ABSTRACT While thinking about the notion of the “global” in the history of the history of science, this essay examines a related but equally basic concept: the idea of “Western science.” Tracing its rise in the nineteenth century, it shows how it developed as much outside the Western world as within it. Ironically, while the idea itself was crucial for the disciplinary formation of the history of science, the global history behind this story has not been much attended to. Drawing (...) on examples from nineteenth-century Egypt and China, the essay begins by looking at how international vectors of knowledge production (viz., missionaries and technocrats) created new global histories of science through the construction of novel genealogies and through a process of conceptual syncretism. Turning next to the work of early professional historians of science, it shows how Arabic and Chinese knowledge traditions were similarly reinterpreted in light of the modern sciences, now viewed as part of a diachronic and universalist teleology ending in “Western science.” It concludes by arguing that examining the global emergence of the idea of Western science in this way highlights key questions pertaining to the relation of the history of science to knowledge traditions across the world and the continuing search for global histories of science. (shrink)

Historians often feel that standard philosophical doctrines about the nature and development of science are not adequate for representing the real history of science. However, when philosophers of science fail to make sense of certain historical events, it is also possible that there is something wrong with the standard historical descriptions of those events, precluding any sensible explanation. If so, philosophical failure can be useful as a guide for improving historiography, and this constitutes a significant mode of productive interaction between (...) the history and the philosophy of science. I illustrate this methodological claim through the case of the Chemical Revolution. I argue that no standard philosophical theory of scientific method can explain why European chemists made a sudden and nearly unanimous switch of allegiance from the phlogiston theory to Lavoisier's theory. A careful re-examination of the history reveals that the shift was neither so quick nor so unanimous as imagined even by many historians. In closing I offer brief reflections on how best to explain the general drift toward Lavoisier's theory that did take place. (shrink)

Kant's well-known statement from the “Critique of Practical Reason” (§ 7) that the consciousness of the basic law of pure practical reason (or the customary/moral law) can be called a fact of reason (V, 31.24) has not yet become the subject of adequate attention of domestic researchers. In the “Critique of Practical Reason”, Kant justify his famous categorical imperative by appealing to the “fact of reason” (§ 7). A closer reading of this passage reveals that it refers to a “fundamental (...) law of pure practical reason” and its “consciousness” is called “a fact of reason”. It is likely to think that Kant makes a “naturalistic fallacy” when he tries to justify “ought” (law) from “is” (fact). An analysis of the broader context of the use of the term “fact”, which occurs in the Critique in general 11 times, proves that its denotation is a moral law, which is explained in the corresponding train of thought. A special problem of interpretation is the explanation of the genitive in the expression “a fact of reason” [ein Factum der Vernunft]. It is common to read it as genitivus subjectivus (the fact is a product (act) of the reason, the fact arises thanks to the reason) and as genitivus objectivus (the reason itself is a fact, something factual). But from the standpoint of modern studies of Kant its reading as genitivus auctoris (Willaschek, Wolff, Noller) is promising. Kant’s specific use of the Latin form “ein Factum” in other works, which has the meaning not of “fact”, but of “imputable act” also, testifies in favor of this. Starting with Dieter Heinrich’s article “The Concept of Moral Insight and Kant’s Doctrine of the Fact of Reason” (1960), many researchers interpret the thesis of the “fact of reason” as Kant’s rejection of the attempt at the deduction of moral insight in the “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Moral” (1785). However, as modern studies (Riedel, Wolff) show, this interpretation is not convincing enough. There are sufficient reasons to believe that it is Kant’s moral and legal doctrine of imputatio facti can explicate an enigmatic passage of the II Critique. (shrink)

Bernard Norton's friends in the history of science have had many reasons for commemorating, with admiration and affection, not only his research and teaching but no less his conversation and his company. One of his most estimable traits was his refusal to beat about the bush in raising the questions he thought worthwhile pursuing. I still remember discoursing at Pittsburgh on Darwin's route to his theory of natural selection, and being asked at the end by Bernard what were Darwin's views (...) on heredity. I answered with the conventional waffle to the effect that the theory concerned the populational fate rather than the individual production and transmission of heritable variation, so that whatever views Darwin had on heredity had only a subsidiary place in his theorizing. Bernard was not fooled. ‘I would have thought’, he said, ‘that in order to understand anyone's theorising about evolution it would be necessary to look at his views on heredity’. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Term “Philosophy of History” The Terms “Philosophy” and “History” Historiographical Production Critical Theory of Historiography vs. Substantive Philosophy of History The Meaning and Function of History The Evolution of Substantive Philosophies of History The Poetics of the Substantive Philosophy of History The Arrival of the Philosophy of Historiography References Further Reading.

This paper focuses on the revision of the classical thesis concerning secularism the progressive domination of the discussion around the issue of the civil society. These two poles facilitated the development of a series of historiographic approaches that particularly touched on the areas of Eastern and Southeastern Europeís history. Here we are concerned with three central cases of historiographic discourseís production, as indicators of the dominant ìparadigmîís change: the first concerns the role of the Russian church in the pre-Revolutionary (...) period; the second, the issue of secularization and its relations with Islam in the Ottoman Empire; and finally the third, the problem of internal fragmentation of the Orthodox millet with the establishment of Greek autocephalus Church in 1833 and (self-sufficiency) and later the Bulgarian Exarchate. These new approaches were intended to solve various long-standing problems and for the most part resulted in solutions within existing opposites of historiographic schools of thought. (shrink)

In the history of biology, knowledge about human differences often has been produced through an interaction with politics and values assumed to be external to science. Two recent books—Jonathan Marks’ Is Science Racist? and Maurizio Meloni’s Political Biology—shed new light on this interplay. While Marks looks into the field of anthropology, Meloni offers a historiographical view on the soft-hard heredity debate. Based on these new contributions, this essay addresses a number of current ways in which society and science conceptualize (...) human differences through categories like race, gender, and class. Especially, this refers to the separation of what is taken as natural and purportedly fixed, from what is cultural and changeable. (shrink)

