Argument

Much recent research has established the importance of visualization in modern science. This essay treats, instead, of the continued importance of the aural and oral: the professorial voice. The professor remains important for science since so many scientists still instantiate this persona and, as is here argued, a “voice” constitutes an essential feature of it. The form of the essay reflects its contents. From the Middle Ages until well into the modern era, the archetypal professorial genre was the disputation, an oral event recast in written form. Apropos of the traditional disputation, this essay begins with a disquisition more or less to the point. It concerns Nietzsche’s first major publication, which violated norms for the proper professorial voice, thus accelerated the destruction of his academic career. The essay then presents six theses on the professorial voice. The theses treat relevant aspects of the professorial voice from the Sophists onward. It is argued, in Weberian terms, that the professorial voice or persona embodies elements of charismatic and traditional authority which coexist with and condition the rational authority or “objectivity” of science.

L. E. J. Brouwer and David Hubert, two titans of twentieth-century mathematics, clashed dramatically in the 1920s. Though they were both Kantian constructivists, their notorious Grundlagenstreit centered on sharp differences about the foundations of mathematics: Brouwer was prepared to revise the content and methods of mathematics (his “Intuitionism” did just that radically), while Hilbert's Program was designed to preserve and constructively secure all of classical mathematics.

Hilbert's interests and polemics at the time led to at least three misconstruals of intuitionism, misconstruals which last to our own time: Current literature often portrays popular views of intuitionism as the product of Brouwer's idiosyncratic subjectivism; modern logicians view intuitionism as simply applying a non-standard formal logic to mathematics; and contemporary philosophers see that logic as based upon a pure assertabilist theory of meaning. These pictures stem from the way Hilbert structured the controversy.

Even though Brouwer's own work and behavior occasionally reinforce these pictures, they are nevertheless inaccurate accounts of his approach to mathematics. However, the framework provided by the Brouwer-Hilbert debate itself does not supply an adequate correction of these inaccuracies. For, even if we eliminate these mistakes within that framework, Brouwer's position would still appear fragmented and internally inconsistent. I propose a Kantian framework — not from Kant's philosophy of mathematics but from his general metaphysics — which does show the coherence and consistency of Brouwer's views. I also suggest that expanding the context of the controversy in this way will illuminate Hilbert's views as well and will even shed light upon Kant's philosophy.

Drawing and writing number among the most widespread scientific practices of representation. Neither photography, graphic recording apparatuses, typewriters, nor digital word- and image-processing ever completely replaced drawing and writing by hand. The interaction of hand, paper, and pen indeed involves much more than simply recording or visualizing what was previously thought, observed, or imagined. Both writing and drawing have the power to translate concepts and observations into two-dimensional, manageable, reproducible objects. They help to develop research questions and they open up an interaction between the gathering of phenomena and the formation of theses. Related to the manifold studies of representational activities in the sciences and the humanities, this topical issue tries to refine our understanding of the capacities of drawing and writing as research techniques; i.e. as productive epistemic practices. In particular the contributions address three aspects: the material conditions and configurations of the “scene of drawing and writing,” the involved procedures of production, and the languages of inscription.

Montaigne's Essays were an exercise in self-knowledge carried out for more than twenty years in Montaigne's private library located in his mansion near Bordeaux. The library was a place of solitude as well as a place of knowledge, a kind of heterotopia in which two sets of spatial relations coexisted and interacted: the social and the epistemic. The spatial demarcation and arrangement of the site – in both the physical and the symbolic sense – were necessary elements of the constitution of Montaigne's self as an object of knowledge and as a subject of discourse. The spatial setting of the library made possible and constrained certain discursive patterns through which words were systematically linked to things, authority was correlated with access and visibility, and the epistemological was coordinated with the social. In this sense, Montaigne's library resembled other places of empirical knowledge of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (e.g., early laboratories or observatories) in which subjects of knowledge were constituted, objects were posited in their proper phenomenal fields and the entire structure of intellectual activity was reproduced through various cultural mechanisms. But the initial similarity is only apparent. The private library never became a culturally recognized place for knowledge of the self; its heterotopic structure could not have been reproduced without the concrete presence of an author and of a self, while Montaigne's skepticism systematically undermined the possibility of the author's position and of the identity of the self.

