François Renaud replies to the question of what principles one ought to employ in the study of Plato by arguing that, and demonstrating how, the argument and the drama operate together successfully in the Gorgias. In agreement with Renaud’s approach, I expose some historical roots with a review of Platonic interpretive strategies of the modern period in the context of history of philosophy more generally. I also try to show why argument and drama operate together, an insight I attribute to (...) Plato’s genius in relation to music. (shrink)

Del Giudice addresses a complex and pertinent theoretical issue: the evolutionary adaptiveness of sex differences in attachment styles in relation to life history strategy. Although we applaud Del Giudice for calling attention to the problem, we regret that he does not sufficiently specify how attachment styles serve as an integral part of a coordinate life history strategy for either sex.

A secondary analysis was performed on preliminary data from an ongoing cross-cultural study on assortative pairing. Independently sampled pairs of opposite-sex romantic partners and of same-sex friends rated themselves and each other on Life History (LH) strategy and mate value. Data were collected in local bars, clubs, coffeehouses, and other public places from three different cultures: Tucson, Arizona; Hermosillo, Sonora; and San José, Costa Rica. The present analysis found that slow LH individuals assortatively pair with both sexual and social (...) partners more strongly than fast LH individuals. We interpret this phenomenon as representing (1) an adaptation for preserving coadapted genomes in slow LH strategists to maintain high copying fidelity genetic replication while producing a lower number of offspring in stable, predictable, and controllable environments and (2) a bet-hedging adaptation in fast LH strategists, favoring the genetic diversification of a higher number of offspring in unstable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable environments. (shrink)

Del Giudice's model of sex-specific attachment patterns demonstrates the usefulness of infusing life history theory with principles of sexual selection. We believe a full synthesis between the two theories provides a foundation for a comprehensive model of alternative reproductive strategies. We extend Del Giudice's ideas based on our own program of research, focusing specifically on the importance of intrasexual competition and the individual phenotype during development.

The history of scientific illustrations is a story that correspond the cultural, economic, political and scientific history of the world. A look into the history of sciences displays that pictures and illustrations had a decisive role for the sciences progressive success and rising societal status from the sixteenth century. The illustrations visualized the unknown to graspable facts. Without the pictures the new discovered continents, the blood circulatory system and the body’s muscles had remained theoretical proclamations. The scientific discoveries became visible (...) and communicated, to a wider audience by its illustrations. The scientific illustrations and maps were intertwined with an epistemic ambition to unveil the true natural order. During the seventeenth century the concept of objectivity was interpreted as a quest for revealing nature’s ideal order, a task only feasible for the brilliant artist to accomplish. The epistemic ambition concurred with the belief that only one true ontological order existed that the scientific knowledge had to uncover. This concept of objectivity was succeeded by the modern concept of objectivity which equated objectivity with impartiality and elimination of the scientist’s subjective bias. The view from “nowhere” is still a valid, ruling definition of objectivity. However, the presence and huge expansion of computational pictures in the sciences as well in everyday life raises the question if a new sense of objectivity is framed. In physics and chemistry the produced pictures intend to be contributions to an ongoing theoretical discussion, about a nature in constant flux, let it be molecules or artificially processed materials in the nanoscale. The traveller designs her own map in advance, mixing the Google earth features with the personal arrangements. For both the scientists and the laymen the modernist objective virtues of detachment, impartiality and disinterestedness have been supplemented by a return of subjective involvements. (shrink)

The theoretical problem Bensaïd tries to confront from the 1990s onwards is the problem of the categories that are necessary to account for the traumatically new experience of history opened up by the defeat of the revolutionary experiments of the twentieth century. Hence the necessity of new answers to these fundamental and inexhaustible questions: How are we to understand history in its relation to human practice and to politics? Can we talk of ‘necessity’ in history, of ‘laws of history’, of (...) ‘determination’, or ‘determinism’, or of modes of causality operating within it? How are we to conceive the notions of ‘historical possibility’, of ‘conflict’ and ‘struggle’? Bensaïd’s contribution will focus on a dialectical notion of temporality that implies a primacy of politics over history and a break with the traditional Marxist notions of a historical subject as an internally homogeneous and fully-sovereign collective force. (shrink)

