Apprenticeship was probably the largest mode of organized learning in early modern European societies, and artisan practitioners commonly began as apprentices. Yet little is known about how youths actually gained skills. I develop a model of vocational pedagogy that accounts for the characteristics of apprenticeship and use a range of legal and autobiographical sources to examine the contribution of different forms of training in England. Apprenticeship emerges as a relatively narrow channel, in which the master’s contribution to training was weakly defined and executed conservatively. The creation of complementary channels of formal instruction was constrained by cost and coordination problems. When we consider a range of British youths who obtained advanced skills as artisan practitioners (and engaged in invention or pursued natural philosophical interests), we see the importance of individual agency over institutional structures. For these youths, training could involve rejecting apprenticeship, engaging in periods of advanced study, including time in multiple workshops after the end of apprenticeship, and parallel campaigns to access scarce books and communities of scholarship.

The history of ballooning has received considerable attention from historians examining the technological innovations behind it as well as from scholars interested in aeronautical anecdotes concerning launches and disasters. The cultural importance of this new machine, however, remains less fully analyzed. This essay explores one facet of that history through a discussion of the commodification of launches in France and Great Britain. These two countries, which have larger middling classes as well as a higher degree of commercialization in general, provided a fertile environment for aeronauts seeking to instruct and entertain an audience willing to fund ballooning. Balloonists had to invent ways to market this scientific discovery and determine how best to attract paying customers. The audience was entertained while simultaneously empowered to act as witnesses to what balloonists presented as a scientific experiment.

Field research stations are households as a result of allegoric notions of the scientific family, and because they fulfill the purpose of a home in the field in a literal sense. They meet the practical and physical need for bed and board, as well as the emotional and intellectual need for social cohesion. I argue that this, in combination with local gender identity, opened the door for a woman of lower social strata, the daughter of a fisherman, to take upon herself the role as station household matriarch, thus gaining an integral role within an inner circle of influential scientists. Secondly, I argue that locally employed members of the research station were valued primarily for their social skills. For the sake of ensuring necessary conditions for scientific work, being abrasive was just as important as being agreeable.

In the winter of 1849–1850 in Königsberg, German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) conducted pioneering measurements concerning the propagation speed of stimulations in the living nerve. While recent historians of science have paid considerable attention to Helmholtz's uses of the graphic method, in particular his construction of an instrument called “myographion,” this paper draws attention to the inscription surfaces that he used in effective ways for capturing and transmitting his findings. Against the background of recent archival findings, I show that Helmholtz used isinglass copies of his graphical recordings in order to communicate the basic principle of previous measurements to the academic public. As the correspondence with his Berlin-based friend and colleague Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896) and the subsequent development of the myographion make clear, these curves were not meant as measurements but functioned as demonstrations. In other words, Helmholtz's curves did provide “images of precision” (Olesko and Holmes 1993) – but they were not precise images.

Eugenics is the paradigmatic case of the conflict between biology and medicine over social influence. Commenting on as essay by Debora Kamrat–Lang(1995), the paper reconstructs the historical roots of eugenics as a form of preventive medicine. A comparision between the development of some crucial aspects of eugenics between Germany and the United States reveals that the prevalence of the value placed on the individual over hereditary health of a population ultimately determined the outcome of the conflict but collective concepts may be revived by new biological knowledge

Argument

An attempt to understand and analyze a unique nineteenth-century musical instrument – the enharmonic piano from the collection of the Glinka Museum of Russian Musical Culture in Moscow – directs a historian towards Prince Vladimir Odoyevskiy’s efforts to construct a special musical scale corresponding to the indigenous tradition of Russian music. Known today mostly as an author of Romantic short stories, Odoyevskiy was also an amateur scientist and musician, a follower of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, and a mystic. He tried to design his new musical scale and instruments on the basis of experimental science and mathematics. Odoyevskiy’s life-long search for a synthesis of literature, music, positive science, and spirituality demonstrates how the adaptation and appropriation of European arts preceded and paved the way towards the appropriation of European sciences among the educated élite in nineteenth-century Russia. The tensions inherent in the process led to Odoyevskiy’s nationalist rebellion against the European musical standard, the equal temperament. His call for a different musical scale remained largely ignored in the nineteenth century, until the topic was raised anew by twentieth-century composers and musicians.

Argument

This article depicts the emergence of the modern, secular Jewish intellectual in the eighteenth century as a process of intellectual seduction and irresistible attraction of young men to knowledge outside the boundaries of Jewish culture. In the rhetoric of the Haskalah (Enlightenment), the cultural conversion was often described metaphorically as sexual attraction to a forbidden woman. The passion for knowledge inaccessible within the traditional Jewish culture (mainly of the natural sciences, but also of Hebrew, European languages, and philosophy) and intense curiosity were the hallmarks of the early maskilim (Jewish Enlighteners). It is difficult now to assess the sense of audacity, the awareness of sin, of guilt, and of subversion entailed in the desire to enter the realms of extra-Jewish and extra-religious knowledge, as well as the barriers of language and social norms that had to be crossed. The encounter of the Ashkenazi elite in eighteenth-century Europe with extra-Jewish knowledge was a traumatic conflict that grew in intensity as the shelf of Hebrew books and the number of maskilim grew.

