Emotion and feeling have only in the last decade become analytic concepts in the humanities, reflected in what some have called an “affective turn” in the academy at large. The study of emotion has also found a place in science studies and the history and philosophy of science, accompanied by the recognition that even the history of objectivity depends in a dialectical fashion on a history of subjectivity (Daston and Galison 2010, esp. chap. 4). This topical issue is a contribution to this larger trend across the humanities and the history of science, and yet is circumscribed by attention to a particular kind of emotion or condition for feeling: one centered not in an individual body, but in the interstices between bodies and things, between selves and others – what we call empathy.

A Catoptrica attributed to Euclid appears in manuscripts amongst treatises dealing with elementary astronomy. Despite this textual background, the treatise has always been read literally as a theory of mirrors, and its astronomical significance has gone unnoticed. However, optics, catoptrics, and astronomy appear strongly intermingled in sources such as, amongst others, Geminus, Theon of Smyrna, Plutarch and Cleomedes. If one compares the optical reasoning put forward in these sources to account for the formation of moonlight with arguments of Catoptrica, one is able to shed new light on several principles and propositions of Catoptrica, some of which had been deemed corrupt, meaningless, and obscure. Moreover, the present analysis offers a glimpse at the context of a specific stage in the evolution of ancient catoptrics: Whether literally or by analogy, several of its results appear to have been set against a wider astronomical background, which explains the inclusion of Catoptrica in the group of texts loosely defined as “little astronomy.”

For historians of science, earthquakes may well have an air of the exotic. Often terrifying, apparently unpredictable, and arguably even more deadly today than in a pre-industrial age, they are not a phenomenon against which scientific progress is easy to gauge. Yet precisely because seismic forces seem so uncanny, even demonic, naturalizing them has been one of the most tantalizing and enduring challenges of modern science. Earthquakes have repeatedly shaken not just human edifices but the foundations of human knowledge. They have been known to cast doubt on divine providence, on the predictive ability of the sciences, and on the capacity of the human mind to learn from an experience of sheer terror. Most recently, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 have forced nuclear experts around the world to confront the limits of their knowledge and the vulnerability of their best-laid plans.

Past and present societies world-wide have employed well over 100 distinct notational systems for representing natural numbers, some of which continue to play a crucial role in intellectual and cultural development today. The diversity of these notations has prompted the need for classificatory schemes, or typologies, to provide a systematic starting point for their discussion and appraisal. The present paper provides a general framework for assessing the efficacy of these typologies relative to certain desiderata, and it uses this framework to discuss the two influential typologies of Zhang & Norman and Chrisomalis. Following this, a new typology is presented that takes as its starting point the principles by which numerical notations represent multipliers (the principles of cumulation and cipherization), and bases (those of integration, parsing, and positionality). Many different examples show that this new typology provides a more refined classification of numerical notations than the ones put forward previously. In addition, the framework provided here can be used to assess typologies not only of numerical notations, but also of many other domains.

The New Madrid earthquakes shook much of North America in the winter of 1811–1812. Accounts of the New Madrid earthquakes originally were collected and employed as scientific evidence in the early nineteenth century. These early accounts were largely ignored when scientific instruments promised more quantitative and exact knowledge. Years later the earthquakes themselves became both more important and less understood because of changes in scientific models. Today, so-called intraplate or stable continental region earthquakes pose a significant problem in seismology. Historical accounts of the New Madrid events offer some of the most significant examples upon which researchers can draw and form the basis for debates over present public policy. The changing function of accounts, from narrative elements of widely-shared scientific discussion, to raw data, and back into wide-ranging conversation once again, demonstrates both deep ruptures and surprising continuities during two centuries of understanding the earth and its movement.

The new English term “empathy” was translated from the German Einfühlung in the first decade of the twentieth century by the psychologists James Ward at the University of Cambridge and Edward B. Titchener at Cornell. At Titchener's American laboratory, “empathy” was not a matter of understanding other minds, but rather a projection of imagined bodily movements and accompanying feelings into an object, a meaning that drew from its rich nineteenth-century aesthetic heritage. This rendering of “empathy” borrowed kinaesthetic meanings from German sources, but extended beyond a contemplation of the beautiful to include a variety of experimental stimuli and everyday objects in the laboratory. According to Titchener's structural psychology, all higher thought could be reduced to more elemental aspects of mind, and experimental introspection showed empathy to be constituted of kinaesthetic images. The existence of kinaesthetic images, Titchener argued, formed an incisive critique of the view that thought could take place without images, held by one of Titchener's major psychological rivals, the school of thought-psychologists in Würzburg, Germany. The new term “empathy” in early American academic psychology therefore delineated a kinaesthetic imaginative projection that took place on the basis of ontological difference between minds and things.