Jewish historiographical production of the Renaissance and Baroque periods was in fact the expression of the unsuccessful attempt by a handful of individuals to make sense of Jewish history as a living history in diaspora conditions. Their failure was the inevitable result of the essential incompatibility of the subject matter of history, in those days conceived mainly as political and military narrative, and the destiny of their people the world over. Jewish historiographic output can be seen as part (...) of the Jewish endeavor to redefine Jewish identity at the dawn of the modern era. However, the time had not yet come for a "New History" among both Jews and non-Jews -attempted in particular by Joseph ha-Cohen, David Ganz, and most perhaps most successfully by Azariah de Rossi-which might have provided a possible answer to the crisis of Renaissance historiography. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Answer to Catherine König-Pralong, Eun-Jeung Lee, and Jyoti MohanSelusi Ambrogio (bio)I want to start my reply by expressing my deep gratitude to the three reviewers who devoted their energy and time to reading and commenting on my book. Their wise comments and criticisms helped in shaping my upcoming research plans, as well as in refining my understanding of this historiographical topic. The eventual readers of this research will (...) certainly benefit from their arguments. I will reply to each review separately, one after the other. Also I could never thank the editors of Philosophy East and West enough for the honor they bestowed on me in hosting this debate.Mapping the ExclusionCatherine König-Pralong provides an extremely knowledgeable and refined review of the book in three sections. The first section is a theoretical evaluation and discussion of the outputs of the monograph through the lens of Reinhard Koselleck's theory of the "temporalization of history" (Verzeitlichung [End Page 230] der Geschichte)1 and her unequalled expertise on the imaginary maps of civilizations. I completely agree with her statement that "from the doxography of the seventeenth century to Brucker's eclecticism, philosophical historiography seemed to be much less attached to historical accuracy than to delimiting regions and identifying peoples and their minds—in a word, to territorializing." The territorialization of philosophy into maps that presented first the lost seeds of divine wisdom (perennialism) and afterwards the exclusive regions of rationality (eclecticism) shows more the Western necessity for a self-definition rather than an effective understanding of the thought of other civilizations. As Metha perfectly expresses it, "Long ago 'Asia' and the 'Orient' became almost existential categories in the European mind."2 It is in this context of 'spatialization of identities' that philosophy became one of the leading characteristics—when not the leading one—of European identity. As the reviewer lucidly remarks, this happened at the expense of philosophy itself. Practical philosophy was put under the superior control of theoretical and logical faculties. It is true that this process was achieved in German pragmatism and Kantian historiography, but this was already evident in Heumann and Brucker's historiographical productions.In her dense analysis, König-Pralong provides bibliographical suggestions that could be integrated within the monograph. I have to admit that, unluckily, I've never come across the two outstanding essays by Wimmer and Rüdiger on Chinese philosophy as a problem of historiography in the eighteenth century, both published in 2017.3 On the contrary, I eagerly read the reviewer's book La colonie philosophique, which was published in March 2019. However, at that time, my monograph was already in the hands of the editor, undergoing the process of double-blind peer review and editing, and hence my argumentation could not benefit from her discussion on temporalization versus historicization and the mapping of civilizations. To quote a sentence from her brilliant book: "L'histoire de la philosophie des Lumières programme en effet une rationalisation de l'histoire et une temporalisation de la philosophie."4 This sentence is a perfect explanation of the "de-territorialization" of India and China from the land of historicity and rationality, namely philosophy. For Brucker, India and China did not possess reliable historical sources, showed childish theoretical capacities, and presented oppressive norms that were not based on moral principles and reasoning.The reviewer agrees with the fact that, at the time of Brucker, we can already find reasons for the exclusion of Asian philosophies, but she contests the thesis that the character of this exclusion was already completely displayed. She suggests that Brucker's Historia critica is mostly a destructive history, showing human mistakes, and that the real targets were Neoplatonism and mystical syncretism, not Asian thought. She writes that "Brucker excluded non-European thoughts from philosophy, but not from the history of philosophy." In my view, Brucker did not insert "barbarian" [End Page 231] and "exotic" civilizations in the history of philosophy, but rather in a critical history—that is, historia critica—of human mistakes. He clearly states that nothing philosophical could be detected in these lands and that his own use of the term "philosophy" about them is... (shrink)

The article traces the development of Hungarian intellectual history of the early modern period from the emergence of the national romantic constructions of literary history to the recent turn towards contextualist and conceptual history. One of its main findings is the ideological importance of this period for the formation of the national canon, as it became a central point of reference for the emerging local methodological tradition of intellectual history, even if it was often compartamentalized under other categories. From this (...) perspective, the article puts particular emphasis on ideological constructions seeking to define the nation and depict the emergence of modern national identity. This finding also offers a vantage point for analyzing the interplay between literary history and the socio-culturally focused approaches, which can be considered the main framework for the developments of the last two decades, when these local historiographical traditions entered into an interesting dialogue with the Western European and American schools of intellectual history. Along these lines, while pointing out the discursive continuities with the previous paradigms, which are shaping even the contemporary historiographical production, the article also ponders the ways in which the inherited (post-)romantic constructions can be successfully challenged. (shrink)

In what follows I explore the question of fictionality in history writing. First, I venture into the unfamiliar genre of ego-histoire and make my own professional training in the tenets of positivist or realist historiography an object of theoretical reflection and critical analysis. Then as a way of dealing with the literary dimension of written history, I make a canonical work in history of education an object of rhetorical analysis. Finally, as another way of coming to terms with the “fictions (...) of historiography,” I revisit one of my own productions and make it an object of metacritical consideration. My central theme is that historiographical realism alone will not suffice, that historians are as dependant upon literary invention as upon documents, that history cannot be written without the aid of the “fictions of historiography,” and that the difference between the historian and the novelist is narrower than we may have been accustomed to think. I further argue that attention to the literary or rhetorical dimension of history is long overdue in history of education, where it flourishes unacknowledged. I conclude that historical writing is not just a literary pastime and the issue remains: how to come to grips with fictionalizing and the truth claims of historiography. (shrink)

This essay explores the historiographic and ethnographic valence of video in Indonesia since 1998, against the backdrop of transition from an authoritarian to a neoliberal regime, and the concurrent renewal of the country’s public sphere. The first section takes Joshua Oppenheimer’s controversial film The Act of Killing (2012) as exemplary of the moving image’s purchase on national trauma, emphasizing its role in the production (and perversion) of official history. The second section concerns the state of video discourse in Indonesia (...) as reflected in a conference held in Yogyakarta in 2011, addressing the diversity of contemporary video practices and situating them in local art and media histories. In a third and final section, we return to the epistemological quandaries raised by Oppenheimer’s film, mooting video’s capacity as a means of reconciliation with the past – a reconciliation that would seem to require both the documentary and a ‘revelatory’ function of the image. (shrink)

In 1926 and 1927, James W. Alexander and Kurt Reidemeister claimed to have made “the same” crucial breakthrough in a branch of modern topology which soon thereafter was called knot theory. A detailed comparison of the techniques and objects studied in these two roughly simultaneous episodes of mathematical research shows, however, that the two mathematicians worked in quite different mathematical traditions and that they drew on related, but distinctly different epistemic resources. These traditions and resources were local, not universal elements (...) of mathematical culture. Even certain common features of the main publications such as their modernist, formal style of exposition can be explained by reference to particular constellations in the intellectual and professional environments of Alexander and Reidemeister. In order to analyze the role of such elements and constellations of mathematical research practice, a historiographical perspective is developed which emphasizes parallels with the recent historiography of experiment. In particular, a notion characterizing those “working units of scientific knowledge production” which Hans-Jörg Rheinberger has termed “experimental systems” in the case of empirical sciences proves helpful in understanding research episodes such as those bringing about modern knot theory. (shrink)

This last result leads, rather naturally, to some concluding observations and a series of questions for further investigation. These case studies show that in all of the sites examined, the institutionalization of molecular biology as a “discipline” was primarily driven by the need to separate groups of practitioners with divergent but overlapping interests within the local context. Thus molecular biology was contingently separated from agricultural or medical biochemistry, virology, work on the physiology of nucleic acids, and so forth for contingent (...) local institutional reasons. This makes it even more pressing to try to understand how molecular biology came to be delimited on a larger scale. How did it come to be a discipline with specific intellectual content (or did it?), including some problems, tools, and practices and excluding others? How did it gain authority as the forefront biological science by the mid-1960s? We need to understand the ways in which the tensions between different practices, projects, aims, understandings of the goals of molecular biology, and so on were resolved, on what scale and in what venues, so that something approximating the political character of a discipline, rather than a federation, was achieved. If these case studies provide a sound starting point, it will nevertheless prove difficult to answer the interconnected questions implicit here satisfactorily.One means of getting at such questions that should prove of considerable interest is to examine carefully the work of those who were widely cited in the papers of the late fifties through the mid-seventies by the people now considered major founders of molecular biology. By studying the contributions of those who are now omitted in the standard histories and recollections, we will gain a clearer sense of the possibilities that were open as molecular biology took shape. It is already widely recognized that the contributions of a number of biochemists have been given short shrift, but (as the example of Ernest Gale in Rheinberger's study illustrates) there are a great many more figures whose line of work were then crucial but who are now overlooked.6 To understand both what molecular biology was at the time of its early institutionalization and what is has become, it will be enormously helpful to understand at what point the definition or ideology “hardened” and the grounds for inclusion and exclusion of individuals and lines of work were reformed. Studies of this sort are appropriate in many other areas as well, of course; in general, they should different histories, political standing, and institutional bases of those disciplines in their national cultures. It is likely (but a matter for investigation!) that such differences influenced the opportunities for introducing new bench practices, if in no other way than by delimiting the niches within which certain practices could be initiated.7 And since new practices can fail to achieve their objectives, can transform the direction of work and disciplinary allegiances of their practitioners, can lead to only routine results, or can open up important new vistas, the character of the available niches from which to work can prove to have a strong influence on the direction that new work takes if and when it starts to flourish. A key aspect of this problematic (not yet adequately studied, I believe) is the problem of drawing boundaries between different kinds of work and determining where each should fit among established disciplines and/or within some new construct. To the extent that an “international” solution is ultimately achieved to such problems, it must surely be achieved in light of initially different ways of dealing with it in different countries.Underlying work of the sort we have been exploring is the thorny problem of how best to contextualize the work being studied. This, I believe, is one of the major historiographic problems that we must face in the history of science. It is by no means a new problem, of course, but a particularization of the age-old problem of the (seeming) overdetermination of historical events. If we deal with local cultures, to understand how they develop and their fate we need to understand their location within larger cultures. But it is utterly unclear how to draw appropriate boundaries on the relevant larger culture(s). As even this brief discussion has shown, institutional cultures, the cultures of sponsoring agencies, “the” culture of science (or of biological science, physical science, etc., as appropriate), and national cultures all can provide relevant contexts, all can occasionally determine the fate of work undertaken in a particular local context. The potentially intractable problem of delimiting the boundaries of investigation looms large here, but it is one that must be faced explicity if we are to profit fully from the enormously stimulating investigations of local cultures exemplified in the four papers published in this symposium. My own view is that we have no abstract standard available for determining which boundaries are appropriate to a given study, and, indeed, that no single contextualization is adequate to the examination of any given case, but that, nonetheless, we can (at least sometimes) distinguish useful and explanatory delimitations of the larger context from others that prove to be misleading.Against this background, I hope that the four papers published in this special issue will stimulate the readers of the JHB to carry out similar studies—that is, studies that seek to characterize and contextualize local experimental cultures —over a wide range of cases. I also hope that some of those who take up this challenge will deal with the larger questions raised by the need to find a way of balancing different, sometimes competing, contextualizations of such studies. The fact that any given case requires multiple contextualizations, resulting in multifaceted representations no one of which is alone adequate, will surely land us in fascinating, hopefully fruitful and productive, controversies. (shrink)

