Argument

Seeing a prodigious cure happen and then testifying about it certainly differs from attending an air pump experiment in order to bear witness to it. Yet early-modern saint-making and the “new” or “experimental philosophy” shared juridical roots, and thereby an understanding of the role of testimony for the establishment of “matters of fact” and for the production of legitimate knowledge. The reforms carried out after the Council of Trent, especially during Urban VIII's pontificate (1623–1644), of the juridical procedures for saint-making in the Catholic Church implied a new attitude towards the examination of proposed miracles. Most of these miracles were healings. While the appeal to medical expertise had long been common, and skepticism had often manifested itself regarding cures or extraordinary bodily phenomena, both were now given formal status. Miracle inquests henceforth leaned towards refuting miraculousness by means of natural explanations. The procedure was systematized in a treatise published in the 1730s by Prospero Lambertini (later pope Benedict XIV). The combination of Lambertini's work with the canonization causes in which he acted as the “devil's advocate” in charge of disputing arguments favorable to a sainthood candidate allows for a reconstruction of the interplay between the juridical and scientific economies of saint-making, and of the role of testimony in the production of trust and evidence.

Argument

Within the Republic of Letters the art of experiment led to immense reorientation and an extensive redrawing of the enlightened map of natural knowledge. This paper will investigate the formative period of the exact sciences from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century when the persona of the experimentalist as a scientific expert was shaped. The paper focuses on Moritz Hermann Jacobi’s experimental knowledge derived from his modeling of an electro-magnetic self-acting machine and the social and epistemological problems of its integration into traditional academic life. His struggle to achieve academic recognition and credibility for his experimental work reflects not just his individual quandary, but important structural problems of the historical development of experimental knowledge traditions and science in what has been called the “second scientific revolution.”

In this essay, I sketch a problem-based framework within which I locate the concept of “organism” in the system theories of Georg Ernst Stahl, Théophile Bordeu, and Paul-Joseph Barthez. Around 1700, Stahl coins the word “organism” for a certain concept of order. For him, the concept explains the form of order of living bodies that is categorically different from the order of other (dead) bodies or composites. At the end of the century, the “organism” as a specific form of order becomes a major topos in many discourses. I will not so much focus on experiments and objects as on basic problems that contribute to the general framework of the concept of organism as a key concept of the vitalist movement between 1700 and 1800. For this purpose, I will investigate the combination of three explanatory tools. These tools refer to regulating agents, functional interactions, and stimulus-reactions-schemes within individual organic systems of forces. They are related to various themes – especially to energy, sensibility, and sympathy. I will retrace some aspects of these relations.

This essay argues that a prime source of contemporary technological pessimism is the loss of place that accompanied the conquest of space through the construction of large technological systems of transportation and communication. This loss may involve physical destruction, or it may involve the more subtle withdrawal of economic, political, and cultural meaning and power from localities in favor of these far-flung systems.

The argument proceeds in five stages. First, key terms are defined, notably “environmental damage” and “technological system.” Second, the origins of the modern ideology of circulation are traced in the development of a capitalist world-economy, and in the historical theories of Enlightenment philosophes (with special attention to Turgot and Condorcet). Third, possible relations between that ideology and nineteenth-century systems-building are briefly sketched. Fourth, the ambiguous political character of these systems — at once liberating and constraining — is noted. Finally, the cultural challenge of overcoming spatial alienation is described with reference to some late nineteenth-century writers who sought to trace new pathways both spatially and linguistically.

Argument

When electricity became a commodity in 1900, it furnished Germany with new attractions and revolutionized everyday life with all kinds of tools and gadgets; it also opened up a new space for investigating psycho-physical interaction, reviving ideas of a close linkage between psychic life and electricity. The paper traces the emergence of this electro-psychological framework beyond “electroencephalography,” the recording of electrical brain waves, to “diagnoscopy,” personality profiling by electric phrenology.

Diagnoscopy opens a window onto the scientific and public cultures of electricity and psychical processes in Weimar Germany. It garnered enormous attention in the press and was quickly taken up by several institutions for vocational guidance, because it offered a rapid and technological alternative to laborious psychological testing or “subjective” interviewing. Academic psychology and leading figures in brain research reacted with horror; forging counter measures which finally resulted in this technique being denounced as quackery. A few years later, the press celebrated electroencephalography as a mind-reading device, whereas the neuroscientists remained initially skeptical of its significance and the very possibility of an “electroencephalogram” (EEG) before they adapted electroencephalography as a tool for representing various neuro-psychiatric conditions in patterns of recorded signals.

The blending of psychophysiology and electrical engineering marks the formation of an electric epistemology in scientific as well as public understanding of the psyche. The transformations of electrodiagnosis from diagnoscopy to the EEG are indicative of a cultural shift in which electricity changed its role from being the power source for experimental apparatuses to becoming a medium of psychic processes.

