How does the advancement of the sciences relate to the ways in which their founding figures are remembered? According to the stark picture painted by Alfred N. Whitehead in 1917, “the establishment of a reverential attitude towards any statement made by a classical author” had barred the progress of logic for several centuries: “Scholars became commentators on truths too fragile to bear translation. A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost” (Whitehead 1917, 115). In the eyes of many critics (who often tend to equate science and logic in similar fashion), Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis may well be an example of such a lost cause. From the founding book The Interpretation of Dreams ([1899] 1900) to his very last statements, Freud never ceased to affirm that psychoanalysis was a science: “What else can it be?” (Freud 1940, 282). Yet not only the fact that he has become one of the classic authors of the twentieth century, but also a number of very specific traits of psychoanalytic institutions (such as the numerous schisms resulting from personal fights between their members) have nourished the suspicion that Freud was less the founder of a science than of a sort of quasi-religious movement, a secular sect thriving on a personality cult.

This paper explores the confrontation of physical and contextual factors involved in the emergence of the subject of color measurement, which stabilized in essentially its present form during the interwar period. The contentions surrounding the specialty had both a national and a disciplinary dimension. German dominance was curtailed by American and British contributions after World War I. Particularly in America, communities of physicists and psychologists had different commitments to divergent views of nature and human perception. They therefore had to negotiate a compromise between their desire for a quantitative system of description and the perceived complexity and human-centeredness of color judgment. These debates were played out not in the laboratory but rather in institutionalized encounters on standards committees. Such groups constitute a relatively unexplored historiographic and social site of investigation. The heterogeneity of such committees, and their products, highlight the problems of identifying and following such ephemeral historical “actors”.

The major part of the mathematical “classics” in Hebrew were translated from Arabic between the second third of the thirteenth century and the first third of the fourteenth century, within the northern littoral of the western Mediterranean. This movement occurred after the original works by Abraham bar Hiyya and Abraham ibn Ezra became available to a wide readership. The translations were intended for a restricted audience — the scholarly readership involved in and dealing with the theoretical sciences. In some cases the translators themselves were professional scientists (e.g., Jacob ben Makhir); in other cases they were, so to speak, professional translators, dealing as well with philosophy, medicine, and other works in Arabic.

In aketshing this portrait of the beginning of Herbrew scholarly mathematics, my aim has been to contribute to a better understanding of mathematical activity as such among Jewish communities during this period.

Argument

Several recent works in sociology examine the manufacture of public identities through the notion of celebrity. This paper explores the imagery of Charles Darwin as a nineteenth-century scientific celebrity by comparing the public character deliberately manufactured by Darwin and his friends with images constructed by the public as represented here by caricatures in humorous magazines of the era. It is argued that Darwin’s outward persona drew on a subtle tension between public and private. The boundaries between public and private were blurred by the ritual of Darwin “showing” himself in the flesh, either at home to visitors or, more rarely, on public occasions. The reputation for privacy and illness that he built up added materially to this public face. By contrast, caricatures tended to depict him as an ape. These apish representations played a significant role in associating Darwin, rather than any other thinker, with the notion of evolution, and in creating an alternative public persona over which he had no direct control.

Here I analyze the anatomical thought of the French physician and naturalist Félix Vicq d'Azyr (1748–1794) in order to bring to light its importance in the development of comparative anatomy at the end of the eighteenth century. I argue that his work and career can be understood as an ambitious program for a radical reform of all biomedical sciences and a reorganization of this whole field around comparative anatomy, on the conceptual as well as the institutional level. In particular, he recommended a close connection between anatomical and physiological studies, and a generalization of the comparative approach towards organs and functions in man and animals. This conception led him not only to reform the scope, the methods, the style of description, and the vocabulary in anatomy, but also to construct a new classification of living beings and to pursue a quest for laws of organization. This strategy was successful, since Vicq d'Azyr was able to promote his thought as well as his institutional position efficiently. The Revolution and his untimely death prevented him from achieving his program, but his attempt would serve as an example for younger scientists like Cuvier.

