The study examines the trajectory of Uruguayan Political Science (PS) from a critical theory perspective. Concretely, the article focuses on PS’ institutional birth and early period (1980s and 1990s) and shows how broader political and ideological transformations had a significant impact on its discourse on Uruguayan democracy. Three components of such discourse are unpacked: The embrace of liberalism, the rejection of Marxism, and the uncritical engagement with the local political system, particularly the ‘traditional parties.’ The argument is supported by a systematic analysis of the 163 articles published by Revista Uruguaya de Ciencia Política (RUCP) from 1987 to 2012 and 22 in-depth interviews with scholars from the Instituto de Ciencia Política (ICP) at Universidad de la República (UdelaR).

Jacob (Henrique) de Castro Sarmento was a descendent of New Christians in Portugal who made his way to London in the early eighteenth century. There he professed Judaism openly, but he also advanced his scientific and medical pursuits, becoming particularly enamored of the Newtonian world view. This paper argues that Sarmento's attachment to Judaism was essentially a function of his personal relationship with Hakham David Nieto, and that Sarmento's Judaism was never really the full synthesis of scientific outlook and Jewish theology toward which Nieto pushed him. Rather, after Nieto's death Sarmento identified himself with scientific Newtonianism increasingly openly, while his religious identitly waned. Apparently he found science a more useful outlook in approaching the world, as did many Newtonians of that generation.

In contrast to “socialist eugenics” as a set of ideas on how to deal with the biological problems of mankind, “proletarian race hygiene” placed its emphasis on the environmental components of human life. This mode of eugenics always assumed a change in living conditions, or social milieu, to be the key to human betterment. Its objective was a gradualist, thoroughgoing improvement of human working and living conditions in order to bring about a life of harmony, solidarity and equality. These ideas can be traced back to phrenomesmerism at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and developed through a stage closely entwined with the Marxist thought of Daniels, Engels, Bebel, etc. (which has scarcely been acknowledged by more modern Marxist literature). This tradition was picked up in the early twentieth century by the Austrian sociologist Goldscheid as well as by the developmental biologist Kammerer. These men extended these ideas and incorporated them into the framework of “proletarian race hygiene,” involving as key concepts what they called “human economy” and “organic technology.”

“A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history,” Mahatma Ghandi is often quoted as saying, and, one might add cheekily, but with unquestionable truth, so too a small group of determined historians. Burke may have counseled that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but the Irishman clearly gave memory greater credit than it deserves. Not only do we use the past by many means and to many ends, but these means and ends necessarily color our view of the past, shape it, oftentimes constructing it forthright. And what is true for the layman may in fact be argued to be doubly true for the professional historian, his or her many years of considered disciplining notwithstanding. Being taught to be aware of our biases doesn't always help us overcome them, nor do we necessarily write about the past because we simply want to tell it “like it was.” Memory is fallible, and historical records incomplete – yes – but over and above these limitations, we often seek to recall the past and breathe new life into it for very particular reasons. Churchill knew this all too well. “History will be kind to me,” he wrote, “for I intend to write it.”

The impressive growth of the Swiss electricity supply industry in the late nineteenth cestury has usually been explained by Switzerland's abundant waterpower resouces, its well-equipped financial markets, and the mechanical skills of its Swiss workers and engineers. This article does not aim to deny the importance of these factors. Rather it seeks to explain how they developed synergetic effects and how they were knit together. The argument is put forward in three steps: First, I show the importance of the new technology's discursive integration, arguing that the development of specialized electric discourse led to a social shaping of technology that was highly compatible with generalized cultural patterns of late nineteenth-century Swiss society. The expressive dispositions and instituted means of expression that constitiute the elextric discourse were constantly pursuing and achieving effective resonances in other discursive fields. This allowed for a solid integration of the electrotechnical discourse in late nineteenth-century Swiss society.

Second, I argue that electrotechnology was modeled in such a way that it became coupled with existing technological (and scientific) practices, such as the national mapping endeavor, the urban gas and water supply, the sewer system, and the telegraphic networks. It is noteworthy that making electrotechnology compatible with other technological practices led not only to similar patterns in the design and management of both the old and the new technologies but also to operated with the existing water supply station.

