PERSON
I. Bernard Cohen
American historian of science (1914–2003), Basalla's doctoral advisor at Harvard and the pioneer of the history of science as an academic discipline — whose methodological rigor shaped Basalla's anti-heroic approach to technological change.
I. Bernard Cohen was the first American to earn a Ph.D. in the history of science (Harvard, 1947) and spent his career at Harvard as Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Science. He was the pioneer who established the field as a serious academic discipline, training a generation of historians including Basalla. His methodological commitments — careful attention to textual evidence, resistance to presentist readings of past science, insistence on understanding scientific work in its historical context — shaped Basalla's own approach. Cohen's work on Newton, on the Copernican and Keplerian revolutions, and on the nature of scientific revolutions established the historiographical framework against which Basalla developed his distinctively anti-revolutionary account of technological change.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Cohen's influence on Basalla is visible in the methodological discipline of The Evolution of Technology. The book's refusal to organize its account around celebrated individuals, its patience with the accumulated weight of case material, and