David Bloor often wrote that Karl Mannheim had “stopped short” in his sociology of knowledge, lacking the nerve to consider the natural sciences sociologically. While this assessment runs counter to Mannheim's own work, which responded in quite specific ways both to an encroaching “modernity” and a looming fascism, Bloor's depiction becomes clearer when considered in the light of his principal introduction to Mannheim's work — a series of essays by Robert Merton. Bloor's reading and appropriation of Mannheim emerged from his background in experimental psychology and his attempts to supercede Merton's own structural-functionalist program for the sociology of knowledge. By retracing this extended trail of readings and re-readings, we may begin to understand the roots of Bloor's curious interpretation of Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, and inquire in a reflexive way about the present and future directions of science studies.

Argument

The psychoanalytic setting counts today as one of the familiar therapeutic rituals of the Western world. Taking up some of the insights of the anthropology of science will allow us to account for both the social and the material arrangements from which Freud's invention emerged at the end of the nineteenth century out of the clinical laboratories and private consulting rooms of practitioners of hypnosis. The peculiar way of neglecting or forgetting the object world and the institution of the psychoanalyst as a “transference object” will be traced back to multiple reconfigurations in the history of hypnotism in France and in Germany. In this process, different practitioners tried to achieve a synthesis of clinical work and experimental psychology, with the aim of objectifying knowledge about human subjectivity. While Freud retained the claim of psychoanalysis performing an experimental situation, he set apart his own setting from the objectifying practices which were characteristic of this experimental psychology located in the clinic and the private consulting room.

It is not easy to over-estimate the importance of the part played by hypnotism in the history of the origin of psychoanalysis. From a theoretical as well as from a therapeutic point of view, psycho-analysis has at its command a legacy which it has inherited from hypnotism.

Sigmund Freud, A Short Account of Psycho-Analysis ([1923] 1924, 192)

This paper considers how certain ideas elaborated by the Montpellier vitalists influenced the rise of French alienism, and how those ideas framed the changing view of passions during the eighteenth century. Various kinds of evidence attest that the passions progressively became the focus of medical attention, rather than a theme specific to moralists and philosophers. Vitalism conceived of organisms as animal economies understandable through the transformations of the various modes of their sensibility. This allowed some physicians to define a kind of anthropological program, which viewed human beings as a whole, with no distinction between le physique and le moral. The passions in this context became a specific alteration of the animal economy. Such an anthropological program was the framework within which Pinel understood the various classes of madness as disease – those troubles being general disturbances of the animal economy, which presupposed a knowledge of the latter, to be addressed and cured. In this view, and departing from the vitalist writers with regard to the specificity of mental illness as such, Pinel proposed another conception of the relations between passions and madness, and elaborated a general view of their status in etiology and therapeutics; those views were taken up and systematized by Esquirol, who finally defined a new kind of continuity between passion and madness, demonstrated by the idea that some kinds of madness that he called “monomania” had as a principle a “ruling passion” that the alienist, this novel medical specialist, had to unveil and address.

This article uses the history of early sound recording technology in the united States between 1878 and 1915 to show how published discourse contributed to the way the talking machine was defined and situated as a commercially viable product. Comparing the published accounts of Edison's phonograph and Berliners gramophone in popular scientific articles between 1878 and 1896 illustrates that technological advances in sound recording technology take on important cultural meanings. Critical to these meanings is the way in which the technological “fidelity” is linguistically transformed into an aesthetic quality, projected and interpreted within demonstrable values of musical culture. Beginning in 1902, the Victor Talking Machine Company, formed to market the gramophone, took advantage of these cultural meanings to claim a technological advantage over Edison's cylinder recorder. Whose voice was recorded became part of the claim to technological superiority. The Victor Company succeeded in capitalizing “Culture” by promoting their recordings of opera stars like Enrico Caruso as technologically and culturally faithful to live musical performance and as a democratically available access to a privileged lifestyle. Thus did the Victor Company use a terrier and a tenor to legitimate their talking machine as an American musical instrument

The development of modern mathematical biology took place in the 1920s in three main directions: population dynamics, population genetics, and mathematical theory of epidemics. This paper focuses on the first trend which is considered the most significant. Modern mathematical theory of population dynamics is characterized by three aspects (the first two being in a somewhat critical relationship): the emergence of the mathematical modeling approach, the attempt at establishing it in a reductionist-mechanist conceptual framework, and the revival of Darwinism. The first section is devoted to the analysis of the concept of mathematical model and the second one presents an example of a mathematical model (Van der Pol's model of heartbeat) which is a good prototype of that concept. In section 3 the main trends of mathematization of biology and the cultural and scientific contexts in which they found their development are discussed. Sections 4 and 5 are devoted to the contributions of V. Volterra and A. J. Lotka, to the analysis of the differences of their scientific conceptions, and to a discussion of a case study: the priority dispute concerning the discovery of the Volterra-Lotka equations. The historical analysis developed in this paper is also intended to detect the roots of some recent trends of mathematization of biology.