Using the example of the electrification of Zurich, I then, in a third step, combine the two elements – discursive accommodation and practical assimilation – to demonstrate their effects on the selection and construction of technology. The article's somewhat complex argumentative strategy allows for a differentiated interpretation of the phenomenon and shows the importance of taking into consideration the sociocultural dimension of economic growth that had its roots in the diffusion of a new technology

Argument

Throughout the nineteenth century, French alienists reflected on the nature of idiocy, on its causes and possible treatments. Central to this reflection was the question of education. Was it possible to teach a child idiot to develop physically, intellectually, and morally? Schools were established, wards were rearranged, and educational methods were suggested. The extent to which all of this succeeded is hard to assess. The optimistic tone of educational treatises was never reflected in the life in the asylum. By the end of the century, the dichotomy between theoretical ideals and practical reality came to a halt as both methodological treatises on education and pleas for funding ceased. Soon, idiots left the wards and their schools for new classes within the common school system. While the former practice had proved successful in improving the patients' abilities, it was claimed that it had failed to bring about the social integration for which alienists had once hoped. This final period marked a rupture in the treatment of idiocy, both in terms of space and organization from asylums to schools and from alienists to psychologists.

Argument

Both the British naturalist Charles Darwin and the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz attempted explanations of the origin of variation: the former of the biological kind, the latter of the cultural kind. In so doing, both made claims that outstripped the evidence they possessed. But, in retrospect, in light of the history of the Nature versus Nurture debate, they nevertheless seem prescient, thereby possessing a kind of scientific “intuition.” By looking closely at these two intuitions, historically divided, but united by the concept of “variation,” this article argues that it is not always a “bad” thing to be either unaware or ignorant, that truths need not necessarily lead to other truths, and that one form of knowledge may be relevant to another, even when the second form is not consciously understood.

This paper examines self-inscription, a mode of census enumeration that emerged during the nineteenth century. Starting in the 1840s, a number of European states introduced self-inscription as an auxiliary means to facilitate the work of enumerators. However, a decisive shift occurred when Prussian census statisticians implemented self-inscription via individual “Zählkarten”—or “counting cards”—in 1871. The paper argues that scientific ideals of accuracy and precision prevalent in the sciences at the time motivated Prussian census officials to initiate self-inscription as an at-home scenario unmediated by enumerators, in which the census form alone was to yield truthful information from the respondents. By illuminating the bureaucratic means for implementing scientific ideals and practices in gathering personal census data, the paper offers an in-depth analysis of the media, technologies, and manpower that census takers deployed to reveal the epistemic—as well as social and political—impact of being “true to form.”

A growing cross-disciplinary literature has acknowledged the importance of verbal-visual interaction in the creation and communication of scientific texts. I contend that the proper understanding of these texts must flow from a hermeneutic model that takes verbal-visual interaction seriously, one that is firmly grounded in cognitive constraints and affordances. The model I propose has two modules, one for perception, derived from Gestalt psychology, the other for cognition, derived from Peirce's semiotics. I apply this model to an important but largely neglected text in the history of nineteenth-century science, Charles Lyell's The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, and to two accounts by well-respected historians of science, both of the same key discovery in quantum physics. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate the advisability of incorporating the exegetical practices my model entails into the everyday practices of historians of science.

Argument

I propose that both Moholy-Nagy's suggestions that products of applied, particularly scientific, photography be employed as exemplars for art photography, and his practice of integrating such applied photographs with art photographs in his publications and exhibitions, laid the groundwork for an aestheticization of scientific photography within the twentieth-century artistic avant-garde. This photographic “New Vision,” formulated in the 1920s, also effected a kind of “scientization” of art photography. Rather than Positivist mechanism, however, I argue that the science at play was “biocentrism,” the early twentieth-century worldview that can be described as Naturromantik updated by biologism. His key inspiration in this regard was one of the most important figures of biocentrism, the biologist and popular scientific writer Raoul Heinrich Francé, and his conception of Biotechnik [bionics], in which he proposed that all human technologies are based in natural technologies.

The biological, pure and simple, taken as the guide.

– Moholy-Nagy (1938, 198)

Argument

Focus of this paper is on the historiographical fate of Nicholas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei in Nazi Germany. Both played interesting roles in Nazi propaganda and the legitimization of Nazi political goals. In the “Third Reich,” efforts to claim Copernicus as a German astronomer were closely linked to revisionist policies in Eastern Europe culminating in the war-time expansion. The example of Galileo’s condemnation by the Catholic Church in 1633 became a symbol of its unjustified opposition to new “scientific” results, namely Nazi racial theory. After Catholic opposition against Nazi racial theory had reached a peak in 1937, the Galileo affair was turned into an instrument of Nazi propaganda against the Catholic Church.

Auch der Historiker steht in der Zeit, nicht über ihr.

Das Ewigkeitspostament hat er verloren.

Siegfried Giedion

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.