This multiple-case study examined the rationales and instructional strategies for teaching history of science of 16 instructors of a history of science course for undergraduate preservice teachers in the USA. Based on instructor syllabi, instructional materials, and instructor interviews, we conducted single-case and cross-case analyses to identify why they teach HOS, how they teach HOS, and what possible relationships might underlie instructor rationales and their instructional strategy choices for teaching HOS. We found 10 rationales in three overarching categories and (...) 9 active-learning instructional strategies. Moreover, we found that instructors with skills rationales implemented active-learning instructional strategies, whereas instructors who only cited knowledge rationales relied only on lectures and reading discussions. We discuss implications and recommendations for the design of HOS courses. (shrink)

The purpose of this contemporary history study is to analyse nursing strategy documents produced by NHS Trusts in England in the period 2009–2013, through a process of discourse analysis. In 2013 the Francis Report on the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust was published. The Report highlighted the full range of organisational failures in a Trust that valued financial efficiency over patient care. The analysis that followed, however, dwelt heavily on the failings of the nurses. Nursing strategy documents at that (...) time served to set the future direction for NHS Trusts, prescribing specific value frameworks for each nursing workforce. However, the values chosen frequently conflicted with each other pitting nursing values against a managerial trope. It is argued that documents provided a response to wider NHS concerns and high-profile failures in care, particularly the Francis Report, paying lip service to staff engagement whilst maintaining a corporate focus. Nursing values were placed firmly within a managerialist discourse, one that has needed to be re-evaluated in the current Covid-19 pandemic. Wider implications of the research suggest discussion of value conflict may be beneficial within nursing education and a truly local approach to strategy creation would potentially promote staff buy-in to strategy documents. (shrink)

Although most scholars now seem to agree that Herodotus was to some extent a didactic historian writing for the instruction of his readers, the systematic nature of his didacticism has perhaps not been fully appreciated. The Histories' concluding episodes reveal at least two didactic programs or strategies: first, the reader is to be trained in the application of Herodotean thinking to events subsequent to the period covered by the narrative; second, the reader is to be warned of the moral and (...) intellectual dangers posed by the “wonders” that have played so conspicuous a role in Herodotus' work. The existence of these programs helps to explain several features of the last chapters of the Histories, including the prominent position given to the peculiar story of Xerxes and Masistes. (shrink)

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health data were used to test predictions from life history theory. We hypothesized that (1) in young adulthood an emerging life history strategy would exist as a common factor underlying many life history traits (e.g., health, relationship stability, economic success), (2) both environmental harshness and unpredictability would account for unique variance in expression of adolescent and young adult life history strategies, and (3) adolescent life history traits would predict young adult life history (...) class='Hi'>strategy. These predictions were supported. The current findings suggest that the environmental parameters of harshness and unpredictability have concurrent effects on life history development in adolescence, as well as longitudinal effects into young adulthood. In addition, life history traits appear to be stable across developmental time from adolescence into young adulthood. (shrink)

We agree that sexual selection is a more comprehensive explanation for sex differences in direct aggression than social role theory, which is an unparsimonious and vestigial remnant of human exceptionalism. Nevertheless, Archer misses several opportunities to put the theoretical predictions made by himself and by others into direct competition in a way that would further the interests of strong inference.

This article deals with one particular aspect of Livy's narrative of the Gallic Sack of Rome, told in Book 5, and traditionally placed in 390b.c.—namely the issue over the validity of the ransom agreement struck by the Romans with the Gauls. The broader context is well known—and needs only brief reiteration here. When the Gauls march on Rome, the Romans give battle at the river Allia, leading to a resounding Gallic victory. Most of the Romans flee the battlefield and then (...) the city, except for a small group of both old and young, male and female, who hold out on the Capitoline Hill. That hill is subsequently put under siege by the Gauls. Following several months of beleaguerment, both sides are depicted as severely worn out by hunger and fighting. It is important for present purposes to stress that, when the Gauls stood at the gates and besieged the city, one of Rome's greatest heroes, Marcus Furius Camillus, was noticeably absent. Camillus was in neighbouring Ardea, some fifty miles south of Rome, training an army of Roman soldiers to challenge the Gallic invaders after his recent recall from exile and appointment to the dictatorship. But before Camillus’ return to Rome, the besieged Romans surrendered and agreed a ransom with the Gauls in order to liberate their city. The continuation of the story as given in Livy is equally well known. Camillus arrives in the middle of the ransom exchange, asking for the exchange to be stopped. Unsurprisingly, the Gauls are not keen on following Camillus’ orders, and insist on the ransom. Consequently, Camillus challenges the agreement between Romans and Gauls on a constitutional basis; the agreement was reached with a lesser magistrate after Camillus’ appointment to the dictatorship (5.49.2):cum illi renitentes pactos dicerent sese, negat eam pactionem ratam esse quae postquam ipse dictator creatus esset iniussu suo ab inferioris iuris magistratu facta esset, denuntiatque Gallis ut se ad proelium expediant.When they, resisting, said that they had come to an agreement, he [Camillus] denied that an agreement was valid which, after he himself had been made dictator, had been concluded by a magistrate of lower status without his instructions, and he announced to the Gauls that they should prepare themselves for battle.The constitutional argument has often been repeated by modern scholars. Ogilvie comments that ‘(t)he dictatorship was held to put all other magistracies into suspension.’ Feldherr notes similarly that, ‘(o)nce Camillus has been appointed dictator, hisimperiumsupersedes that of the lesser magistrates who negotiated the surrender.’ And to explain why the Gauls nevertheless entered into negotiations in Camillus’ absence, Ross observes that ‘the Gauls, of course, could hardly have known either of Camillus’ appointment as dictator or of the fact that the dictatorship superseded all other magistracies.’. (shrink)