A brief review of the Merton thesis shows that its restriction to England is arbitrary. An example from the historiography of modern physics suggests the possible payoff of an ecumenical Merton thesis and the means to explore it. A summary of the careers of men who practiced science literally in the church – men who built meridian lines in Italian cathedrals – indicates the range of social support of astronomical studies by Catholic institutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Gertrude Cox, first chair of North Carolina State University's Department of Experimental Statistics, worked as a consultant for the Ford Foundation to Cairo University's Institute of Statistical Studies and Researches in 1964. An analysis of this work provides a case study in the internationalization of the statistics profession, the systems of patronage available to scientists in the second half of the twentieth century, and the history of women in science. It highlights some of the complexities in the process of internationalization in science, showing that even when scientists cross national boundaries to promote their discipline, they may have as a goal the advancement of their own nationalistic interests, or those of their patrons. In documenting Cox's commitment to serving her professional community, this case study will show that some particularly feminine qualities of Cox's approach to her work enabled her to accomplish what her male colleagues tried unsuccessfully to do.

The tension between theoretical and practical knowledge was particularly problematic for trainee physicians. Unlike civic apprenticeships in surgery and pharmacy, in early modern England there was no standard procedure for obtaining education in the practical aspects of the physician’s role, a very uncertain process of certification, and little regulation to ensure a suitable reward for their educational investment. For all the emphasis on academic learning and international travel, the majority of provincial physicians returned to practice in their home area, because establishing a practice owed more to networks of kinship, patronage and credit than to formal qualifications. Only when (and where) practitioners had to rely solely on their professional qualification to establish their status as young practitioners that the community could trust would proposals to reform medical education, such as those put forward to address a crisis of medicine in Restoration London, which are examined here, be converted into national regulation of medical education in the early nineteenth century, although these proposals prefigured many informal developments in medical training in the eighteenth century.

Argument

“How should a modern artist react to the atomic age?” Time magazine posed this question in 1952 to open a review of an exhibition of paintings inspired by the “explosion of the atomic bomb” and by the “discovery of nuclear energy.” The energetic paintings of the Italian Spatial Movement were, according to Time, “almost as explosive as the bomb itself.” “Explosiveness” was a defining feature of much 1950s art, whose main impulse, gestural abstraction, has previously been understood as the urgent expression of the artist's subjectivity. This paper argues that explosiveness in art can also be seen as an “expression” of the realities of the nuclear era. Postwar artists were ambivalent about the explosive forces, both liberating and devastating, that lay within the atom. Toward the end of the 1950s, no longer content merely to represent atomic disintegration, some artists went so far as to propose the outright self-destruction of the work of art as the only fitting means of expression in the atomic age.

One must – and this is not an exaggeration – keep in mind that we are living in the atomic age, where everything material and physical could disappear from one day to another, to be replaced by nothing but the ultimate abstraction imaginable.

– Yves Klein 1958 (Klein 1973, 10)

Argument

The paper offers a reading of Aquinas' treatise On Faith as a source of inspiration for later developments in the Catholic world of learning. My main argument is that Aquinas' attempt to interpolate his discourse on faith into a clear epistemological context had long-term intellectual and institutional implications. On the intellectual level Aquinas' discourse had the effect of blurring the ancient dichotomy between episteme/knowledge-science, and doxa/opinion-belief, that had presupposed an ontological difference between their objects. On the institutional level Aquinas' discourse on faith allowed for the superposition of intellectual and political authority. The Jesuit educators of the early modern age, who identified themselves as Thomist, elaborated on the potential of the special configuration of knowledge and authority they had found in Aquinas' theology and transformed its principles into social-intellectual mechanisms to organize a framework in which to produce and transmit knowledge in the first global educational system.

This article explores historical sociology as a complementary source of knowledge for scientific research, considering barriers and facilitators to this work through reflections on one project. This project began as a study of the emergence and reception of the infant disorganized attachment classification, introduced in the 1980s by Ainsworth’s student Mary Main, working with Judith Solomon. Elsewhere I have reported on the findings of collaborative work with attachment researchers, without giving full details of how this came about. Here, I will offer personal reflections arising from the process, and my work in what Hasok Chang has called history as “complementary science.”

