Toby E. Huff
was born in
Portland, Maine, on April 24, 1942. He was trained as a
sociologist but has been increasingly drawn to questions in the history, philosophy and sociology of science. Those inquiries led him to undertake
Max Weber
Maximilian Karl Emil Weber (; ; 21 April 186414 June 1920) was a German sociologist, historian, jurist and political economist, who is regarded as among the most important theorists of the development of modern Western society. His ideas profo ...
-inspired studies of the Arab and Muslim world, as well as China, including field work in Malaysia.
He is best known for his book
The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West', now in a third edition. It has been translated into Arabic, Turkish, Korean and Chinese. Related writings have been translated into Russian and Swedish.''
Career and contributions
Huff earned a B.A. from
Northeastern University
Northeastern University (NU) is a private university, private research university with its main campus in Boston. Established in 1898, the university offers undergraduate and graduate programs on its main campus as well as satellite campuses in ...
, a Master's from
Northwestern University, and his Ph.D. from
The New School For Social Research in 1971. He was a member of the
Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey (1978–79) and prior to that was a Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley working with
Robert Bellah.
Huff has been a visiting scholar at the National University of Singapore, the University of Malaya, and the Max Weber College in Erfurt, Germany. He taught sociology for thirty-four years at the
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth before becoming chancellor professor emeritus in 2005. Since then he has been a research associate in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University.
At the New School Huff's mentor was
Benjamin Nelson who was then taking up “
the Needham Question,” the question of why modern science arose only in the West and not in China. Influenced by Nelson but also Robert Merton, Huff continued that line of inquiry that resulted in
The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West'. It has been translated into Arabic, Turkish, Korean and Chinese. It is still being used in classroom teaching seventeen years after its first publication. By exploring questions in the
history of science
The history of science covers the development of science from ancient times to the present. It encompasses all three major branches of science: natural, social, and formal.
Science's earliest roots can be traced to Ancient Egypt and Meso ...
in the Arab-Muslim world, Huff further extended questions initially raised by R. K. Merton about religious and institutional factors supporting 17th century science in England. By questioning the cultural embeddedness of science in Islamic culture and civilization, Huff also stimulated controversy.
That discussion has been taken a step further by exploring evidence of scientific curiosity in China, Mughal India, and the Ottoman Empire in comparison to Europe in the seventeenth century. The results of that inquiry are in his
Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution. A Global Perspective'.
Additional influence of Max Weber on Huff can be seen in two books, his ''Max Weber and the Methodology of the Social Sciences''; and ''Max Weber and Islam'', co-edited with Wolfgang Schluchter.
Early in his career Huff was influenced by a number of
philosophers of science, especially
N.R. Hanson and
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the cl ...
. That intersection of questions in the philosophy and history of science is seen in his contribution to the ''Karl Popper Centenary volume: The Open Society, Metaphysical Beliefs , and Platonic Sources of Reason ad Rationality''.
[Huff, “The Open Society, Metaphysical Beliefs and Platonic Sources of Reason and Rationality,” in Karl Popper. A Centenary Assessment, edited by Ian Jarvie, Karl Mitford, and Avid Miller, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007, pp. 16-44.]
Publications
* On the Roads to Modernity. Conscience, Science, and Civilizations, Selected writings of Benjamin Nelson (1981)
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* Co-authored with Wolfgang Schlucter.
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* “Some Historical Roots of the Ethos of Science,” Journal of Classical Sociology, 7/2 (2007)
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References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Huff, Toby
American sociologists
1942 births
Living people
Academics from Portland, Maine
Northeastern University alumni
Northwestern University alumni