The study of pain in a historical context requires a consideration of the cultural context in which pain is sensed and expressed. This paper examines attitudes toward physical pain in the later Middle Ages in Europe from several standpoints: theology, law, and medicine. During the later Middle Ages attitudes toward pain shifted from rejection and a demand for impassivity as a mark of status to a conscious attempt to sense, express, and inflict as much pain as possible. Pain became a positive force, a useful tool for reaching a variety of truths. While this attitude stemmed from the religious wish to identify with Christ's passion, it permeated and affected all spheres of cultural expression and investigation. Late permeated and affected all spheres of cultural expression and investigation. Late medieval medicine accepted pain, trying to relieve it only when it became dangerous to the patient. Given the existence of analgesic medicines at the time, this attitude is comprehensible only within the cultural context of the period.

The first part of this paper surveys the current literature in the history of nineteenth-century mathematics in order to show that the question “Did the increasing abstraction of mathematics lead to a sense of anxiety?” is a new and valid question. I argue that the mathematics of the nineteenth century is marked by a growing appreciation of error leading to a note of anxiety, hesitant at first but persistent by 1900. This mounting disquiet about so many aspects of mathematics after 1850 is seldom discussed. The second part explores the issue of anxiety in mathematical life through an interesting account of an address made by a mathematician in 1911, Oscar Perron. The third and final part ventures some conclusions about the value of anxiety as a question for historians of mathematics to pursue.

Film scholars have long posed the question of the specificity of the film medium and the apparatus of cinema, asking what is unique to cinema, how it constrains and enables filmmakers and audiences in particular ways that other media do not. This question has rarely been considered in relation to scientific film, and here it is posed within the specific context of cell biology: What does the use of time-based media such as film coupled with the microscope allow scientists to experience that other visualization practices do not? Examining three episodes in the twentieth-century study of the cell, this article argues that the apparatus of microcinematography constitutes what might be thought of as a technical portal to another world, a door that determines the experience of the world that lies on the other side of it. In this case, the design of apparatuses to capture time-lapsed images enabled the acceleration of cellular time, bringing it into the realm of human perception and experience. Further, the experience of the cellular temporal world was part of a distinct kind of cell biology, one that was focused on behavior rather than structure, focused on the relation between cells, and between the cell and its milieu rather than on cell-intrinsic features such as chromosomes or organelles. As such, the instruments and technical design of the microcinematographic apparatus may be understood as a kind of materialized epistemology, the history of which can elucidate how cinema was and is used to produce scientific knowledge.

By the mid-eighteenth century, governors of the major European states promoted the study of nature as part of natural-resource based schemes for improvement and economic self-sufficiency. Procuring beneficial knowledge about nature, however, required observers, collectors, and compilers who could produce usable and useful descriptions of nature. The ways governments promoted scientific explorations varied according to the form of government, the makeup of the civil society, the state's economic ideologies and practices, and the geographical situation. This article argues that the roots of a major natural history initiative in Denmark-Norway were firmly planted in the state-church organization. Through the clergymen and their activities, a bishop, supported by the government in Copenhagen, could gather an impressive collection of natural objects, receive observations and descriptions of natural phenomena, and produce natural historical publications that described for the first time many of the species of the north. Devout naturalists were a common species in the eighteenth century, when clergymen and missionaries involved themselves in the investigation of nature in Europe and far beyond. The specific interest here is in how natural history was supported and enforced as part of clerical practice, how specimen exchange was grafted on to pre-existing institutions of gift exchange, and how this influenced the character of the knowledge produced.

Argument

During the early modern period, European naturalists were confronted with a rapidly growing body of new objects due to the recent geographic discoveries. According to Bruno Latour's model of “action at a distance” naturalists managed this situation by mobilizing and stabilizing specimens and inscriptions at the periphery of the known world, as well as accumulating, reshuffling, and processing that material in “centers of calculation.” This paper tries to resolve an ambiguity that lies in this model: While the work of naturalists was clearly dependent on local institutions, collections, and botanical gardens in particular, they nevertheless claimed universality for the interpretations of the natural world they propounded. Analysis will be based on a case study: In the 1730s Carl Linnaeus produced a series of manuscripts and printed books that allow us to reconstruct the sequence of translations which led from the first encounter with a “new” plant at the periphery of the known world (in the case of Linnaeus, Lapland, which he visited in 1732) to a major botanical center (the botanical garden of George Clifford, former director of the Dutch East India Company, who employed Linnaeus in 1736 and 1737 to catalog his collection). I will argue generally that the abstraction process that was constitutive of Linnaeus' universal plant taxonomy – the separation of “constant” species and genera from local “varieties”- did not take place exclusively in the centers of knowledge production. This abstraction process was rather coextensive with the global network of translation and exchange that connected such centers with each other and with their peripheries. The “map” of the plant world outlined by Linnaeus did not represent “things drawn together,” but rather “things being exchanged,” and the global circulation of specimens and inscriptions was the foundation on which its claim to universality rested.