In recent years, research on modeling in both the philosophy of science and the social studies of science and technology has undergone an acute transformation. Philosophers and social scientists have begun to realize that science, in the words of Carrier and Nordmann, has increasingly shifted its focus from “epistemic or truth-oriented” research to “application-dominated” research. “Science is viewed today as an essentially practical endeavor” (Carrier and Nordmann 2011, 1) and should be considered in the context of its application. In accordance with this re-orienting of science, research on modeling has also changed. Still considering models as genuinely scientific tools, philosophers and social scientists promoted the “practice turn” that suggests a sharper focus on pragmatic issues and the performative and productive role of modeling. Application of models for the resolution of practice-related problems is viewed as an extension of science.

Patients suffering from advanced, incurable cancer often receive from their doctors proposals to enroll in a clinical trial of an experimental therapy. Experimental therapies are increasingly perceived not as a highly problematic approach but as a near-standard way to deal with incurable cancer. There are, however, important differences in the diffusion of these therapies in Western countries. The large diffusion of experimental therapies for malignant disease in the United States contrasts with the much more restricted diffusion of these therapies in the United Kingdom. The difference between the two reflects differences in the organization of health care in these countries and distinct patterns of the professionalization of medical oncology in America and in Britain. The high density and great autonomy of medical oncologists in the United States encourages there the diffusion of experimental therapies (regarded by some as expensive and inefficient); the lower density of these specialists in the United Kingdom and their task as consultants and not primary caregivers, favors the choice of more conservative (for some, too conservative) treatments. Theoretically, the decision as to whether patients suffering from advanced, incurable cancer will be steered toward an experimental therapy or toward palliative care depends on the values and beliefs of these patients and their physicians. In practice, however, such choice does not depend exclusively on the individual' cultural background and ethical values, but is also strongly affected by the — culturally conditioned — Professional and institutional structure of medicine

It has long been apparent that in the nineteenth century, mathematics in France and England developed along different lines. The differences, which might well be labelled stylistic, are most easy to see on the foundational level. At first this may seem surprising because it is such a fundamental area, but, upon reflection, it is to be expected. Ultimately discussions about the foundations of mathematics turn on views about what mathematics is, and this is a question which is answered by a variety of different groups including mathematicians, students, curricular planners, parents, etc. Mathematical practice rests on some kind of mixture of the answers to this fundamental question which come from these diverse groups. Comparing the cultural matrices which supported mathematics in France and Britain in the first decades of the nineteenth century sheds light on the real though often subtle differences in the ways the subject was pursued in the two countries.

The article is based on the controversies relating to conducting experiments and licensing AIDS treatments in France in the 1980s and 1990s. We have identified two political operators, i.e. two issues around which tensions have grown between the different generations of actors involved in these controversies: 1) the way of thinking about patient autonomy, and 2) the way in which objectivity regarding medical decisions is built. The article shows that there are several regimes of objectivity and autonomy, and that it is at the meeting point of the two dimensions that very different political forms of medicine have developed. In the case of AIDS, the article identifies four of these forms (liberal and conservative clinical traditions and therapeutic modernity – enclosed, then participative) and analyzes the dynamics of their emergence and opposition. We discuss an “objectivity/autonomy” diagram as a conceptual framework which enables us (above and beyond AIDS) to think about changes in contemporary medicine.

This paper deals with the achievements of those French mathematicians active in the period 1800–1830 who oriented their work specifically around the needs of engineering and technology. In addition to a review of their achievements, the principal organizations and institutions are noted, as is their importance as sources of employment and influence.

The argument is centered on the word ‘neglected“ in the title. A case is made that a mass of work was produced which made considerable impact at the time but has been overlooked or even completely ignored by historians since. The paper begins with a general discussion of the notion of context, both for the historical figures and for their supposed historians, and several examples of historical distortion are given.

Regarding France itself, we see a professional and research profile rather different from that in other countries. The question of national differences in the organization and prosecution of science is thereby sharply exposed.