This essay examines Freud's construction of a mythical moment during early childhood, in which differences between male and female sexual identities are said to originate. It focuses on the way in which Freud divides fear and envy between the sexes, allocating the emotion of (castration) fear to men, and that of (penis) envy to women. On the one hand, the problems of this construction are pointed out, but on the other hand, it is shown that even a much-maligned myth may still provide food for thought.

Then, four critiques of Freud which have been articulated by prominent feminist psychoanalysts – Karen Horney, Nancy Chodorow, Luce Irigaray, and Jessica Benjamin – are presented, as well as the alternative visions of sexual identities which these thinkers have developed. The basic metaphors or economies guiding these visions of sexual difference are appraised in terms of their breadth and depth, with particular reference to their ability to acknowledge and integrate the presence of fear and envy as passions which are evoked but also repressed in the face of sexual difference.

From this angle, the contributions of Nancy Chodorow and Luce Irigaray are found to be more limited than those of Karen Horney and Jessica Benjamin, since the former two theorists allocate fear primarily or exclusively to men, as Freud has done, while they remain completely silent on envy. Differences in the scope or reach of the four feminist approaches are explained as a result of the theorists' differing perceptions of the social, political, and cultural position of women in patriarchal society.

I have conducted a similar investigation on a text by a different author (S. T. Aksakov: “Childhood Years of Bagrov's Grandson”). The results of this investigation, which was performed on a text passage of 100,000 letters, are presented in the following tables from which one can see how and to what extent the limit theorems of the calculus of probability actually become evident.

By the beginning of the fourteenth century, medicine had acquired a cultural role in addition to its traditional functions as a therapeutic art. Medical subject matter infiltrated the religious discourse via the new thirteenth-century encyclopedic literature. Preachers came to employ in their moral analogies a wider range of medical topics, using sophisticated medical examples and citations attributed to recognized medical authorities. These developments coincided with the growing prestige of medicine as an academic discipline.

The sphygmograph as designed and tested by Jules-Étienne Marey – an apparatus destined to write pulse tracings on paper – revolutionized medical diagnostics in the early 1860s. Since the accuracy with which this device registered and objectified the pulse was controversial from the outset, the young scholar Ernst Mach (soon to become a leading theoretician and philosopher) decided to thoroughly examine Marey's sphygmograph. The investigation led to the invention of an alternative, truly Machian, sphygmograph. Mach's sphygmograph had originated in the regime of theoretical and applied physics, whereas the instrument invented by Marey had been rooted in the regime of experimental physiology. This one type of instrument thus serves as the focal object of a comparative study of two antagonistic epistemological approaches to sphygmography.

In some cases our sensory organs are no longer capable of rendering processes in the external world perceptible to us. Their inadequacy expresses itself, for example, in phenomena that involve the kind of expansion of space and time in which the conditions for summary perception are no longer at all present. The resources that aid our immediate sense perception in these circumstances will thus be charged with the task of expanding or diminishing space and time to the extent that the contiguity and succession of events is comprehensible to us. The microscope is thus essentially based upon the principle of spatial expansion, the map on that of spatial diminution. The pertinent contrivances for these purposes are largely derived from the graphic arts. How stereoscopy and instantaneous photography, which is based on temporal expansion, facilitate our perception! In spite of the multifarious applications of photography, one has yet to take the step of employing it in the opposite direction, namely as a means of temporal diminution. We demonstrate that phenomena that take place in too ephemeral and too rapid a succession for our eyes can, with the help of instantaneous photographs in series, be analyzed with our senses as the event passes in a comparatively longer time. Quite analogously, we could also compress into a small duration the moments of an event separated widely from one another in time and thereby give our perception an understanding of the nature thereof.

The main thesis of this paper is that Copernicus's avoidance of all admission that scripture was contravened in De revolutionibus and his composition of its new Preface in 1542, as well as the non-publication of Rheticus's Treatise on Holy Scripture and the Motion of the Earth, were influenced by the early information they received on the failure of the 1541 Regensburg Protestant-Catholic colloquy, among the major consequences of which were significant increases in the problems concerning publishing works which contravened scripture. This is supported by examining Rheticus's first letter to Paul Eber in conjunction with the documents on the Regensburg colloquy and on censorship in Nuremberg, as well as with the existing literature on Copernicus and his context. In view of the main thesis, Copernicus's apparent dedication of the work to the Pope merits additional explanation, and the second thesis is that components of explanations for several aspects of those parts of the Preface that relate to the Papacy and to theologians can be provided via comparisons with previous diplomacy between Warmia and the Papacy which occurred or was being referred to during Copernicus's time. This is supported by examining these parts of the Preface in the light of a selection of the relevant documents.