Einstein's initial fame came in late 1919 with a dramatic breakthrough in his general theory of relativity. Through a remarkable confluence of events and circumstances, the mass media soon projected an image of the photogenic physicist as a bold new revolutionary thinker. With his theory of relativity Einstein had overthrown outworn ideas about space and time dating back to Newton's day, no small feat. While downplaying his reputation as a revolutionary, Einstein proved he was well cast for the role of mild-mannered scientific genius. Yet fame demanded its price. Surrounded by social and economic unrest in Berlin, he was caught between two worlds, one struggling to be born, another refusing to die. Far from withdrawing, he threw himself into the political fray to become a symbol for international reconciliation during the early Weimar Republic. A decade later, his public image acquired another layer when he re-emerged as a Stoic sage and selfless humanitarian, a quasi-religious figure who saw himself as a modern-day Spinoza. Focusing on events of this period and the role of the German media in portraying them, this essay highlights the scientific and political undercurrents that drew Einstein into the public eye at a critical juncture in European history. Its broader aim is to show the import of these themes within the context of the vast literature on Einstein as well as the larger historiography of science.

The sixteenth-century physician and philosopher Julius Caesar Scaliger suggests that in particular cases plants can come into being that belong to a plant species that did not exist before. At the same time, he holds that God could not have created a more perfect world. However, does the occurrence of new species not imply that the world was not the best possible world from the beginning? In this article, I explore a set of metaphysical ideas that could provide Scaliger with the means of solving this problem: (1) His version of the notion of a plurality of substantial forms in every living being, and (2) his version of the notion of the ordained divine power. As it turns out, Scaliger analyzes the generation of new species in terms of a development of subordinate substantial forms into dominant substantial forms. Thereby, previously existing essences of plant parts become essences of plants. These plants, thus, possess essences that no previously existing plant possessed and, in this sense, belong to a new species. In this way, Scaliger avoids positing the occurrence of new essences, thus saving the best possible world thesis. Moreover, he believes that all substantial forms stand in a relationship of mutual existential dependence by means of which God safeguards the persistence and unity of the world. This is why the agency of subordinate forms turned dominant can be understood as an expression of the ordained power of God.

This essay considers the metaphors of projection in Hugo Münsterberg's theory of cinema spectatorship. Münsterberg (1863–1916), a German born and educated professor of psychology at Harvard University, turned his attention to cinema only a few years before his untimely death at the age of fifty-three. But he brought to the new medium certain lasting preoccupations. This account begins with the contention that Münsterberg's intervention in the cinema discussion pursued his well-established strategy of pitting a laboratory model against a clinical one, in this case the “master-trope” of early cinema a spectatorship drawn from hysteria, hypnosis, and related phenomena like double-consciousness. Münsterberg's laboratory-oriented account also flowed from his account of cinema technology as an outgrowth of the apparatus of his own discipline of experimental psycho-physiology, which entailed a model of cinema spectatorship continuous with the epistemological setting of laboratory relations. I argue that in The Photoplay and related writings projection functioned in three registers: material, psychological, and philosophical. Münsterberg's primary concern was with psychological projection, where he drew upon his own work in experimental aesthetics to articulate an account of how the basic automatisms of cinema produce a state of oscillation between immersion and distraction. I show how Münsterberg's experimental aesthetics drew upon German doctrines of aesthetic empathy, or Einfühlung, which Münsterberg sought to modify in accordance with the dynamic and temporal characteristics of psycho-physiological experiment. Finally, I argue that Münsterberg's cinema theory was enfolded in his action or double-standpoint theory, in which the transcendental self posits the material, objective conditions of laboratory experience as a means to know itself. This philosophical projection explained cinema's uncanny ability to suspend ordinary perceptions of space, time, and causality. It also made cinema uniquely suited for the philosophical emancipation of a popular mass audience.

Darwin's narrative of the earthquake at Concepción, set within the frameworks of Lyellian uniformitarianism, romantic aesthetics, and the emergence of geology as a popular science, is suggestive of the role of the sublime in geological enquiry and theory in the early nineteenth century. Darwin's Beagle diary and later notebooks and publications show that the aesthetic of the sublime was both a form of representing geology to a popular audience, and a crucial structure for the observation and recording of the event from the beginning. The awesome spectacle of the earthquake proved in turn the magnitude of the forces at stake in earth history, and helped to make geology an epic conjoining the history of civilization with the history of the earth.

This paper investigates whether there is a discrepancy between stated and actual aims in biomechanical research, particularly with respect to hypothesis testing. We present an analysis of one hundred papers recently published in The Journal of Experimental Biology and Journal of Biomechanics, and examine the prevalence of papers which (a) have hypothesis testing as a stated aim, (b) contain hypothesis testing claims that appear to be purely presentational (i.e. which seem not to have influenced the actual study), and (c) have exploration as a stated aim. We found that whereas no papers had exploration as a stated aim, 58 per cent of papers had hypothesis testing as a stated aim. We had strong suspicions, at the bare minimum, that presentational hypotheses were present in 31 per cent of the papers in this latter group.