As historian Henning Schmidgen notes, the scientific study of the nervous system would have been “unthinkable” without the industrialization of communication in the 1830s. Historians have investigated extensively the way nerve physiologists have borrowed concepts and tools from the field of communications, particularly regarding the nineteenth-century work of figures like Helmholtz and in the American Cold War Era. The following focuses specifically on the interwar research of the Cambridge physiologist Edgar Douglas Adrian, and on the technology that led to his Nobel-Prize-winning research, the thermionic vacuum tube. Many countries used the vacuum tube during the war for the purpose of amplifying and intercepting coded messages. These events provided a context for Adrian's evolving understanding of the nerve fiber in the 1920s. In particular, they provide the background for Adrian's transition around 1926 to describing the nerve impulse in terms of “information,” “messages,” “signals,” or even “codes,” and for translating the basic principles of the nerve, such as the all-or-none principle and adaptation, into such an “informational” context. The following also places Adrian's research in the broader context of the changing relationship between science and technology, and between physics and physiology, in the first few decades of the twentieth century.

Neuroscience research has created multiple versions of the human brain. The “social brain” is one version and it is the subject of this paper. Most image-based research in the field of social neuroscience is task-driven: the brain is asked to respond to a cognitive (perceptual) stimulus. The tasks are derived from theories, operational models, and back-stories now circulating in social neuroscience. The social brain comes with a distinctive back-story, an evolutionary history organized around three, interconnected themes: mind-reading, empathy, and the emergence of self-consciousness. This paper focuses on how empathy has been incorporated into the social brain and redefined via parallel research streams, employing a shared, imaging technology. The concluding section describes how these developments can be understood as signaling the emergence of a new version of human nature and the unconscious. My argument is not that empathy in the social brain is a myth, but rather that it is served by a myth consonant with the canons of science.

This article explores the entangled histories of three imaging techniques in early nineteenth-century British physical science, techniques in which a dynamic event (such as a sound vibration or an electric spark) was made to leave behind a fixed trace on a sensitive surface. Three categories of “sensitive surface” are examined in turn: first, a metal plate covered in fine dust; second, the retina of the human eye; and finally, a surface covered with a light-sensitive chemical emulsion (a photographic plate). For physicists Michael Faraday and Charles Wheatstone, and photographic pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot, transient phenomena could be studied through careful observation and manipulation of the patterns wrought on these different surfaces, and through an understanding of how the imaging process unfolded through time. This exposes the often-ignored materiality and temporality of epistemic practices around nineteenth-century scientific images said to be “drawn by nature.”

What does “life” become at a moment when biological inquiry proceeds by manufacturing biological artifacts and systems? In this article, I juxtapose two radically different communities, synthetic biologists and Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef crafters (HCCR). Synthetic biology is a decade-old research initiative that seeks to merge biology with engineering and experimental research with manufacture. The HCCR is a distributed venture of three thousand craftspeople who cooperatively fabricate a series of yarn and plastic coral reefs to draw attention to the menace climate change poses to the Great Barrier and other reefs. Interpreting these two groups alongside one another, I suggest that for both, manufacturing biological artifacts advances their understandings of biology: in a rhetorical loop, they build new biological things in order to understand the things they are making. The resulting fabrications condense scientific and folk theories about “life” and also undo “life” as a coherent analytic object.

Argument

In this paper I will argue that the scientific investigation of skulls and brains of geniuses went hand in hand with hagiographical celebrations of scientists. My analysis starts with late-eighteenth century anatomists and anthropologists who highlighted quantitative parameters such as the size and weight of the brain in order to explain intellectual differences between women and men and Europeans and non-Europeans, geniuses and ordinary persons. After 1800 these parameters were modified by phrenological inspections of the skull and brain. As the phrenological examination of the skulls of Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm Heinse, Arthur Schopenhauer and others shows, the anthropometrical data was interpreted in light of biographical circumstances. The same pattern of interpretation can be found in non-phrenological contexts: Reports about extraordinary brains were part of biographical sketches, mainly delivered in celebratory obituaries. It was only in this context that moral reservations about dissecting the brains of geniuses could be overcome, which led to a more systematic investigation of brains of geniuses after 1860.