Scholars such as Nancy Leys Stepan, Alexandra Minna Stern, Marius Turda and Aaron Gillette have all argued that the rejection of coerced sterilization was a defining feature of “Latin” eugenic theory and practice. These studies highlight the influence of neo-Lamarckism in this development not only in Latin America but also in parts of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. This article builds upon this historiographical framework to examine an often-neglected site of Latin American eugenic knowledge (...) class='Hi'>production: Chile. By focusing on Chilean eugenicists’ understandings of environment and coerced sterilization, this article argues that there was no uniquely Latin objection to the practice initially. In fact, Chilean eugenicists echoed concerns of eugenicists from a variety of locations, both “mainstream” and Latin, who felt that sterilization was not the most effective way to ensure the eugenic improvement of national populations. Instead, the article contends that it was not until the implementation of the 1933 German racial purity laws, which included coerced sterilization legislation, that Chilean eugenicists began to define their objections to the practice as explicitly Latin. Using a variety of medical texts which appeared in popular periodicals as well as professional journals, this article reveals the complexity of eugenic thought and practice in Chile in the early twentieth century. (shrink)

In modern discourse about the history of science, it seems to be widely accepted that at the end of the nineteenth century, Germany was one of the leading countries in the production of science. In the past, historians of science tried to trace back a specific ‘German style’ of science that—in combination with other factors—determined this German dominance around 1900, especially in the life sciences. Considering the theoretical concept of ‘national styles’, it has to be kept in mind that (...) around 1900, contemporaries already proclaimed ‘national styles’ of science as representations of national identity. Thus, the question arises as to how far existing historiographical conceptions of national styles may include earlier claims and prejudices. Careful reconstructions of contemporary discourses on national styles and inquiries into the ‘stylisation’ of a dominant, successful ‘German style’ are necessary. One of the contemporary critics of a ‘German style’ of science was the physiologist Jacques Loeb (1859–1924), who emigrated to the USA in 1891. Loeb corresponded regularly with the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (1838–1916). Ernst Mach can be considered Loeb's intellectual father with whom he corresponded about strategic, philosophical, and epistemological questions. Using the Loeb–Mach correspondence, the aim of the paper is to reconstruct Loeb's conception of a ‘German style’ of science and its differences to an ‘American style’. Changes in his views are discussed as well as the roots of his views and some of their consequences. Finally, Loeb's ideas on national styles and his working profiles before and after his emigration are compared to historiographical analyses of ‘American’ or ‘German’ styles of science around 1900. (shrink)

L’articolo intende mettere in luce i rapporti tra le fonti storiche del Medioevo russo e la resa cinematografica della narrazione medievale nelle poetiche di Ejzenštejn e Tarkovskij. Congelando le filmografie dei due autori sulle due rispettive pellicole che hanno raccontato il Medioevo russo, l’_Alexandr Nevskij_ di Ejzenštejn e l’_Andrej Rublёv_ di Tarkovskij, l’articolo propone un’indagine critica sulle modalità d’approccio divergenti dei due registi rispetto al materiale storiografico e l’analisi della portata storica che la narrazione del Medioevo assume in un prodotto (...) artistico cinematografico. Partendo dal pensiero di H. White sulla necessità di affiancare la forma narrativa al contenuto del lavoro storico, l’obiettivo dell’articolo è anzitutto la messa in discussione della presunta oggettività della verità storiografica, spostando l’attenzione, in un’ottica cinematografica, sui precisi processi che portano a compimento una narrazione storica _tout court_ in relazione al presente della narrazione e allo sguardo dello spettatore. _This contribution aims to highlight the relationship between the historical sources of the Russian Middle Ages and the cinematic rendering of the medieval narrative in Ejzenštejn and Tarkovskij’poetics. Focusing on two respective films that recounted the Russian Middle Ages, the _Alexandr Nevsky_ by Ejzenštejn and the _Andrej Rublёv_ by Tarkovskij, the article proposes a critical investigation into the divergent approaches of the two directors with respect to historiographical material and the analysis of the historical significance that the medieval narrative assumes in a cinematographic product. Starting from the thought of the philosophy of history’s expert H. White on the need to combine the narrative form with the content of the historical work, the objective of the contribution is primarily to question the alleged objectivity of the historiographical truth. Afterwards the focus will be on the precise processes that bring to completion an historical narrative _tout court_ in relation to the present of the narrative and the viewer’s gaze in a cinematographic perspective._. (shrink)

Preparative and analytical methods developed by separation scientists have played an important role in the history of molecular biology. One such early method is gel electrophoresis, a technique that uses various types of gel as its supporting medium to separate charged molecules based on size and other properties. Historians of science, however, have only recently begun to pay closer attention to this material epistemological dimension of biomolecular science. This paper substantiates the historiographical thread that explores the relationship between modern (...) laboratory practice and the production of scientific knowledge. It traces the historical development of gel electrophoresis from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, with careful attention to the interplay between technical developments and disciplinary shifts, especially the rise of molecular biology in this time-frame. Claiming that the early 1950s marked a decisive shift in the evolution of electrophoretic methods from moving boundary to zone electrophoresis, I reconstruct various trajectories in which scientists such as Oliver Smithies sought out the most desirable solid supporting medium for electrophoretic instrumentation. Biomolecular knowledge, I argue, emerged in part from this process of seeking the most appropriate supporting medium that allowed for discrete molecular separation and visualization. The early 1950s, therefore, marked not only an important turning point in the history of separation science, but also a transformative moment in the history of the life sciences as the growth of molecular biology depended in part on the epistemological access to the molecular realm available through these evolving technologies. (shrink)

How do nuclear technologies become commonplace? How have the borders between the exceptional and the banal been drawn and redrawn over the last 70 years in order to make nuclear energy part of everyday life? This special issue analyzes the role of fun and display, broadly construed, in shaping the cultural representation and the material circulation (or non-circulation) of nuclear technologies. Four case studies, covering the United States, Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, and Ukraine from the 1950s to the 2000s, explore (...) how specific forms of public display and playful practices of cultural production were used as means to banalize (or de-banalize) nuclear energy. This introduction addresses the main theoretical and historiographical signposts of the special issue and outlines the different ways in which the articles explore them. (shrink)