Why do some invertebrates store so much carotenoids in their tissues? Storage of carotenoids may not simply be passive and dependent on their environmental availability, as storage variation exists at various taxonomic scales, including among individuals within species. While the strong antioxidant and sometimes immune-stimulating properties of carotenoids may be beneficial enough to cause the evolution of features improving their assimilation and storage, they may also have fitness downsides explaining why massive carotenoid storage is not universal. Here, the functional and (...) ecological implications of carotenoid storage for the evolution of invertebrate innate immune defenses are examined, especially in crustaceans, which massively store carotenoids for unclear reasons. Three testable hypotheses about the role of carotenoid storage in immunological (resistance and tolerance) and life-history strategies (with a focus on aging) are proposed, which may ultimately explain the storage of large amounts of these pigments in a context of host–pathogen interactions. (shrink)

The harshness and unpredictability of early life circumstances shape life history strategies for trade-offs between the resources devoted to somatic and reproductive efforts of individuals in the developmental process. This paper uses belief in a just world as a reflection of early environmental cues to predict an individual’s life history strategies. Research has found that belief in a just world influences life history strategies through a sense of control. However, the relationship between a sense of control and a life history (...) strategy is flawed because influencing life history strategies should be intrinsic to control strategies rather than a sense of control. A total of 408 Chinese undergraduate students completed the Personal Belief in a Just World Scale, Mini-K Scale, and Primary and Secondary Control Scale. Structural equation modeling suggested that belief in a just world can directly or indirectly influence life history strategies through primary and secondary control strategies, respectively; there was no statistical difference in the degree of influence between the two paths. These results deepen our understanding of the underlying mechanisms in the relationship between belief in a just world and life history strategies, which can be utilized to ensure a slow life history strategy among Chinese university students in the future. (shrink)

In recent years the Chemical Revolution has become a renewed focus of interest among historians of science. This interest isshaped by interpretive strategies associated with the emergence anddevelopment of the discipline of the history of science. The disciplineoccupies a contested intellectual terrain formed in part by thedevelopment and cultural entanglements of science itself. Threestages in this development are analyzed in this paper. Theinterpretive strategies that characterized each stage are elucidatedand traced to the disciplinary interests that gave rise to them. Whilepositivists (...) and whigs appropriated the history of science to thejustificatory and celebratory needs of science itself, postpositivistslinked it to philosophical models of rationality, and sociologists ofknowledge sought its sociological reconstruction. Since none of thesestrategies do justice to the complexity of historical events, a modelof the Chemical Revolution is outlined which upholds the autonomyand specificity of history and the methods used to study it. (shrink)

Research with nonhuman primates can make important contributions to life history models of human attachment and reproductive strategies, such as: including parental responsiveness into female reproductive strategies, testing the assumption that adult attachment is a reproductive adaptation, assessing genetic and environmental effects on attachment and reproduction, and investigating the mechanisms through which early stress results in accelerated reproductive maturation.

