Eugenics and race played significant roles in Ukrainian interwar nationalism, yet remain largely unstudied. The Ukrainian nationalists’ understanding of the racial makeup of their imagined community was contradictory as they struggled to reconcile their desire for racial “purity” with the realities of significant variations between the populations inhabiting the enormous territories which they sought to include in their intended state project. The “turn to the right” over the 1930s placed an increased onus on race, and eugenics came to occupy an increasingly prominent place in Ukrainian radical nationalism from around 1936. In 1941, the leading Ukrainian far-right organization, the OUN had developed a project for eugenic engineering, for their aborted state, declared in L’viv on June 30, 1941. Racial conceptualizations of the Ukrainian community figured prominently well into the Cold War era, gaining a new actuality and meaning in an émigré community dispersed across several countries.

Contrary to common portrayals of social Darwinism as a transference of laissez-faire values, the widely read evolutionism of Japan's foremost Darwinist of the early twentieth-century, Oka Asajirō (1868–1944), reflects a statist outlook that regards capitalism as the beginning of the nation's degeneration. The evolutionary theory of orthogenesis that Oka employed in his 1910 essay, “The Future of Humankind,” links him to a pre-Darwinian idealist tradition that depicted the state as an organism that develops through life-cycle stages. For Oka, laissez-faire capitalism marked the moment when the state began to decline toward extinction due to the orthogenetic overdevelopment of hitherto subordinate individual egos. Because conservative bureaucrat-intellectuals had been drawing upon this same organicist-developmental tradition since the 1880s in an attempt to forestall the social ills of industrialism, Oka's call for statist measures, including eugenics, to lessen and delay the atomizing, enervating, and corrupting influence of capitalism articulated the political vision of officialdom. Statist evolutionism, not social Darwinism, might be the term that best describes Oka's approach.

in 1612, lodovico cigoli completed a fresco in the pauline chapel of the basilica of santa maria maggiore in rome depicting apocalypse 12: “a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet.” he showed the crescent moon with spots, as his friend galileo had observed with the newly invented telescope. considerations of the orthodox view of the perfect moon as held by philosophers have led historians to ask why this clearly imperfect moon in a religious painting raised no eyebrows. we argue that when considered in the context of biblical interpretation and the rhetoric of the counter-reformation, the imperfect moon under the woman's feet was entirely consistent with traditional interpretations of apocalypse 12.

Recurring economic crises, like the one of 2007-2008, led to criticism of economic research and a demand to develop new strategies to avoid them. Standard economic theories use conventional approaches to deal with economic challenges, heterodox theories try to develop alternatives with which to face them. It remains unclear whether the 2007-2008 crisis led to a change in economic research as well as to a consideration of alternative approaches. We used co-word analysis to map the structure of economic research in Germany between 2005 and 2014. Core topics within economic research, such as “market” or “production” hardly shift and can be linked to standard economic theories. Peripheral topics such as “inequality” or “unemployment” show greater dynamics. However, only a few of these topics can be linked to heterodox approaches. Certain changes have occurred in reaction to the 2007-2008 crisis. However, the unchanged importance of standard economic topics raises the question whether these changes are sufficient to face coming economic challenges.

This paper analyses a process of co-construction of knowledge and its multiple forms of communication in a country of the European periphery in the early twentieth century. It focuses on Lieutenant Manuel Soares de Melo e Simas, a politically engaged Portuguese astronomer, who moved from amateur to professional during the political transition from the monarchy to the republic. Melo e Simas paralleled his professional career in continuous activity of communicating science to the public in the context of republicanism in a double way, by responding to the agenda of republicanism and by playing an active role in shaping it. He aimed at educating lay audiences in the various ways of astronomy, and he reached out to as many people as possible by exploring a multitude of communication channels, from lectures to articles in newspapers and journals. Voiced often within newly created republican institutions, the praxis and the ideas of Melo e Simas helped to mold the new republican scientific ethos. By going beyond mere emphasis on scientism and positivism, usually taken to be the defining characteristics of the new republican ethos, this paper argues that science and the specificities of its multiple forms of communication were central to the way Melo e Simas shaped the republican ideology. Furthermore, popularization of science was used to legitimize the status of professional scientists at the same time that it helped reinforce their institutional setting, still to be negotiated in the forthcoming decades through a complex process which deserves further historical analysis.