The history of sexology is a well-established field of scholarly investigation animated by ongoing contestations around the disciplinary boundaries, political outlook, and transnational dimensions of the sexological field. This special issue focuses on the multivalent concept of development to address some of the most pressing questions driving current historiographical conversations in this area. The five articles examine how sexology developed in the late 19th and 20th centuries and explore how sexologists deployed various developmental categories to understand sexuality in different (...) national, geographical, and linguistic spaces, including India, Latin America, and Western and Southern Europe. They show how central tracing the relationship between sexuality and human development became to sexologists’ understanding of their project and its value. By interrogating the intersecting individual, social, cultural, and evolutionary developmental frameworks at the heart of sexological knowledge production, the articles engage with sexology as a global and transnational project deeply shaped by ideologies of race, nation, and empire and motivated by a diverse range of political concerns and intellectual questions. In so doing, the special issue as a whole demonstrates the breadth of the sexological field in terms of its interdisciplinary scope, diverse political and intellectual agendas, and global dimensions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science by Ann BlairPeter DearAnn Blair. The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv + 382. Cloth, $45.00.Jean Bodin’s Universae naturae theatrum (1596) is the least celebrated of all the major publications by this outstanding figure of the French renaissance. It lacks the apparent political, historiographical, and philosophical relevance of Bodin’s (...) well-known earlier works (the Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem of 1566, Les six livres de la République of 1576, and De la démonomanie des sorciers of 1580, all receiving much more attention then as now). Ann Blair focuses our attention on the Theatrum, as a text whose significance for her book exists on at least three interrelated levels: there is its relation to Bodin’s views in the more famous texts; its advantage as a treatise on natural philosophy about whose author we know much more (intellectually) than those of most such works; and in connection with the last, there is above all its value as a distinguished representative of a genre of natural philosophical writings that was prominent in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.It is the third consideration that motivates Blair’s book most centrally. She declares her wish to enrich our view of the history of science with works, like the Theatrum, that were not made by subsequently regarded stars such as Galileo or Descartes; the very typicality of its genre makes the Theatrum, she argues, a valuable window on contemporary understandings of what natural knowledge was and should be about. Bodin’s enterprise possessed a religious core: natural philosophy was for him a tool to be used in shoring up broadly irenical positions (of the kind associated with the Colloquium heptaplomeres, usually attributed, as here, to Bodin). This kind of “natural theology” avant la lettre characterized a good number of different thinkers and writers on natural philosophy in this period, many of them German (besides their discussion here, Blair is considering such people, and their project of pia philosophia, more fully in her current work). It is a subject that, more than anything, stands at the heart of her study.Bodin, rather conventionally, tried to establish a close liaison between natural philosophy and religious knowledge—that is, between those things to be inferred from experience of the natural world and the central dogmas of faith. Less conventionally, he attempted to demonstrate on occasion truths that were far from orthodox. Regardless of whether Bodin was “really” a Catholic or a Protestant (and Blair observes the great interest in the Theatrum shown by German Calvinists in the first few decades after its original publication), his general religious stance was one of accommodation. Thus good philosophizing could demonstrate (in the weak, rhetorical sense of that term) such doctrines as the existence and providence of God; contentious issues, such as the correct interpretation of the Eucharist, were left aside. Nonetheless, Bodin also argued, at such length and with such vigor as to have the propositions condemned by the Catholic church, that human souls and angels (as well as, more usually, demons) were corporeal beings. The importance to Bodin of this position stemmed from its sociopolitical implications: in particular, if human souls were incorporeal, it became unclear how rewards and punishments—necessary sanctions for restoring the social order threatened by the Wars of Religion—could be meted out after death. Curiously, such a view seems to imply that pleasure and pain are inextricably connected to bodies alone. [End Page 363]Among the historiographical strands informing Blair’s approach is recent literature on the “history of the book,” best known through the work of Roger Chartier. Accordingly, Blair discusses the vicissitudes of production of Bodin’s book in its various editions and emissions, and carefully considers, along with the likely reading practices by the aid of which Bodin came to compose it, the various uses to which its first readers put it. Her major interpretive trope is that of the commonplace book. While acknowledging the lack of direct material evidence for Bodin’s use of such a technique as his chief means of... (shrink)

Several fields of research associated with the history of the early modern Iberian world have experienced a significant boost in recent decades: Iberian science as it relates to the Atlantic world, the history of European colonial empires, and the study of knowledge production in Latin American cultures. This expansion has coincided with a renewed interest of historians of the early modern period in practical knowledge and artisanal cultures. This paper presents an updated historiographic review of both lines of research (...) as well as of their close interconnections. In addition, it offers a re-interpretation of Iberian imperial science in the context of the European maritime expansion through the lens of artisanal epistemology. (shrink)

This article tries to elucidate the Deleuzian project of the reversal of Platonism in relation to that of Nietzsche. To this aim, I have made a predominantly historiographic sketch of the question in both authors. In the case of Nietzsche, I inquired about both the relationship that the reversal of Platonism presents in his philosophy with the problem of nihilism and the evolution that the topic undergoes throughout his vast intellectual production, until it reaches its final formulation. With regard (...) to Deleuze, I offer a broad overview of his work aimed at tracing the subject, from his interpretation of the Nietzschean formulation, as opposed to that of Heidegger, to the meticulous way in which it fits into his own philosophy as a shift of the essence in favour of the event as a source of singularities. (shrink)

The history of ideas is most prominently understood as a highly specialized group of methods for the study of abstract ideas, with both diachronic and synchronic aspects. While theorizing the field has focused on the methods of study, defining the object of study – ideas – has been neglected. But the development of the theories behind material culture studies poses a sharp challenge to these narrow approaches. It both challenges the integrity of the notion of abstract ideas and also offers (...) possibilities for enlarging the scope of the ways in which we can study ideas historically. It is proposed here to regard ideas as mental relations deeply connected to human communication by both thinking and doing. This connection of ideational thought to human production and behavior is a deep foundation for the history of ideas as an interdisciplinary historiographic means of understanding moral life. (shrink)

This paper is both a reflection on Francis Bacon’s social epistemology and a meta-reflection on how we should be think about historical figures such as Bacon, who are of continuing philosophical, scientific and even political relevance. The impetus for this paper is provided by Daniel Garber’s ‘Bacon’s Metaphysical Method’, which depicts Bacon as making various moves in the scholastic debates of his time. In contrast, I draw two sorts of conclusions: (1) At the historiographical level, I argue against the (...) sort of ‘contextualism’ that artificially constrains the ‘transcendental’ horizons of a thinker such as Bacon, who was clearly addressing not simply his immediate contemporaries but perhaps more importantly, some future readers whose identities he cannot know. What is sometimes called the ‘conversation of mankind’ has just this rather odd communicative character. (2) At the more substantive philosophical level, it is clear that Bacon does not have a conception of knowledge as a kind of (justified) belief at all. On the contrary, knowledge is the product of a process that is largely conducted by humans on humans, very much in the spirit of a judicial inquisition. In this context, humans – no less than the technologies normally found in laboratories – are instruments of knowledge production. Here Bacon presages the c19-c20 ideas of media as the ‘extension of the senses’ and Karl Popper’s World 3. (shrink)