This essay reads Guy Debord's theoretical work through its primary philosophical and theoretical influences, and in doing so draws attention to his concerns with time and history. These concerns are used as a means of clarifying Debord's theory of 'spectacle' and of highlighting its virtues and failings. The essay uses Debord's remarks on subjectivity and temporality to pursue the theoretical dimensions of his interest in strategy, and thereby addresses his Hegelian Marxism via his comments on the relation between (...) class='Hi'>strategy, history and dialectics. His concerns with temporality are however also shown to pertain to the theory of spectacle's shortcomings as an account of capitalist society. The essay thus attempts to draw out some of the more neglected foundational material upon which the theory of spectacle rests, contending that the former may be of greater contemporary interest than the latter. (shrink)

“The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology” published by Richard Levins in 1966 has been cited over 2500 times. For a paper concerned with modeling approaches in population biology a surprisingly large part of the attention. The Strategy received comes from history and philosophy of biology, and specifically from accounts on model and model formulation. The Strategy is an unusual paper; it presents neither new data nor a new formal model; at times it reads like a (...) manifesto for some modeling approach, without specifying which broader program that approach intends to support. When these peculiarities of The Strategy are even mentioned, the philosophical literature tends to explain them away by invoking Levins’ Marxist commitments. In contrast, I argue that those peculiarities can be explained by examining the programmatic purpose of the paper; starting from his doctoral work, Levins was trying to establish a research program meant to account for the relations between fitness and environment in different terms than the prevalent lock-and-key view. My paper brings that program back to the discussion, explains its relation to competing approaches and examines Levins’ approach to modeling in light of that context. (shrink)

Life-history evolution is a complexprocess. Life-history theory covers the fundamentallevel of the process, the evolution of life-historytraits. Life-history traits interact; thosecoevolving as a response to the same selectionpressure form life-history tactics. Top level of thehierarchy, life-history strategy, is formed bygenetically interconnected tactics. Our aim is toexpand the traditional view to life-history evolutionby considering what boundary conditions a successfullife-history strategy has to fulfil. We claim thatthe most fundamental condition successful strategieshave to meet is to minimize the risk of evolutionaryfailure. (...) Here the risk of failure refers to failurein transferring practitioners of the strategy to thenext time point, either through survival, or byreproduction. We make an attempt to classify types ofrisks as they lead to evolutionary failure, anddiscuss how risk minimization ideas may be approachedempirically. We conclude that understanding howtraits evolve may not cover all aspects of howstrategies evolve. We emphasize that bookkeeping ofthe actual causes of failure might help in developinglife-history theory that uses causes of selection topredict responses to selection. (shrink)

Combining a Nietzschean framework with close attention to a wide range of carefully selected literary texts, Autoaesthetics presents a case for Nietzche's centrality in contemporary aesthetic and literary studies. Based on Nietzche's own practice of combining poetry and philosophy by transcending ressentiment and approaching life to its fullest, Autoaesthetics engages in a heated but intricate debate through and with Nietzche's re-articulation of the self as a strategic (and impossible) aesthetic creation." "Stephen Barker argues that all notions of self are aesthetic, (...) literary, strategic, and teleological, and must be seen not in the context of any essential self but as a complex series of self-articulations. He sets out a strategy of reading that combines Nietzschean "psychology" with subsequent theoretical investigations and shows how Nietzschean dialectics of the self are at work in all (self-defining) human experience in the (post)modern world. His book itself is a play of dialectics (again after Nietzche), designed for interdisciplinary scholars and graduate students interested in exploring the scope of literary and aesthetic theory and philosophy. (shrink)

In the 1950s and 1960s, an interfield interaction between molecular biologists and biochemists integrated important discoveries about the mechanism of protein synthesis. This extended discovery episode reveals two general reasoning strategies for eliminating gaps in descriptions of the productive continuity of mechanisms: schema instantiation and forward chaining/backtracking. Schema instantiation involves filling roles in an overall framework for the mechanism. Forward chaining and backtracking eliminate gaps using knowledge about types of entities and their activities. Attention to mechanisms highlights salient features of (...) this historical episode while providing general reasoning strategies for mechanism discovery. (shrink)

In a series of incisive readings of signature historical works, Mark Poster charts the move from social history to new practices of cultural history that are drawing strength from poststructuralist interpretive strategies and raising issues found in feminist and postcolonialist discourse. In the process, he sets forth an outline for a postmodern historiography that can negotiate the contested terrain between the ambiguities of discourse and the pull of the "real." As Poster provides close readings of leading historians and theorists such (...) as Lawrence Stone, Francois Furet, Michel de Certeau, and Michel Foucault, key themes animate his work: the often irreducible difference between past and present; the relationship of writing and representation to power and domination; the dissolving distinctions between high and low culture, production and consumption, and reality and fiction; and, most important, a new perspective on human agency and the construction of political subjects. (shrink)

Fincher & Thornhill (F&T) present a compelling argument that parasite stress underlies certain cultural practices promoting assortative sociality. However, we suggest that the theoretical framework proposed is limited in several ways, and that life history theory provides a more explanatory and inclusive framework, making more specific predictions about the trade-offs faced by organisms in the allocation of bioenergetic and material resources.