The article studies a small Hebrew book called “The Wars of God” composed by an Anglo-Jewish jeweler who lived in London at the end of the eighteenth century. The book is interesting in further documenting the Jewish response to Newtonianism, that amalgam of scientific, political, and religious ideas that pervaded the culture of England and the Continent throughout the century. Hart, while presenting Newton in a favorable light, departs from other Jewish Newtonians in voicing certain reservations about Newton's alleged religious orthodoxy, specifically his fear that the force of gravitation might be explained independent of God's divine providence. The key to understanding Hart's unique stance is his reliance on two eighteenth-century Christian theologians: William Whiston and Robert Greene, particularly the latter. In staking out this position, Hart also endorsed the theological position of his more well known Jewish colleague David Levi, the publisher of his Hebrew text. Both men reveal together the capacity of Jewish thinkers to absorb the dominant trends of thinking by the majority culture while defending honestly and defiantly the integrity of their religious faith and community.

The publication of this volume appears to be the most recent in a group of works whose appearance marks renewed interest in Duhem. Over the past ten years, attention has been focused on Duhem's life (Jaki 1984), his physics (Jaki 1984; Nye 1986, 208–23), his philosophy of science (Jaki 1984, chap. 9; Paul 1979, chap. 5; Ariew 1984),' and his history of science (Jaki 1984, chap. 10; Martin 1976). But the significance of this translation is that - leaving aside To Save the Phenomena – for the first time we have a partial translation into English of one of the two great historical works that revitalized the study of medieval science.

Sorokin, Pitirim Alexandrovich, born January 21,1889, in the small village of Turia in Russia [died 1968]. Student at the Teachers' Seminary in the province of Kostroma in Russia (1903–6), at the evening school in St. Petersburg (1907–9), at the Psycho- Neurological Institute in St. Petersburg (1910–14); Magistrant of Criminal Law (1915); Ph.D in Sociology (1922); Privatdozent at the Psycho-Neurological Institute (1914–16), at the University of St. Petersburg (1916–17); Professor of Sociology at the same university (1919–22); Professor of Sociology at the Agricultural Academy (1919–22), at the University of Minnesota (1924–30); Chairman of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University from 1930. Member of the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Peasant's Soviet (1917); Secretary to the Prime Minister [ Kerensky ] (1917); member of the Russian Constitutional Assembly (1918); sentenced to death and finally exiled by the communist administration (1922); emigrated to the United States (1923), naturalized (1930). Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Sociological Association; honorary member of the International Institute of Sociology of the Czechoslovakian Academy for Agriculture, of the German Sociological Society, and of the Ukrainian Sociological Society; President of the International Institute for Sociology (1936–37). Member of the Greek-Orthodox Church.

Between 1550 and 1650, the intellectual elite of Ashkenazic (German-and Yiddish-speaking) Jews, including rabbis such as Yom Tov Lipmann Heller (1578–1654), showed a marked interest in astronomy, and to a lesser degree in the natural sciences generally. This is one aspect of the assimilation of medieval Jewish rationalism by that group. Passages from Heller‘s writings show his familiarity with medieval and early modern Hebrew astronomical texts, and his belief that astronomy should be studied by all Jewish schoolboys. Heller‘s astronomical views were then influenced by the discoveries and debates of his period. Between 1614 and the 1630‘s, Heller moved from an Aristotelian to a Tychonic view of the nature of the celestial bodies. Inspired, furthermore, by the notion of a natural order subject to change, and basing himself on the exegesis of ancient rabbinic texts, Heller offered what we have termed” midrashic natural histories”: namely, a hypothesis concerning the development of a certain type of animal, and another concerning the dimming of the moon and its movement into a lower orbit.