Argument

During the 1860s Ernst Haeckel, German zoologist and one of the foremost popularizers of Darwinism, proposed a natural philosophy called “Monism.” Based on developmental thinking, natural selection, and sound natural laws, the scientific Weltanschauung of Monism was to supersede Christian religion in all its accounts of nature. Haeckel's new scientific religion, this essay argues, fused the religious joys of reveling in the beauty of “mother nature” with the assurance of progress based on scientific certainty. Even though Haeckel and his followers polemicized against dualistic and teleological interpretations of nature, and despite their fierce struggle against the Christian churches, Monism cannot conceal its roots. All central arguments of natural theology reappear – albeit sometimes in causal or reductionist phrasing. Haeckel's aesthetics of nature in particular shows his indebtedness to the concept of a divine economy of nature. His Monism is an evolutionary and pantheistic natural theology.

From about 1620 on a profound revolution occurred in the thought of the most developed European nations (France, Italy, Holland, and England), which found its most pregnant expression in the birth of the new philosophical schools of Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes. The renewal of philosophy at this juncture in the history of thought, however, does not signify above all a change in the specific, metaphysical content of thought about God, the soul, and immortality, although the revolution in thought does concern these themes as well. Central to the whole “modern” school of philosophers of this period is the constitution of a new conception of nature and – directly for some of them, implicitly for all – of human society as well.

I propose a revisionist account of the production and reception of Galileo's telescopic observations of 1609–10, an account that focuses on the relationship between credit and disclosure. Galileo, I argue, acted as though the corroboration of his observations were easy, not difficult. His primary worry was not that some people might reject his claims, but rather that those able to replicate them could too easily proceed to make further discoveries on their own and deprive him of credit. Consequently, he tried to slow down potential replicators to prevent them from becoming competitors. He did so by not providing other practitioners access to high-power telescopes and by withholding information about how to build them. This essay looks at the development of Galileo's monopoly on early telescopic astronomy to understand how the relationship between disclosure and credit changed as he moved from being an instrument-maker to becoming a discoverer and, eventually, a court philosopher.

In 1895 when the Lumière brothers unveiled their cinematographic camera, many scientists were elated. Scientists hoped that the machine would fulfill a desire that had driven research for nearly half a century: that of capturing the world in its own image. But their elation was surprisingly short-lived, and many researchers quickly distanced themselves from the new medium. The cinematographic camera was soon split into two machines, one for recording and one for projecting, enabling it to further escape from the laboratory. The philosopher Henri Bergson joined scientists, such as Etienne-Jules Marey, who found problems with the new cinematographic order. Those who had worked to make the dream come true found that their efforts had been subverted. This essay focuses on the desire to build a cinematographic camera, with the purpose of elucidating how dreams and reality mix in the development of science and technology. It is about desired machines and their often unexpected results. The interplay between what “is” (the technical), what “ought” (the ethical), and what “could” be (the fantastical) drives scientific research.

Einstein's initial fame came in late 1919 with a dramatic breakthrough in his general theory of relativity. Through a remarkable confluence of events and circumstances, the mass media soon projected an image of the photogenic physicist as a bold new revolutionary thinker. With his theory of relativity Einstein had overthrown outworn ideas about space and time dating back to Newton's day, no small feat. While downplaying his reputation as a revolutionary, Einstein proved he was well cast for the role of mild-mannered scientific genius. Yet fame demanded its price. Surrounded by social and economic unrest in Berlin, he was caught between two worlds, one struggling to be born, another refusing to die. Far from withdrawing, he threw himself into the political fray to become a symbol for international reconciliation during the early Weimar Republic. A decade later, his public image acquired another layer when he re-emerged as a Stoic sage and selfless humanitarian, a quasi-religious figure who saw himself as a modern-day Spinoza. Focusing on events of this period and the role of the German media in portraying them, this essay highlights the scientific and political undercurrents that drew Einstein into the public eye at a critical juncture in European history. Its broader aim is to show the import of these themes within the context of the vast literature on Einstein as well as the larger historiography of science.

