爱情和性观念的理解。他与美国和德国建立了重要的联系，在都柏林度过了频繁而辉煌的时期，用洛克菲勒的钱在科莫湖上建立了塞尔贝隆尼别墅作为学术中心，并担任英国国际关系研究委员会主席多年，该委员会对其职权范围进行了独特的处理。巴特菲尔德之所以比他的其他著作更出名，也许是因为他支持两个原因：一是将科学史作为一门学术学科，我将对此做一个全面的介绍;二是将历史编纂学作为一门研究学科。我们可以理解这个术语意味着关注和解释在不同时间和不同文化中对过去的不同看法。对我们来说，这已经成为一个非常正常的概念，成为这个行业前景的一部分。但在20世纪50年代，当巴特菲尔德着手宣传其重要性时，情况并非如此。由于我已经写了很多关于这个主题的文章，我很好地讨论了巴特菲尔德思想的这一部分，并把它作为一个整体放在英国史学中。最后，我们不应该忽视巴特菲尔德与他那个时代的许多杰出人物的关系，这些人都被编织在这里的故事中--科学天才约瑟夫·李约瑟，杰出的政治哲学家迈克尔·奥克肖特，一大批杰出的历史学家，其中一些他在1956年客座编辑的TLS中汇集在一起，还有珀西·施拉姆或雷蒙德·阿隆等重要的欧洲人物。其结果将是一个约160 000字的大量专着写的一般观众-一个巴特菲尔德自己解决。