This article explores the history of mummy unwrappings in the West, culminating in Margaret Murray's public unrolling of two mummies in Manchester in 1908. Mummy unwrappings as a practice have shifted often between public spectacles which displayed and objectified exotic artifacts, and scientific investigations which sought to reveal medical and historical information about ancient life. Although others have looked at Murray's work in the context of the history of mummy studies, I argue that her work should be viewed culturally as poised between spectacle and science, drawing morbid public interest while also producing ground-breaking scientific work that continues to this day. Murray's main goal was to excite the interest of the public while at the same time educating them in the true history of ancient Egypt, while ascertaining new scientific information and contributing to the scholarly interpretations of ancient Egypt.

The main contribution of the Alfred P. Sloan and Russell Sage Foundations' behavioral economics program (1984–1992) was not the resources it provided, which were relatively modest. Instead, the program's contribution lay in catalyzing “a sense of mission” in the collaboration between psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, economist Richard Thaler, and their associates. Partly this reflected the common strategy of American foundations to pick an individual or small group of scientists and stick with them until scientific success had been achieved. But moreover, it was a consequence of the careful management of the program's director Eric Wanner. The various actors involved in the behavioral economics program constructed a new behavioral economic sub-discipline in economics by tapping into existing missionary sentiments in the economic and psychological disciplines, while at the same time actively shaping this sense of mission.

A number of theorists have proposed simulation theories of empathy. A review of these theories shows that, despite the fact that one version of the simulation theory can avoid a number of problems associated with such approaches, there are further reasons to doubt whether simulation actually explains empathy. A high-level simulation account of empathy, distinguished from the simulation theory of mindreading, can avoid problems associated with low-level (neural) simulationist accounts; but it fails to adequately address two other problems: the diversity problem and the starting problem. It is argued that a narrative approach to empathy obviates all these problems and offers a more parsimonious account.

Recent studies of patents have argued that the very materiality and techniques of legal media, such as the written patent document, are vital for the legal construction of a patentable invention. Developing the centrality placed on patent documents further, it becomes important to understand how these documents are ordered and mobilized. Patent classification answers the necessity of making the virtual nature of textual claims practicable by linking written inscription to bureaucracy. Here, the epistemological organization of documents overlaps with the grid of patent administration. How are scientific inventions represented in such a process? If we examine the process of creating a new patent category within the International Patent Classification (IPC), it becomes clear that disagreements about the substance of the novel inventive subject matter have been resolved by computer simulations of patent documents in draft classifications. The practical needs of patent examiners were the most important concerns in the making of a new category. Such a lack of epistemological mediation between the scientific and legal identities of an invention depicts a legal understanding that science is already inside patent law. From an internal legal perspective, the self-referential introduction of the new patent category may make practical sense; however it becomes problematic from a technological and scientific standpoint as the remit of the patent classification also affects other social contexts and practices.

Between 1878 and 1880, Switzerland, Italy, and Japan initiated the world's first national earthquake commissions, but only the Swiss made ordinary citizens a vital part of this undertaking. This paper examines the texture of communication between Swiss scientists and lay observers and traces the development of a language for seismology that was simultaneously scientific and vernacular. This is the story of an aborted dialogue between scientists and citizens about living with environmental risk, an alternative abandoned on the way to the increasingly technical science of the twentieth century.

Hijōji (emergency) was an important keyword in the militarist Japan of the 1930s. Previous scholarship has assumed that such language sprung from the global financial crisis of 1929, and subsequent diplomatic events. Our article demonstrates, however, that a full-bodied language of emergency was crafted well before the collapse of the global economy, and against the backdrop of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which destroyed the Japanese capital. While previous “great earthquakes” had been opportunities to strengthen Japanese participation in the global project of science, this one led more dramatically to a crisis of reason, and indirectly contributed to the spiritual, anti-western, and anti-rational rhetoric of what became the “Showa Restoration.” This and other post-disaster landscapes, we argue, should be examined as compelling sites for the crafting of political language – sites of opportunity and meaning as well as trial. While the phrase “state of emergency” was coined under very different circumstances in post-war Britain, it gained power and charisma in Japan, and likely other places around the world, by its association with natural catastrophe. Thus did modern politics establish a new connection with the traditional realm of the sublime, and in the case of Japan, the supernatural. Emergency's ability to associate politics with nature would never disappear, and has perhaps even strengthened in the early twenty-first century.

This paper builds on a neglected philosophical idea, Evidenz. Max Weber used it in his discussion of Verstehen, as the goal of understanding either action or such things as logic. It was formulated differently by Franz Brentano, but with a novel twist: that anyone who understood something would see the thing to be understood as self-evident, not something dependent on inference, argument, or reasoning. The only way one could take something as evident in this sense is by being able to treat other people as having the same responses – by empathy with them, in the weak sense of following their thought. Brentano's philosophical claim is that without some stopping point at what is self-evident, justifications fall into infinite regress. This is radically opposed to much of conventional philosophy. The usual solutions to the regress problem rely on problematic claims about the supposed hidden transcendental structure behind reasoning. In contrast, empathy is a genuine natural phenomenon and a better explanation for the actual phenomenon of making sense of the reasoning of others. What is evident to all who are capable of understanding is an empirically-defined subset of this class.