In Merton's early work in the sociology of science three theses are identified: (1) economic and military influence in shaping early modern science; (2) the “Puritan spur” to scientific activity; (3) the critical role of a democratic social order for the support of science. These themes are located in the contemporary economic crisis of the 1930s, the rise of Nazism and fascism, and the emerging radical and Marxist political activism of scientists in the United States and the United Kingdom. Merton's interaction with this context is critical for understanding his choice of problems and issues for the nascent sociology of science. The enunciation of the four-part normative structure of science is closely identified with the political ideals of this context. Merton's transition from an interest in problems of science in society to his postwar concern with the social and organizational structures of science and the social behavior of scientists is framed against the anticommunist and anti-Marxist thrust of immediate postwar politics in the United States. The implications of this change for the paradigms of the sociology of science are noted.

I argue here that in its historical development, sexology developed differently in France than elsewhere in Europe. Though I concur that the modern notion of “sexuality” arose some time in the last half of the nineteenth century, the older notion of ”sex” persisted in French science and medicine for a far longer time than elsewhere because of a fear that nonreproductive sexual behavior would deepen the country's population crisis. I argue that the scientific and medical concepts of the sexual perversions, particularly homosexuality, were considered by French sexologists to be abnormal deviations from heterosexuality, whereas some English, German, and Austrian sexologists — including Freud — viewed the perversions more tolerantly as natural variations of the norm. I also address here the inadequacies of historical accounts of these developments that favor discursive ruptures in the Foucauldian manner, and stress the advantages of social history and causal historical explanation.

For more than thirty years after World War II, the unconventional economist Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) was a fervent advocate of the integration of the social sciences. Building on common general principles from various fields, notably economics, political science, and sociology, Boulding claimed that an integrated social science in which mental images were recognized as the main determinant of human behavior would allow for a better understanding of society. Boulding's approach culminated in the social triangle, a view of society as comprised of three main social organizers – exchange, threat, and love – combined in varying proportions. According to this view, the problems of American society were caused by an unbalanced combination of these three organizers. The goal of integrated social scientific knowledge was therefore to help policy makers achieve the “right” proportions of exchange, threat, and love that would lead to social stabilization. Though he was hopeful that cross-disciplinary exchanges would overcome the shortcomings of too narrow specialization, Boulding found that rather than being the locus of a peaceful and mutually beneficial exchange, disciplinary boundaries were often the occasion of conflict and miscommunication.

Eighteenth-century Montpellerian vitalism and contemporaneous French “vitalist” materialism, exemplified by the medical and biological materialism of La Mettrie and Diderot, differ in some essential aspects from some later forms of vitalism that tended to postulate immaterial vital principles or forces. This article examines the arguments defending the existence of vital properties in living organisms presented in the context of eighteenth-century French materialism. These arguments had recourse to technological metaphors and analogies, mainly clockworks, in order to claim that just as machines can have functional properties which its parts do not possess (e.g., showing time), so living organisms can, as material entities, also have organic or vital properties which its material parts do not possess. Such arguments, with the help of a healthy dose of epistemological scepticism, tend to strike a balance between two positions concerning the ontology of life which we now tend to label “vitalism” and “emergentism.” Although there is nothing inconsistent in viewing vital properties as emergent, some ambiguity results if one does not draw a clear distinction between properties and functions. The philosophical problems related to these ambiguities are revealed in Diderot's apparent hesitation concerning sentience as “a general property of matter or the product of organization.”

Two simultaneous episodes in late nineteenth-century mathematical research, one by Karl Hermann Brunn (1862–1939) and another by Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909), have been described as the origin of the theory of convex bodies. This article aims to understand and explain (1) how and why the concept of such bodies emerged in these two trajectories of mathematical research; and (2) why Minkowski's – and not Brunn's – strand of thought led to the development of a theory of convexity. Concrete pieces of Brunn's and Minkowski's mathematical work in the two episodes will, from the perspective of the above questions, be presented and analyzed with the use of the methodological framework of epistemic objects, techniques, and configurations as adapted from Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's work on empirical sciences to the historiography of mathematics by Moritz Epple. Based on detailed descriptions and a comparison of the objects and techniques that Brunn and Minkowski studied and used in these pieces it will be concluded that Brunn and Minkowski worked in different epistemic configurations, and it will be argued that this had a significant influence on the mathematics they developed for those bodies, which can provide answers to the two research questions listed above.