Conventional wisdom has it that Ashkenazic rabbinic culture was far less receptive to non-Jewish learning and worldly disciplines than its Sephardic counterpart. Whereas great Sephardic rabbis such as Maimonides and many others were masters of philosophy, medicine, and science, Ashkenazic rabbis usually restricted their intellectual horizons to talmudic literature and, in the best of cases, “broadened” them to include the Bible and/or Kabbalah. Ashkenazic rabbinic culture was, according to this image, insular and unidimensional.

This paper focuses on several Italian Jewish philosophers in the second half of the sixteenth century and the first third of the seventeenth century. It argues that their writings share a certain theology of nature. Because of it, the interest of Jews in the study of nature was not a proto-scientific but a hermeneutical activity based on the essential correspondence between God, Torah, and Israel. While the theology of nature analyzed in the paper did not prevent Jews from being informed about and selectively endorsing the first phase of the scientific revolution, it did render the Jews marginal to it. So long as Jewish thinkers adhered to this theology of nature, Jews could not adopt the scientific mentality that presupposed a qualitative distinction between the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture.

Argument

How well does Aristotle's abstract definition of nature in the Physics cope with some significant agricultural facts? Are its implications in tension with the workings of artificial teleology? How Aristotle might categorize domesticated plants is problematic: they are neither obviously natural nor obviously artificial. That artificial things generally retain an intrinsic source of change does not help us to settle the status of “living quasi-artefacts.” A survey of Theophrastus reveals that many agricultural techniques go against nature, rather than collaborating with it; and, moving from the practical to the theoretical, the Mechanica might suggest a scientific program at odds with the Aristotelian tradition of passive observation. Reflection on the Historia Animalium exposes difficulties in specifying natural and artificial environments which exacerbate the puzzle, and reinforce the rationale for Aristotelians to adopt an active stance when investigating nature. The Aristotelian olive remains mysterious.

Aimé Civiale's attempt at a complete photographic coverage of the High Alps seems to be a peculiar project at first sight. Carried out between 1859 and 1868, this was the earliest systematic attempt to introduce photography as a medium for studying the earth sciences. But as precise and determined as Civiale's approach appears, it was still quite unclear at the time how exactly photography could be useful in geology. This paper asks where the great confidence in the new medium in regard to mountain representations came from. The answer is not an easy one, as sources on Civiale's project are scarce. To make things even more difficult, the confidence in photography in the earth sciences during that time seems to have been based more on hope than on actual results. It is difficult to extract hope from written sources, let alone from images. I argue that this confidence was not so much based on photography's classic attributes of exactness or objectivity, but on its promise to produce unexpected results. Therefore this argument will inevitably have speculative elements. Thus, this paper can also be understood as an attempt to deal with a specific historiographical problem that regularly occurs when writing about images.

This paper makes use of the 1860 clash between T. H. Huxley and Richard Owen to examine the role of social context in scientific advance in the biological sciences. It shows how the social context of nineteenth-century England first favored the Coleridge-Owenite interpretation of the biological world and then, at mid-century and subsequently, allowed the Darwin-Huxley interpretation to win through. It emphasizes the complexity of the clash. Professional, personal, and generational agendas as well as scientific theory and fundamental philosophical intuition were at stake. The history, ultimately, provides a useful instance of Schutz ‘s and Scheler ‘s concept of societal factors controlling and selecting between flows of idealfactoren. Although Huxley is conventionally regarded as the victor I conclude by suggesting that the issue is not yet closed and that profound philosophical issues remain unresolved.

Had anybody told me at the beginning of my university studies that I would end up as a historian of science, I would not only have shaken my head in disbelief, I would in all probability not even have understood the prophecy. When I left high school, my interests ranged from literary writing to the life sciences. After an initial attempt to study biochemistry, which I aborted after a year, my early university education was in philosophy, with an emphasis on continental philosophy, from Descartes to Spinoza, from Kant to Hegel, from Nietzsche to Heidegger, pretty much the curriculum that would dominate the vast majority of the philosophical institutes in German universities in the mid-1960s. Having moved from Tübingen to Berlin, in addition I absorbed early on, as part of a group of students around Jacob Taubes, what came to be subsumed under the label of structuralism and post-structuralism: linguistics and semiotics from the Prague School through Noam Chomsky to Julien Greimas, grammatology from Ignace Gelb to Jacques Derrida, historical epistemology in its latest, Canguilhemian and Foucauldian versions, literary theory as practiced by Roland Barthes, to mention just a few names that formed the horizon of our student reading circles.

On this occasion, I shall try to respond to the suggestions that I report what it was like to be a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1930s engaged in writing a dissertation which took the shape in print of the monograph, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England. This, quite some time before the sociology of science had emerged with a cognitive and social identity. I shall not attempt an account – let alone an explanatory account – of the micro-environment at Harvard back then that provided local context for that study. Indeed, I suspect that the Gerald Holton, Everett Mendelsohn and Arnold Thackray reconstructions come closer to the intellectual and social reality of that time and place than anything I might reconstruct.