After World War II, blood groups became a symbol of anti-racial science. This paper aims to shed new light on the post-WWII history of blood groups and race, illuminating the postcolonial revitalization of racial serology in South Korea. In the prewar period, Japanese serologists developed a serological anthropology of Koreans in tandem with Japanese colonialism. The pioneering Korean hematologist Yi Samyŏl (1926–2015), inspired by decolonization movements during the 1960s, excavated and appropriated colonial serological anthropology to prove Koreans as biologically independent from the Japanese. However, his racial serology of Koreans shared colonial racism with Japanese anthropology, despite his anti-colonial nationalism.

Science in film, and usual equivalents such as science on film or science on screen, refer to the cinematographic representation, staging, and enactment of actors, information, and processes involved in any aspect or dimension of science and its history. Of course, boundaries are blurry, and films shot as research tools or documentation also display science on screen. Nonetheless, they generally count as scientific film, and science in and on film or screen tend to designate productions whose purpose is entertainment and education. Moreover, these two purposes are often combined, and inherently concern empirical, methodological, and conceptual challenges associated with popularization, science communication, and the public understanding of science. It is in these areas that the notion of the deficit model emerged to designate a point of view and a mode of understanding, as well as a set of practical and theoretical problems about the relationship between science and the public.

Until the mid-nineteenth century the age-old idea of a cyclic or oscillating universe belonged to philosophical and religious discourse, with little connection to the physical and astronomical sciences. It was only with the emergence of thermodynamics, and even more so with the general theory of relativity, that it became possible to discuss the hypothesis within a scientific context. This paper follows the development of oscillating cosmological models in the twentieth century, when they were often discussed if rarely taken very seriously. How is it that this conception of the universe was seen as both fascinating and controversial? Can the persistence of such models be explained on a scientific basis alone? The idea of an oscillating universe has been in crisis several times, but recently it has experienced a spectacular revival in the form of models inspired by string theory and other theories of quantum gravity. This paper argues that the current revival of interest in cyclic models is not primarily rooted in their “aesthetic” qualities, as used to be the case. With the maturation of cosmology following the discovery of the cosmic microwave background in 1965, the hypothesis has become part of the discourse of modern theoretical cosmology, and as such it is discussed within a normal scientific context. On the other hand, extrascientific considerations continue to play a role, and they probably always will. The heritage from the past is still visible.

The context of discovery and collection of Siwalik fossils had far less to do with science than with the ability to effect “translations” that helped bring together a wide range of social worlds, from the Doab Canal engineers working at the foot of the Hills, surgeon-botanists at the Saharanpur Botanic Gardens, other colonial officials, the native “Hindoo” diggers and collectors, to all of whom the Siwalik Hills was a “boundary object,” a common factor that bound their lives together. In this colonial scientific collecting episode pertaining to the discovery of a new field of research, cooperation between different participants is achieved not by using methods of standardization but through an emphasis on greater heterogeneity, both in terms of the “allies” enrolled and fossils collected. Heterogeneity becomes a factor of strength rather than a weakness that deters the practice of science. This essay employs sociological reflection to examine the context of discovery, collection, and justification of a significant group of fossils in India in the 1830s–40s.

Whereas eugenics aspired to redeem the human species by forcing it to face the realities of its biological nature, Zionism aspired to redeem the Jewish people by forcing it to face the realities of its biological existence. The Zionists claimed that Jews maintained their ancient distinct “racial” identity, and that their regrouping as a nation in their homeland would have profound eugenic consequences, primarily halting the degeneration they fell prey to because of the conditions imposed on them in the past. Some Zionists believed in a Lamarckian driven eugenics that expected the “normalization” of Jewish life styles to change their constitution. Others believed that transforming conditions would shift selective pressures exerted on the Jewish gene pool.