Developments in theoretical physics, even when they are revolutionary for physics, usually do not enter public awareness. The reaction to the special relativity theory is one of the few exceptions. The conceptual changes brought by special relativity to our notions of space and time, induced a lively debate not only within intellectual circles but in many strata of the educated middle class. In this article, I focus on a particular moment of public reaction to special and general relativity theory and to its creator Albert Einstein. I try to paint a picture of the anti-Einstein campaign in Germany of 1920, with finer brush strokes than those applied previously by others. My aim is to embed the campaign into the cultural and political climate of the Weimar republic. Without leaving the realm of physics only a superficial understanding of what happened seems possible. My thesis is that the anti-Einstein-campaign was organized, and the physicists involved in it (ab)used, mainly in order to rally support for one of the German right-wing parties, the Deutschnationale Volkspartei.

The status of the person is analyzed as represented by the life sciences under the influence of modern physico–chemical and molecular biology.

At the same time the linguistic structure of reality as seen through formalized scientific discourse is not that of a language, but rather that of operational symbolisms, so that the judeo–Greek tradition of Verb as creating and Logos as procreating — which is probably at the origin of the surprising confidence in the possibility of dominating nature through words and formulae — could be suc–cessful only through the depersonalization of language.

Notwithstanding appearances, the phenomena of structural and functional self–organization do not really change this situation.

In this context the question of the status of the person and of the intentional subject has to be dealt with pragmatically, giving up the notion of a unified scientific theory that would take into consideration at the same time the experi–mental sciences (physics, chemistry, biology and “objective” human) and the human sciences as linking subjectivity and intentionality.

Psychology has been frequently subjected to the criticism that it is an unreflexive science — that it fails to acknowledge the reflexive properties of human action which influence psychologists themselves as well as their subjects. However, even avowedly unreflexive actions may involve reflexivity, and in this paper I suggest that the practices of psychology include reflexive ones. Psychology has an established tradition of silence about the self-awareness and sell-consciousness of its actors, whether those actors are experimenters, theorists, or participants (subjects) in research, yet this silence has been established and maintained through sophisticated exercises in self-regard — through sustained reflexive work. Historical analysis reveals some of the ways in which psychologists recognized and then neglected, covered over, or denied reflexivity. Study of those instances where psychologists have engaged in self-conscious reflection or have attended to the sell-consciousness of research subjects indicates both the dangers of reflexivity to governing investigative practices and the resilience which psychology has built against reflexive work. Canonized procedures for scientific work reproduce selves of experimenters and subjects alike, selves who acknowledge only part of their reflexive engagements. Historians of psychology have a special opportunity (and obligation) to explore the reflexive dynamics of investigative practices, and, hence, to theorize about scientists, along with their actions and interactions, just as we theorize about science, its products, and its evolution.

This essay answers a single question: what was Robert Hooke, the Royal Society's curator of experiments, doing in his well-known 1665 work, Micrographia? Hooke was articulating a “universal cure of the mind” capable of bringing about a “reformation in Philosophy,” a change in philosophy's interpretive practices and organization. The work explicated the interpretive and political foundations for a community of optical instrument users coextensive with the struggling Royal Society. Standard observational practices would overcome the problem of using nonstandard instruments, while inherent in representation – the interpretive practice championed in the text – were important theological and political meanings. Hooke's kind of experimental philosophy undermined the claims made by “atheists” and “enthusiasts” – the enemies of the restored church and state – while also producing useful knowledge. Equally important, Hooke modeled the community described in Micrographia upon the classical res publica, but his community made important concessions to Restoration political realities, especially the growing role of commercial or transactional relationships.

Despite the renewed attention paid in recent years to the doctrine or doctrines associated with the Faculty of Medicine of the Université de Montpellier in the second half of the eighteenth century, and known as “vitalism” – chiefly Roselyne Rey's 1987 thèse d'État, which only appeared in print in 2000, and works by François Duchesneau, Elizabeth Williams, Timo Kaitaro, and Dominique Boury, some of whom have contributed to this volume – the existence of a specifically medical vitalism in the eighteenth century still continues to pose a problem. Commentators speaking in rather monolithic terms continue to describe vitalism in terms entirely derived from late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century “neo-vitalism,” that is, in the language of vital force, of supplemental, extra-causal agents powering the living body. Philosophers of biology and, more surprisingly, historians of ideas tend to sound like the very confident Francis Crick, speaking like a prophet from a mountaintop to the entire scientific community: “To those of you who may be vitalists, I would make this prophecy: what everyone believed yesterday, and you believe today, only cranks will believe tomorrow” (Crick 1966, 99). In less prophetic, but still very polarizing tones, a recent review discussion on biological development promotes “organicism” as a scientifically viable view – one which the authors of the review quickly distinguish from the more metaphysically laden “vitalism,” according to which (they write), “living matter is ontologically greater than the sum of its parts because of some life force (‘entelechy,’ ‘élan vital,’ ‘vis essentialis,’ etc.)” (Gilbert and Sarkar 2000, 1).