In the early twentieth century, counting and speaking horses, like the famous Clever Hans or the “Horses of Elberfeld,” became widely debated subjects in experimental psychology. The idea was to determine whether their learning success was only a fraud, or if it might open up a new chapter in “animal psychology” - or even belong to the realm of parapsychology and telepathy. When their tricks were discovered, the teachers of the animals were marked as charlatans. Both the attempts to detect charlatans and the efforts to avoid this accusation during the talking horse experiments proceeded using the method of introducing new levels of communication into the human-animal interaction process in order to substantiate each respective standpoint. This paper argues that the scientific studies and debates on the talking horses are relevant not only from psychological, biological, and semiotic vantage points, but also from the perspective of communications theory, giving rise to the foundational issue of levels of communication.

This article examines the medical and political discussions regarding a controversial medicinal bark from Ecuador – cundurango – that was actively sponsored by the Ecuadorian government as a new botanical cure for cancer in the late nineteenth century United States and elsewhere. The article focuses on the commercial and diplomatic interests behind the public discussion and advertising techniques of this drug. It argues that diverse elements – including the struggle for positioning scientific societies and the disapproval of the capacities of Ecuadorian doctors, US abolitionist history, regional and local political struggles – played a role in the quackery accusations against cundurango and its promoters. The development and international trade of this remedy offer interesting insights into the global history of drugs, particularly how medical knowledge was challenged during a period when scientific medicine was struggling for hegemony. It explores how newspapers expanded “the public interest” in a possible cancer cure.

The purpose of this article is to read Heidegger's critique of modern science —especially in What Is a Thing? —as evolving from ontological issues that preoccupied Heidegger in the period after the publication of Being and Time. The main issues at stake are formal ontology and its connection with mathematics and modern mathematical physics, and the distinction between formal and regional ontology. The connection between these issues constitutes Heidegger's understanding of mathematics. An exposition of Heidegger's notion of the “mathematical” can help us uncover his assumptions in his critique of modern science, and give us new possibilities for evaluating it.

This paper contrasts the research strategies of two women reformers, Florence Kelley and Ellen Swallow Richards, which entailed different strategies of social reform. In the early 1890s, social activist Florence Kelley used the social survey as a weapon for legal reform of the working conditions of women and children in Chicago’s sweatshop system. Kelley’s case shows that her surveys were most effective as “grounded” knowledge, rooted in a local community with which she was well acquainted. Her social survey, re-enacted by lawmakers and the press, provided the evidence that moved her target audience to legal action. Chemist and propagator of the Home Economics Movement Ellen Richards situated the social problem, and hence its solution, not in exploitative working conditions, but in the inefficient and wasteful usage of available resources by the poor. Laboratory work, she argued, would enable the development of optimal standards, and educational programs should bring these standards to the household by means of models and exhibits. With this aim, she constructed public spaces that she ran as food laboratories and sanitary experiments. Kelley and Richards thus crossed the doorsteps of the household in very different ways. While Florence Kelley entered the household to change the living and working conditions of the poor by changing the law, Richards flipped the household inside out by bringing women into hybrid public laboratory spaces to change their behavior by experiment and instruction.

This article argues that in order to discern the place of science in the epistemology of Chinese common readers, it is critical to look beyond the coastal enclaves where foreign missionaries and experts interacted with Chinese scholars and officials, beyond the translated treatises they produced, and even beyond the various forms of new media that attempted to more widely disseminate the principles of Western science. Instead, it asserts the need to engage a different register of materials that were less directly tied to foreign expertise, more directly in line with pre-existing lineages of printed materials, and at the same time, integral to early-twentieth-century Chinese circuits of information. The article focuses explicitly on one print phenomena that has been completely overlooked in the scholarship to date, the expansion and revitalization of the genre of texts known as wanbao quanshu 萬寶全書 (comprehensive compendia of myriad treasures) in the late Qing (1890-1911) and early Republic (1912-1930).

The contemplation of the heavenly vault suggests to any generalizing intelligence the idea of the world suspended within this concavity. During rude barbaric times such as the High Middle Ages – the records of which are precious in this respect – it was thought that this vault rested on the surface of the Earth like a glass bell. And when experience gained firstly by terrestrial travels and afterwards by circumnavigation showed that this was a delusory phenomenon and, at the same time, that the Earth was an autonomous sphere floating within space, the [heavenly] vault became in turn a hollow and translucent sphere containing the concentric world, like the white of an egg surrounding the yolk. Cosmological experience then revealed that the stars were situated at different heights in the supposed vault, which compelled imagining new concentric spheres. Finally, it was discovered that there are neither such spheres nor such a vault; that the amplification and multiplicity of the latter were illusions – as was the concave aspect of the sky – and that the space enclosing the universe is an abyss.