During the 1950s it became apparent that antibiotics could not conquer all microbes, and a series of tests were developed to assess the susceptibility of microbes to antibiotics. This article explores the development and standardization of one such testing procedure which became dominant in the Nordic region, and how the project eventually failed in the late 1970s. The standardization procedures amounted to a comprehensive scheme, standardizing not only the materials used, but also the methods and the interpretation of the results. Focusing on Sweden and Norway in particular, the article shows how this comprehensive standardization procedure accounted for several co-dependent factors and demanded collaboration within and across laboratories. Whereas literature on standardization has focused mostly on how facts and artefacts move within and across laboratories, I argue for the importance of also attending to regions and territories. More particularly, while arguing that the practices, ideals, and politics related to what have been called the “Nordic welfare state” were contributing to the design of the standardized procedure in the laboratory, I also argue that Scandinavia was drawn together as a unified region with and by these very same practices.

Many of the epistemological issues that occupied natural philosophers of the seventeenth century were expressed visually in title-page engravings. One of those issues concerned the relative status to be accorded to evidence of the senses, as compared to knowledge gained by faith or reason. In title-page illustrations, the various arguments were often waged by a series of light metaphors: the Light of Reason, the Light of Nature, and the Lights of Sense, Scripture, and Grace. When such illustrations are examined with the authors' theological views in mind, it becomes apparent that in the first half of the seventeenth century, Catholic authors favored the Light of Reason as a source of truth, while Protestant authors favored the Light of Nature. Since by the end of the century it was widely accepted by scientists of all religious persuasions that certain knowledge must be grounded in sense evidence and the direct study of nature, one might argue that in this instance Protestantism was responsible for nurturing an important development of the Scientific Revolution. However, the skewed nature of the sample (the Catholics who used light metaphors were mostly Jesuits; the Protestants who did so mostly alchemists) and the large number of counterexamples available (many Catholic scientists believed in the ascendancy of the senses but failed to engage in metaphorical warfare) mitigate against taking this offshoot of the Merton thesis too seriously.

This paper aims to understand the emergence of comparative anatomy in the eighteenth century in the Parisian Académie Royale des Sciences. As early as the 1670s, a program centered on animal anatomy was conceived, which was a first attempt to give some autonomy to studies on animals and to link anatomy with natural history, but it declined after 1690. However, a variety of studies on animals was published in the Mémoires of the Académie during the eighteenth century. We propose a descriptive typology of them in order to explore the status of animals and the significance of anatomy in each type, and to determine, in particular, which elements of Perrault's program were passed on at the Académie throughout the century. We discuss the influence of this legacy on the development of comparative anatomy after 1750, especially in Daubenton's work.

The historiography of botanical maps has mainly concentrated on their alleged“golden age,” on maps drawn by famous first-generationplant geographers. This article instead describes botanical maps after the ageof discovery, and detects both a quantitative explosion and qualitativemodification in the late nineteenth century. By spotlighting the case of theplant geographer Oscar Drude (1852–1933), I argue that the dynamicsof botanical mappings were closely linked to a specific milieu of knowledgeproduction: the visual culture of Imperial Germany. The scientific upgrading ofmaps was stimulated by a prospering commercial cartographical market as well asa widespread practice of mediating between professionals and amateurs via mapsin the public sphere. In transferring skills and practices from these“popular” fields of knowledge to scientific domains,botanists like Oscar Drude established maps as an indispensable element ofbotanical observation. This wholesale dissemination of botanical maps had thus aformative influence on collective perception – thebotanist's “period eye” – regardingplant distribution.

This paper aims at contributing to the ongoing efforts to get a firmer grasp of the systematic significance of the entanglement of idealism and empiricism in Helmholtz's work. Contrary to existing analyses, however, the focal point of the present exposition is Helmholtz's attempt to articulate a psychological account of objectification. Helmholtz's motive, as well as his solution to the problem of the object are outlined, and interpreted against the background of his scientific practice on the one hand, and that of empiricist and (transcendental) idealist analyses of experience on the other. The specifically psychological angle taken, not only prompts us to consider figures who have hitherto been treated as having only minor import for Helmholtz interpretation (most importantly J.S. Mill and J.G. Fichte), it furthermore sheds new light on some central tenets of the latter's psychological stance that have hitherto remained underappreciated. For one thing, this analysis reveals an explicit voluntarist tendency in Helmholtz's psychological theory. In conclusion, it is argued that the systematic significance of Helmholtz's empirico-transcendentalism with respect to questions of the mind is best understood as an attempt to found his empirical theory of perception in a second order, normative account of epistemic subjectivity.