Andréanne Turgeon | : La littérature normative, lorsqu’il est question d’étudier les pratiques religieuses passées, est souvent perçue comme limitative pour le chercheur ; en effet, les prescriptions morales contenues dans ce type d’écrits témoignent davantage des attentes du clergé en matière de moeurs et de piété que des pratiques effectives qui avaient cours parmi les fidèles. Au cours des dernières décennies, cette littérature a généralement été exclue du corpus documentaire de nombreux chercheurs qui s’intéressaient à la religion « vécue (...) », afin d’éviter de transposer sur celle-ci une image biaisée, véhiculée par des productions ecclésiastiques. Au Québec, la notion de « réveil religieux », et le débat historiographique qu’elle a suscité au cours des années 1990, fournit un excellent exemple de catégorie, puisque cette notion s’est construite et fortifiée en l’absence d’une riche documentation qui, pourtant, encadrait la pratique que l’on comptabilisait et dont on cherchait à interpréter le sens. Cet article vise à montrer que la littérature normative peut donc s’avérer indispensable pour expliquer les transformations socioreligieuses d’une époque, et que c’est la prise en compte de cette documentation, dans les études historiques récentes, qui a mené à l’éclatement de la catégorie de « réveil religieux ». | : Historians often perceive normative literature as restricting the scholarly study of past religious practices : the moral precepts contained in those writings inform readers about the clergy’s expectations related to piety and morality, but do not tell much about effective practices that prevailed among the faithful. In the last decades, many scholars interested in the religion as experienced by people have excluded normative literature from their documentary corpus, in an attempt to avoid transposing the biased image conveyed by ecclesiastical productions into their research. The concept of “religious revival” and the ensuing historiographical debate in Québec during the 1990s provides a good example of such a problem, this category being created and reinforced without taking into consideration the normative documentation underlying the religious practices historians were trying to explain. This article intends to demonstrate that normative literature may be crucial in explaining past socioreli- gious transformations, and that its use in recent historical studies has even contributed to invalidate the concept of “religious revival.”. (shrink)

The article offers a general account of the genesis of the absolute differential calculus (ADC), paying special attention to its links with the history of differential geometry. In relatively recent times, several historians have described the development of the ADC as a direct outgrowth either of the theory of algebraic and differential invariants or as a product of analytical investigations, thus minimizing the role of Riemann’s geometry in the process leading to its discovery. Our principal aim consists in challenging this (...) historiographical tenet and analyzing the intimate connection between the development of Riemannian geometry and the birth of tensor calculus. (shrink)

Kant is an author who frequently recurs in Zubiri’s works. The constancy of the comparison between the two philosophers is entirely internal to the method of investigation itself of Zubrian philosophy, which has nothing properly historiographical, and which has posed many problems to the commentators of Spanish philosopher. Following the references to Zubiri’s interpretation of Kant in the philosophical texts of Ignacio Ellacuria (1930-1989), we will try to feed a two-part comparison whose main goal is to clarify the nature (...) and the perspective of the confrontation with Kantism, in relation to the more general problem of the status of philosophy in Zubiri’s production. (shrink)

This article addresses the modern concept of sovereignty as a multivocal and conflictual semantic field, arguing for the necessity to trace its genealogy based on the structural tensions that haunt its logical framework – as well as its representations – rather than on a linear historiographic reconstruction. In particular, the scrutiny I propose aims to examine a series of exchanges that have been characterizing this concept since the beginning: the global and the European, the maritime and the territorial, the colony (...) and the state, the imperial and the proprietary. The problematic balance between ‘imperium’ and ‘dominium’ is indeed assumed here as the turning point of the rise of a sovereign power that appears to be originally rooted in the very production and governance of the global space, thus giving up all possible Eurocentric narratives of modernity. To illustrate my argument, I focus on the frontispieces to three of Thomas Hobbes’s most important books, that is, his translation of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars, De Cive and Leviathan. A thorough analysis of these images enables us to understand how these lines of force traverse the very heart of modern European political concepts, along with the mirroring effects that constantly bounce their normative construction of subjectivity back and forth from the periphery to the centre and, ultimately, from the market to the state. (shrink)

While the relationship between fathers and sons, real or metaphorical, is still a dominant paradigm among classicists, this paper considers the rival contribution of Roman sons-in-law to the processes of collaboration and succession. It discusses the tensions, constraints, and obligations that soceri – generi relationships involved, then claims a significant role for sons-in-law in literary production. A new category is proposed here: “son-in-law literature,” with texts offered as recompense for a wife or her dowry, or as substitute funeral orations. (...) Cicero and Tacitus are two authors for whom the relationship played a key role in shaping realities and fantasies of advancement. The idealized in-law bonds of De Amicitia, Brutus, and De Oratore are set against Cicero's intellectual aspirations and real-life dealings with a challenging son-in-law, while Tacitus' relationship to Agricola can be seen to affect both his historiographical discussions of father–son-in-law relationships and the lessons he drew from them about imperial succession. (shrink)

Thanks to the experimental nature of the conference where this research was originally discussed, the article offers a quick survey of the production, circulation and reception of manuscripts with philosophical texts in the Byzantine world, under a new methodology. In the first part, some of the most important manuscripts of philosophical texts are ‘stratigraphically’ analized: in this way, historiographical totem as the so-called «premier humanisme byzantin» or the «macedonian Renaissance» are discussed and revised. In the second part, I (...) examine literary evidences about the circulation of philosophical works in the different periods of Byzantine history, prudently trying to connect them with the quantitative datas which can be inferred from databases as the Mertens-Pack 3 and Pinakes. (shrink)

Chaosmosis and Subjectivity: The Aesthetics of Félix Guattari (1930-1992) is the first doctoral thesis monographically devoted to the work of this great contemporary thinker. The aim of this study is the analysis of his aesthetics in the context of French post-structuralist thought, by means of a systematic analysis of the influences, stages and foundations of his work. From a state of the field which allows us to understand the historiographical keys in the reception of his thought, we then present (...) the development of the complete Guattarian works, paying special attention to all the historical correlates, in order to thus picture the post-Lacanian Guattari who writes about machinic production, collective enunciation, micropolitics and ecosophy. Next, we address the groundings of Guattarian aesthetic thought in relation to four problem-authors: Joyce, in relation to Guattari’s overwhelming volonté d’écriture; Proust, peak of Guattari’s analytic ambitions, and an opportunity to talk about the phylum machinique in the context of his theory of a nonindividualized enunciation; Kafka, the minor, and collective enunciation; and finally, Schumann, paradigmatic example of the great importance music had in Guattari’s work and life, and suitable viewpoint for a deep theory of the refrain. Ultimately, what this study tries to point out is the centrality of the aesthetic plane in Félix Guattari’s work, just as the profound richness of Guattarian contribution to Contemporary Aesthetics. (shrink)

