Toby Huff

Education

Huff earned a Bachelor of Arts from Northeastern University, a Master’s from Northwestern, and his Doctor of Philosophy from the New School University (formerly the New School for Social Research) in 1971.

Career

He was trained as a sociologist but has been increasingly drawn to questions in the history, philosophy and sociology of science. He 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. lieutenant has been translated into Arabic, Turkish, Korean and Chinese.

lieutenant is still being used in classroom teaching seventeen years after its first publication. 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 A Global Perspective. Early in his career Huff was influenced by a number of philosophers of science, especially North.R. Hanson and Karl Popper. 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.

Works

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  • The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West

    (Now in its third edition, The Rise of Early Modern Scienc...)

  • The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West

    (Now in its third edition, The Rise of Early Modern Scienc...)

  • Teaching Guide to An Age of Science and Revolutions, 1600-1800 (Medieval & Early Modern World)

    (The Teaching Guide to An Age of Science and Revolutions i...)

  • The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West

    (This is a study of the long-standing question of why mode...)

  • Max Weber and the Methodology of the Social Sciences

    ( Huff provides a rare, full-scale study of the origins ...)

  • An Age of Science and Revolutions, 1600-1800: The Medieval & Early Modern World

    (An Age of Science and Revolutions, 1600-1800, tells the c...)

  • Student Study Guide to An Age of Science and Revolutions, 1600-1800 (Medieval & Early Modern World)

    (The Student Study Guides are important and unique compone...)

  • (Teaching Guide to an Age of Science and Revolutions, 1600-1800) Author: Toby E Huff published on (October, 2005)
  • Student Study Guide to An Age of Science and Revolutions, 1600-1800 (Medieval & Early Modern World) by Toby E. Huff (2005-10-01)
  • The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West by Huff, Toby E.(August 18, 2003) Paperback
  • The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West by Toby E. Huff (1995-06-30)
  • (An Age of Science and Revolutions, 1600-1800 ) Author: Toby E Huff Oct-2005
  • Student Study Guide to An Age of Science and Revolutions, 1600-1800 (Medieval & Early Modern World) by Toby E. Huff (2005-10-01)
  • Max Weber and Methodology of Social Science by T. Huff (1983-01-30)

Membership

He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (1978-1979) and prior to that was a Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley working with Robert Bellah.