During the nineteenth century, physicists and chemists, using different linguistic modes of expression, sought to describe the world for different purposes; thus, both disciplines gradually were nudged toward demarcation and self-image identification. In the course of doing so the rich complexity of the empire of chemistry was born. The essential challenge was closely connected with analysis, synthesis, and chemical process: learning the art of watching substances change and making substances change. Pursued in theory-poor and phenomenology-rich contexts chemistry nevertheless made itself intellectually, professionally, societally, and industrially creditable and attractive. The developing links between physics and chemistry are examined in this paper from the perspective of the discipline of chemistry more specifically than from the side of physics. Chemists came to believe that essentially physics was no more than mechanics. All else belonged to the domain of chemistry.

Not before the last decades of the century were firm collaborative links and genuine reciprocity fostered between physics and chemistry, and then primarily on account of the common utility of scientific research tools. At a more fundamental level physics and chemistry, in contradistinction to all the other natural sciences, experienced partial overlap and convergence because of unique mutual reliance on the construction of systems each according to its own theoretical conceptions. Still amalgamation was unthinkable. Eventually physical chemistry was loosened from chemistry in the same way that, somewhat later, chemical physics was emancipated from physics. The intrinsic messiness of chemistry, one might suggest, tends more readily to foster Bohr's opinion that “there is no rock bottom to the study of nature,” rather than Einstein's view that “we can realistically, ultimately, put it all together.”

Argument

Studies of Helmholtz’s popular lectures on science have concentrated on reconstructing his vision of the scientific enterprise, of its nature, its benefits, and its “civilizing power.” This paper offers a different perspective by focusing on Helmholtz’s attempts to expose his own scientific work to a wider public. Drawing on recent discussions about how to study science popularization, it analyzes how he made his work on sensory physiology accessible to various audiences. It is argued that the exposition of the theory of vision comprises a complex, multilayered transformation of epistemic messages, which includes the recasting of arguments, recontextualizations, shifting emphasis, and significant changes in style. The popular writings on vision were directed to several different audiences, and, as such, manifest a delicate balance between conflicting agendas. An analysis of the texts indicates that neither the traditional two-step model of science popularization nor the more recent attempt to regard popularization as an “expository continuum” provides appropriate historiographical frameworks to study the popularization of scientific knowledge.

Most lay users of statistics think in terms of means (averages), variances or the square of the standard deviation, and Gaussians or bell-shaped curves. Such conventions are entrenched by statistical practice, by deep mathematical theorems from probability, and by theorizing in the various natural and social sciences. I am not claiming that the particular conventions (here, the statistics) we adopt are arbitrary. Entrenchment can be rational without its being as well categorical (excluding all other alternatives), even if that entrenchment claims also to provide for categoricity. 1 provide a detailed description of how a science is “normal” and conventionalized. A characteristic feature of this entrenchment of conventions by practice, theorems, and theorizing, is its highly technical form, the canonizing work enabled by apparently formal and esoteric mathematical means.

The secret of invention or the art of inventing has recently become the object of positive or experimental research, aimed at discovering the logic of the initial mental processes that lead to “innovation.” But the problem is old and goes back to antiquity: The art of memory, rhetoric, symbolics. Does the succession of thought in invention follow a rule, such that its variations could be classified? Here I offer but a general direction: There is an analogy between the two relations: invention/innovation and fecundation/maturation – namely, a male and a female principle.

The Ancients thought that inventing was a divine art and that man receives the spark to then brood over its fruit in his mind. Today's still dominant materialist tendency insists on the importance of this secondary maturation and minimizes the role of the primordial spark.

Thus becomes possible the ranking according to a unique order — but not without hesitations and guilt — of thinkers as far apart as Mandeville, Adam Smith, Hegel, Buffon, Rousseau, and Herder, to find the contemporary trend to which François Dagognet belongs.