This article explores an episode in the reception of Hegel's philosophy of history and historiography of philosophy with reference to the question of the possibility of non-Western philosophy, in particular African philosophy. Section I briefly outlines the contents of the Hatäta Zär'a Ya‛ǝqob and the controversy over its authorship, focusing in particular on the argument of the Ethiopianist and scholar of Semitic languages Carlo Conti Rossini that ‘rationalistic’ philosophy was impossible in Ethiopia. In section II I suggest that a major (...) component of the intellectual background to this notion of the impossibility of philosophy in Africa can be traced to Hegel's philosophy of history. To substantiate this claim I begin by providing an account of the broader historiographical shift between 1780 and 1830, in which Africa and Asia came to be excluded from the history of philosophy, and I suggest that Hegel's philosophy of history was decisive in this process. I examine how Hegel's account of history as the realization and actualization of freedom goes together with the development of cultural production culminating in philosophy, and how both of these processes (if they are really separate processes at all), can be mapped onto particular historical-geographical populations and cultures. I suggest that, even though this was not Hegel's intention, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this served as a cultural justification for political domination: those who are unfree are unfree because they are unthinking (unphilosophical), and those who are unthinking cannot be free. Finally in section III I connect this Hegelian conception to Conti Rossini's work, both his article on the Hatäta and as apologist for Italian imperialism. I conclude by reflecting on what this underexplored connection between Hegel and early twentieth-century theorists of culture might mean for attempts to construct global histories of philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond the Aesthetic Garden: Politics and Culture on the Margins of Fin-de Siècle ViennaScott SpectorThe rhetorical structure supporting Carl E. Schorske’s seminal Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture 1 is frankly exposed. The argument—which may have single-handedly changed the discipline of cultural history—is an apparently simple one, and it is reasserted in this series of essays on diverse areas of cultural activity through the use of recurring metaphors. Schorske’s famous (...) thesis (modern culture as political surrogate for a marginalized liberal bourgeoisie) is represented through constantly resurfacing dichotomies: liberal political engagement and (vs.) the aesthetic “garden” of modern art; history and (vs.) desire and “the psyche”; politics and (vs.) culture. All of this is well known. In this essay I want both to assess our necessary debt to Schorske’s powerful work and to suggest what lies beyond it. If at the end of our own century we want to rethink Schorske’s founding project of an interdisciplinary cultural history of Central Europe, we cannot limit this initiative to the obviously important question of extending the contents of cultural inquiry (from high culture to popular culture, from the hegemonic nationality to non-German-speaking cultures, from patriarchy to the voices of women). The formal question packed up in the image of refuge from the historico-political in the aesthetic garden or the fortress of the psyche may offer most productive access to rethinking the Schorskean paradigm, instead of merely expanding its scope. For these reasons I want to focus on the rhetorical structure of Schorske’s essay collection against that of aesthetic and critical works from the Central European turn of the century. 2 Schorske’s historical analysis seems to be at odds [End Page 691] with these projects seen on their own terms—but to utter this is ironically to reiterate the tension between history or politics and aesthetic modernism articulated in the essays.The question at hand is hence two-fold. First of all, what is ideologically at stake in a historiographical construction that identifies Central European modernist aesthetic innovation as an escape from history and politics? Schorske’s interdisciplinary project of contextualization (his significant subtitle “Politics and Culture” has become an unshakable legacy for cultural history) is peculiar insofar as his diagnosis is that culture became increasingly isolated from political life. I have chosen to focus on the rhetorical opposition of “center” and “margin” in this essay because of Schorske’s implicit claim that the very class which was central to nineteenth-century Austrian liberalism—the German-speaking bourgeoisie—was “marginalized” by the rise of hostile anti-liberal ideologies (the “culture-makers” were “alienated along with their class in its extrusion from political power”). 3 As I hope to show, this geometry of center and margins was at the heart of the most innovative and potentially explosive play within so-called aestheticist texts around 1900. This brings us to the second half of this two-fold question: how might the “aesthetic moment” of the Central European fin de siècle be seen if we wish to go beyond Schorske’s diagnosis of a forced retreat into the temple of art, the fortress of the psyche, or the aesthetic garden? To get at both sides of this question—the ideological valence of the aesthetic moment and of its histories—I will focus on literary products, in particular on essays, for several reasons. One of these is that Schorske’s synthetic work is, after all, itself a collection of essays published over two decades.The privileging of the essay genre in coming to terms with the problem of turn-of-the-century aestheticism was established long before Schorske’s work. If we can find early examples of this generic strategy in fin-de-siècle authors such as Musil and Broch, the paradigmatic instance—and the place where the function of the essay-critique within aestheticist criticism is worked through—is the collection of Georg Lukács, Soul and Forms. 4 Several positions are taken in that work which may be useful to an understanding of Schorske’s essay project: Lukács asserts the essay’s fragmentary nature at... (shrink)

This essay argues that work on the history of women's ideas has been repeatedly written out of the multiple historiographical reviews of twentieth century intellectual history. By recovering that work, and the contexts and sites of its production, the essay offers a new perspective on the historiography of intellectual history in the twentieth century.

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed his iconic imitation game, calling it a ‘test’, an ‘experiment’, and the ‘the only really satisfactory support’ for his view that machines can think. Following Turing’s rhetoric, the ‘Turing test’ has been widely received as a kind of crucial experiment to determine machine intelligence. In later sources, however, Turing showed a milder attitude towards what he called his ‘imitation tests’. In 1948, Turing referred to the persuasive power of ‘the actual production of machines’ rather (...) than that of a controlled experiment. Observing this, I propose to distinguish the logical structure from the rhetoric of Turing’s argument. I argue that Turing’s proposal of a crucial experiment may have been a concession to meet the standards of his interlocutors more than his own, while his construction of machine intelligence rather reveals a method of successive idealizations and exploratory experiments. I will draw a parallel with Galileo’s construction of idealized fall in a void and the historiographical controversies over the role of experiment in Galilean science. I suggest that Turing, like Galileo, relied on certain kinds of experiment, but also on rhetoric and propaganda to inspire further research that could lead to convincing scientific and technological progress. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Art of Biography in Antiquity by Tomas HäggDan CurleyTomas Hägg. The Art of Biography in Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xv + 496 pp. Cloth, $110.We know less about the genre of ancient biography than handbooks and brief surveys would have us believe. Genres by their nature invite definition, and historiographical perspectives on this genre in particular promote tidy classifications and clear lines of influence. (...) Tomas Hägg’s Art of Biography in Antiquity, which undertakes close readings of some eight-hundred years’ worth of biographical authors and texts, not only recognizes but also embraces ancient life-writing as a vast, polymorphous, versatile, and lacunary enterprise. For those of us who, like this reviewer, prefer to read the works of ancient biographers in literary terms, this is the book we have been wanting.Hägg’s “Prolegomena” are brief but cover the critical issues surrounding ancient biography (and, by way of comparison or contrast, modern biography). Chief among these are the question of the biographical genre itself, which Hägg acknowledges “is more subject matter than form” (3), and the welcome recuperation of biography as the product of “creative imagination” from its traditional status as a “sub-branch of historiography” (3). Hägg distinguishes historiography from historicity—namely, the biographer’s evaluation of, and approaches to, his sources—and he enumerates what might be considered biographical biases, from [End Page 713] the emphasis on public rather than private life, to transference between author and subject, to the inventive bridging of gaps, to the tension between cradle-to-grave chronology and characterization in the moment. Brevity courts controversy, and Hägg cautions that “no systematic treatment of biographic theory and practice is intended” (1). Yet his prolegomena lay out clear guideposts for the case studies of later chapters, which make a more or less chronological exploration of the genre.Chapter 1, even as it postulates Xenophon as the most important (or, at least, the most prolific) proto-biographer, discusses a range of fifth-and fourth-century b.c.e. texts and the ways in which they are—and, just as often, are not— biographies: Ion of Chios, Epidemiai; Plato, Apology and Phaedo; Xenophon, Memorabilia; Isocrates, Evagoras; Xenophon, again, Agesilaus and Cyropaedia. It is no small task to trace the development of a genre given a vexed chronology, the differing purposes of these texts, and uncertainty as to how much influence their authors exerted upon one another. The Epidemiai offers a sympotic anecdote about Sophocles (preserved in Ath. 13.603e–4d) that illuminates the tragedian’s character. The Apology and the Phaedo together display and interpret the life of Socrates as “an ethical unity” (19), the former a retrospective defense of the philosopher’s career, the latter ending with a scenic description of his death. The Memorabilia, in turn, paints a “consistent, pregnant picture” (27) of Socrates’ persona with its serial anecdotes. The Evagoras confirms its own status as written encomium (graphein) and introduces what would become standard topoi, such as its subject’s genealogy, childhood, and methods of ruling. Likewise, the Agesilaus, which emphasizes writing to an even greater degree and dichotomizes the Spartan king’s deeds and their underlying virtues. The Cyropaedia, therefore, is a pinnacle of proto-biography, extending from Cyrus’ childhood to his fictional, idealized death. Although Hägg reads each work on its own terms, and avoids an overly simplistic taxonomy, his emphasis on the unbiographical qualities of his case studies is at times counterproductive. Furthermore, he tends to conclude his discussions with considerations of “the biographical,” as if the preceding analyses—frequently engaged with the aforementioned topoi—have had little bearing. This said, chapter 1 describes a genre developing along lines that later biographers, and their readers, would have recognized.Chapter 2, a survey of Hellenistic biographers, is on firmer (albeit more fragmentary) ground, perhaps because the texts of this era regularly have bios in their titles and therefore help to establish “an unmistakably biographical form” (67). Hägg considers examples from the three traditional sub-categories of Hellenistic “professional biography” (97), namely, the philosophic, the literary, and the political: Aristoxenus’ Pythagoras and Socrates; Satyrus’ Life of Euripides... (shrink)

As a defender of the fundamental importance of Mendel’s experiments for understanding heredity, the English biologist William Bateson did much to publicize the usefulness of Mendelian science for practical breeders. In the course of his campaigning, he not only secured a reputation among breeders as a scientific expert worth listening to but articulated a vision of the ideal relations between pure and applied science in the modern state. Yet historical writing about Bateson has tended to underplay these utilitarian elements of (...) his program, to the extent of portraying him, notably in still-influential work from the 1960s and 1970s, as a type specimen of the scientist who could not care less about application. This paper offers a corrective view of Bateson himself—including the first detailed account of his role as an expert witness in a courtroom dispute over the identity of a commercial pea variety—and an inquiry into the historiographic fate of his efforts in support of Mendelism’s productivity. For all that a Marxian perspective classically brings applied science to the fore, in Bateson’s case, and for a range of reasons, it did the opposite during the Cold War. (shrink)

In this paper I examine three lectures by Paul Ricœur: two about imagination and the metaphor, and a third one about the writing of history and the representation of the past. The objective is to establish the connections between time and word on account of the creative speech; this creative speech is born from the productive imagination and, at the same time, it may be able to express the finite and temporary being that we are. The creative speech, which is (...) expressed through temporary figures, typical of poetry and narrative, is also decisive for historiographic work, both in the process of documentary research, and in the posing of questions about historical events, and, therefore, for the writing of history. (shrink)

This work is an argument for the notion of knowledge production. It is an attempt at an epistemological and historiographic position which treats all facets and modes of knowledge as products of human practices, a position developed and demonstrated through a reconstruction of two defining episodes in the scientific career of Robert Hooke : the composition of his Programme for explaining planetary orbits as inertial motion bent by centripetal force, and his development of the spring law in relation to (...) his invention of the spring watch. ;The revival of interest in the history of experimental and technological knowledge has accorded Hooke much more attention than before. However, dependent on the conception of knowledge as a representation of reality, this scholarship is bound to the categories of influence and competition, and concentrates mainly on Hooke's numerous passionate exchanges with Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens. I favourably explore the neo-pragmatist criticism of representation epistemology in the writing of Richard Rorty and Ian Hacking. This criticism exposes the conventional portrayal of Hooke as "a mechanic of genius, rather than a scientist" as a reification of the social hierarchy between Hooke's Royal Society employers and his artisan-experimenters employees. ;However, Rorty and Hacking's efforts to do away with the image of the human knower as an enclosed realm of 'ideas' have not been completed. Undertaking this unfinished philosophical task, my main strategy is to erase the false gap between knowledge which is clearly produced--practical, technological and experimental, 'know how', and knowledge which we still think of as representation--theoretical 'knowing that'. I present Hooke, Newton and Huygens as craftsmen, who, employing various resources, labor to manufacture material and theoretical artifacts. Eschewing the category of independent facts awaiting discovery, I attempt to compare practices and techniques rather than to adjudicate priority claims, replacing ideas which 'develop', 'inspire', and 'influence', with tools and skills which are borrowed, appropriated and modified for new uses. ;This approach enables tracing Hooke's creation of his Programme from his microscopy, and reconstructing his use of springs to structure a theory of matter. With his unique combination of technical and speculative talents Hooke comes to personify the relations between the theoretical-linguistic and the experimental-technological in their full complexity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Chinese and Indian Ways of Thinking in Early Modern European Philosophy: The Reception and the Exclusion by Selusi AmbrogioCatherine König-Pralong (bio)Chinese and Indian Ways of Thinking in Early Modern European Philosophy: The Reception and the Exclusion. By Selusi Ambrogio. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. How Modern Historians of Philosophy Drew Their World MapsIn his latest book, Chinese and Indian Ways of Thinking in Early Modern European Philosophy: The Reception (...) and the Exclusion, Selusi Ambrogio presents an extensive survey of how Indian and Chinese traditions were conceived of and staged in modern European historiography. This study, which surpasses in detail and scope other works devoted to the same topic,1 reconstructs 150 years of philosophical historiography. Otto van Heurn's Barbaricae philosophiae antiquitatum libri duo (published in 1600) included for the first time contemporary and ancient Indian thinkers in the philosophical doxography; at the other end of the time span considered, Jacob Brucker's Historia critica philosophiae (1744) sanctioned the exclusion of Chinese and Indian thinkers by means of a detailed criticism of their pseudo-philosophies. Moreover, Ambrogio makes the choice to focus on the history of philosophy, unlike Étiemble, for example,2 who was interested in philosophy in a broad sense—academic and non-academic—as well as in travel accounts, the writings of the Jesuits, and those of their opponents, among other sources. According to Ambrogio, the histories of philosophy were more representative of "the common European understanding of these civilizations," since they "were not openly written for controversialist aims" (p. 2). Even though one may wonder whether defining philosophy ("what philosophy is and its role"—ibid.) and legitimizing its scholarly practice is a less political or less polemical undertaking than pamphlets, letters, and philosophical essays,3 it is probably true that philosophical historiography produced an effect of objectification or an appearance of neutrality.The author's main thesis is that the exclusion of all non-Greeks or non-Europeans from the history of philosophy does not date from the nineteenth century and Hegel, as is generally thought, but precisely from the moment when Indian and Chinese "civilizations" were considered by historians of philosophy and included in the philosophical historiography: from the beginning of the seventeenth century onwards (p. 3). Applying a segregationist model, modern historians of philosophy developed a dialectic of [End Page 203] identification—the author speaks of "reception"—and exclusion. They defined the European philosophical mind by demarcating it from other ways of thinking, which they situated in place and time on a civilizational world map. Encompassing the world from Europe produced in return processes of definition and situation. Philosophy was established in a territory and identified with a "culture" or "mind" that began to think itself in relation to the rest of the world under the name of Europe.4I will discuss Ambrogio's remarkable work in three moments. First, I will develop some particularly interesting conclusions drawn from the study; namely, they address periodization, the production of cultural categories, and the valorization of theory. I will then discuss the main thesis as well as some problematic issues, before concluding on the subject of a world absent from Ambrogio's book, the Near and Middle East.I. Logic of Time and Cultural TerritorializationAmbrogio's book is composed of three parts that address three successive historiographical models. First, the "perennialist universalism" (p. 57)—represented by, among others, Otto van Heurn, Thomas Burnet, Isaac Vossius, François Bernier, Georg Horn, and François de la Mothe le Vayer—included ancient India and then China in the "prisca theologia"; on the other hand, it described contemporary Indian and Chinese thinkers as "barbarian" philosophers. In this constellation, Buddhism began to function as the negative part of Oriental thought. According to the Jesuits, it had polluted and corrupted the original Chinese wisdom, often identified with Confucianism.The second model constructed an "Atheistic Asia," which was used either as a positive anthropological image (for example in Pierre Bayle), or as a negative foil for Lutheran philosophy and theology (for example in Johann Franz Buddeus). In the pages he dedicates to these endeavors, Ambrogio often moves away from philosophical doxography, represented by André-Fran... (shrink)

Exploring the modern category of history in relation to film theory, film textuality, and film history, Change Mummified makes a persuasive argument for the centrality of historicity to film as well as the special importance of film in historical culture. What do we make of the concern for recovering the past that is consistently manifested in so many influential modes of cinema, from Hollywood to documentary and postcolonial film? How is film related to the many modern practices that define themselves (...) as configuring pastness in the present, such as architectural preservation, theme parks, and, above all, professional historical research? What is the relation of history in film to other media such as television and digital imaging? How does emphasizing the connection between film and modern historicity affect the theorization and historicization of film and modern media culture? Pursuing the full implications of film as cultural production, Philip Rosen reconceptualizes modern historicity as a combination of characteristic epistemological structures on the one hand, and the social imperative to regulate or manage time on the other. Emphasizing a fundamental constellation of pursuit of the real, indexical signification and the need to control time, he interrogates a spectrum of film theory and film texts. His argument refocuses the category of temporality for film and cultural theory while rethinking the importance of historicity. An original and sustained meditation on the historiographic status of cinematic signs, Change Mummified is both an intervention in film and media studies and an argument for the continuing necessity of modern historical thinking in its contradictions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:African Athena: New Agendas ed. by Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, Tessa RoynonMary R. LefkowitzDaniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon, eds., African Athena: New Agendas. Classical Presences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. xiv + 469 pp. 6 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $160.The inspiration for this book derives from a 2008 conference at the University of Warwick that was held in recognition of the twentieth anniversary of the (...) publication of the first volume of Black Athena. African Athena is the title Martin Bernal once said that he “should have used” for his multivolume project, but his publisher “insisted on” using Black because it would “sell” (“Black Athena and the APA,” Arethusa 22 [1989]: 31–32). In his autobiographical afterword to this volume, he admits that the title Black Athena “may well have had the effect” of exposing critics of his books to charges of racism, as indeed it did. So the use of the alternate title for the present volume represents a welcome shift in emphasis from issues of race to issues of culture and nationality, and the reception of Greek and Roman ideas by later writers. Some of the essays in the volume are based on papers given at the Warwick conference; other contributors were specially invited. The chapters in the first part of the book are primarily historiographical in nature, while most of the essays in the second part consider the literary and historical productions of particular authors. The editors provide an introductory overview of each contribution, with a helpful survey of some of the other recent work in this emerging field, and offer some brief general remarks. But it is not [End Page 347] clear why certain important topics (e.g., the works of Jean Terrasson or Cheikh Anta Diop) were not treated in more depth. Of course, no collection can have the coherence of a work by an individual author, and the essays in this volume seem largely independent of one another. If there was any discussion among the authors who presented their papers in the conference, or commentary on them by Bernal himself, few traces of such interchange appears in the published book. Readers are left to make such connections as best they can.There are, however, some commonalities among the papers. Most concentrate on reception, and do not consider the historical issues that have made Black Athena the subject of such heated debate. That does not mean that the editors or most of the authors believe that the debate has been in any way resolved; rather, it appears that they have sought to avoid discussion of the historical issues involved in Bernal’s reconstruction of the ancient past, seeking instead to concentrate on the “ongoing relevance of the issues Bernal raises.” Although works by Bernal’s most outspoken critics are mentioned, there is only occasional reference to what they actually said and no specific discussions of the particular reasons why most scholars of the ancient world believe that Bernal has vastly overstated the degree of Egyptian influence on Greece and misinterpreted such evidence as there is, especially in the case of his proposed new etymologies. Some of the contributors seem sincerely puzzled by the relative lack of attention accorded to Black Athena. Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence (New Brunswick, N.J. 2006). For example, Patrice Rankine in his chapter “Black Apollo?” is impressed by the “patience and meticulous attention to sources” displayed in Bernal’s claim (based on the epithet λυκηγενής) “that European scholars dislodged Apollo from his Egyptian connection” to Sun worship. Rankine believes that it is mainly because of “the context of North American intellectual life” that such proposals failed to persuade classicists and Indo-Europeanists. He does not appear to have supposed that there might be other, far more compelling reasons why linguists have thought that Apollo’s origins might more credibly be traced to Lycia or Anatolia.Rankine and other contributors to the volume call attention to the nationalism and other types of Zeitgeist that have caused European scholars to ignore or downplay the contributions of Egypt and other African cultures. Toby Green observes, “In the long run, the most deep-rooted impact of Black... (shrink)

In Towards a Realist Philosophy of History, Adam Timmins sets out to develop a non-naïve form of realism that can account for the majority of the practices and products of historiography. In particular, he claims that we should be realists about facts, colligations, and narrative. While being sympathetic to some form of realism about all of these, this review essay critically discusses both Timmins’ actual arguments for historiographic realism and the approach that should be taken to the philosophical issue itself. (...) The wider argument is that realism in historiography is a question of justification and that we therefore must turn to the empirical analysis of actual historiographic texts and debates to make any real headway on this issue. (shrink)

The manuscripts and writings of the fifteenth-century astronomer and physician Lewis Caerleon (d.c.1495) have been largely overlooked. To fill this gap, this article focuses on his writings and working methods through a case study of his canons and table for the equation of time. In the first part, an account of his life and writings is given on the basis of new evidence. The context in which his work on the equation of time was produced is explored in detail by (...) reviewing the three key periods of his scientific production. His heavy reliance on Simon Bredon’sCommentum super Almagestiis also analyzed. The article also provides editions of Lewis Caerleon’s canons for calculating his table for the equation of time and a critical edition of Simon Bredon’sCommentum super Almagesti,III, 22–24. In the second part of this article, we analyze the table for the equation of time derived by Lewis around 1485. In addition to the final table, there is a unique table with intermediate results that records every step of his derivation. By following and discussing the details of this derivation, we shed a new light on tabular practices in mathematical astronomy. Following Lewis in his historical mathematical procedure, we argue, offers a novel historiographical approach that allows us to identify different sources and practices used by historical actors. Therefore, beyond the exchange of parameters residing in modern mathematical analysis, this novel approach offers a promising refinement for the analysis of the transmission of knowledge across space, time, and culture. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis 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”. (shrink)

Motivated by the developments in contemporary mathematical physics and the related interpretive and historiographical works on these developments, a structuralist and historically constitutive and constructive approach to scientific realism (SHASR) is proposed to address the challenges Thomas Kuhn raised against scientific realism, and to remove the defects of the currently available dissatisfactory responses the structuralists put forward to the challenges. The paper shows that SHASR productively exploits the insights from both Kuhn’s historicism and his critics’ structuralism, while avoids the (...) traps in both traditions. Then, after a brief comparison between SHASR and the increasingly popular neo-Kantian post-Kuhnian philosophy of science recommended and defended by Michael Freedman and some others, it concludes with a big picture about the science-world relationship derived from the notion of emergence conceptualized within the framework of SHASR, whose bearings on the Kantian question of the phenomenal - noumenal relationship are worth further explorations. (shrink)

The history of microcinematography is explored here as an example of the possible historiographical directions for work on science and film in the twentieth century. Topics discussed include investigations of the role of time in experiment, and the constant interplay between static and dynamic modes of imaging in scientific research; the role of films as depictions of both the objects of science and the process of scientific looking itself; and the possibility for telling a social history of science through (...) investigation of the production and reception of cinema. (shrink)

This article investigates the new attitude toward the reception and use of Augustine in the early thirteenth century as seen in the works of Helinand of Froidmont and Robert Grosseteste. Both scholars were products of the Twelfth Century Renaissance of Augustine, represented in Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the Glossa Ordinaria, and Gratian’s Decretum. Yet both Helinand and Grosseteste reconstructed Augustine’s texts for their own purposes; they did not simply use Augustine as an authority. Detailed and thorough textual analysis reveals that the (...) early thirteenth century was a high point in Augustine’s reception, and one which effected a transformation of how Augustine’s texts were used, a fact often been obscured in the historiographical debates of the relationship between “Augustinianism” and “Aristotelianism.” Moreover, in pointing to the importance of Helinand’s world chronicle, his Chronicon, this article argues for the importance of compilations as a major source for the intellectual and textual history of the high Middle Ages. Thus, the thirteenth century appears as the bridge between the Augustinian Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, and that of the Fourteenth, making clear the need for further research and highlighting the importance of the early thirteenth century for a thorough understanding of the historical reception of Augustine. (shrink)

En este trabajo nos proponemos poner de manifiesto un aspecto poco estudiado del Contra los griegos de Taciano ; nos referimos a la introducción del discurso historiográfico en la apologética cristiana. En cumplimiento de nuestro objetivo daremos cuenta, por una parte, del carácter idiosincrático de la producción de este apologista en el contexto de la defensa de la fe cristiana en el s. II y analizaremos, por otra, lo que de acuerdo con nuestra línea de investigación es lo más relevante (...) de su controvertido modus cogitandi: el rechazo de la Filosofía como via regia de acceso al Cristianismo para las gentes de alta cultura y la introducción del discurso historiográfico como garantía de veracidad. In this paper we propose to highlight a little studied aspect of the Discourse Against the Greeks of Taciano ; we refer to the introduction of historiographical discourse in Christian apologetics. In fulfillment of our objective we will give account, on the one hand, of the idiosyncratic character of the production of this apologist in the context of the defense of the Christian faith in the s. II and we will analyze, on the other hand, what according to our line of research is the most relevant of his controversial modus cogitandi: the rejection of Philosophy as a way of access to Christianity for people of high culture and the introduction of the historiographical discourse as a guarantee of truthfulness. (shrink)