Niger is regularly affected by food insecurity, mainly due to the high sensitivity of its agricultural sector to climate variability. Despite the support from multiple development institutions and households’ willingness to address food security, hunger and malnutrition continue to challenge many vulnerable households. This study aims to analyze household livelihood strategies toward food security and assess factors determining their resilience. To address the issue, cluster analysis and the principal component analysis were used to identify the different livelihood strategies and to (...) construct a resilience index, respectively. Regression analysis was used to identify the most significant factors determining households’ resilience. The results indicate there were six different household types—pastoralist-extensive agriculturalists, farmers, agro-pastoralists, public service employees, entrepreneurs and wage employees—however, the majority of households obtained their livelihood from both agriculture and livestock (agro-pastoral systems). The principal component analysis highlighted that the pastoralist-extensive agriculturalists are the most resilient followed by public service employees, while households focused on wage labor are the least resilient, followed by entrepreneurs. In terms of gender, the study reveals that households headed by men are more resilient than those headed by women. However, the resilience components including income and food access, assets and adaptive capacity are the most correlated with the households’ resilience to food insecurity. Furthermore, the regression analysis results reveal that the household size, crop production, farming experience, livestock size and number of coping strategies are the most significant factors determining household resilience to food insecurity. Consequently, to face the challenges of climate change and food security, rational investments in agriculture are necessary to transit rural household land-use practices to climate-smart agriculture. (shrink)

Reproduction, a basic property of biological life, entails costs for an organism, ultimately detectable as reduction in survival prospects. Telomeres are an excellent candidate biomarker for explaining these reproductive costs, because their shortening correlates with increased mortality risk. For similar reasons, telomeres are perceived as biomarkers of individual “quality.” The relationship between reproduction and telomere dynamics is reviewed, emphasizing that cost and quality perspectives, commonly presented in isolation, should be integrated. While a majority of correlative studies have confirmed the relationship (...) between telomere dynamics and various reproductive outputs, only limited experimental support exists showing that reproduction causes telomeres to shorten. A shift of focus to experimental manipulations of reproductive effort/telomere dynamics is crucial. However, the observation of survival reduction in response to these manipulations is essential for establishing telomeres as genuine biomarkers, allowing to unravel trade‐offs related to reproduction. (shrink)

Adolescence signifies a transition from the use of prereproductive to reproductive strategies in the life history of Homo sapiens. Insofar as human generations overlap, events at adolescence, surrounding the onset of puberty, offer a unique glimpse into human adaptation from the point of view of the changing strategies of both parents and offspring. The timing of puberty is an important life history trait that varies between species, but also between and within the sexes in human beings. The onset of puberty (...) marks the beginning of the reproductive life, is affected by previous experience, and serves as a trigger for behavioral change. Surbey (1988, 1990) reported relationships between father absence, heightened levels of childhood stress, and early menarche and considered them within the context of human evolutionary history. Subsequently, similar findings have been reported in a number of human populations and have been interpreted from several evolutionary perspectives. This article discusses the extent to which these and related findings regarding alterations in the timing of human puberty reflect evolved parental or offspring strategies. It entails a consideration of the applicability of the concepts of phenotypic plasticity, nonadaptive genetic variation, and conditional and alternative reproductive strategies in describing the interwoven nature of strategies employed by parent and child in the transition at adolescence. (shrink)

Se presenta un artículo acerca de los factores de riesgo asociados a la dermatitis atópica en niños, enfermedad con una incidencia significativa en el municipio Nuevitas. A partir de la revisión de Historias Clínicas en los Consultorios 4,5 y 6 del territorio, en el período comprendido de enero a septiembre del 2015, se constató como importantes los factores genéticos y los medioambientales en estos pacientes. Con el objetivo de disminuir los últimos se elaboró una estrategia educativa para la familia de (...) los infantes. Se aplicó una encuesta inicial y una final con una población de 60 familias y una muestra de 30 que representa el 50 % con el criterio de inclusión de tener algún o algunos de estos factores. Se concluye que la estrategia contribuyó a transformar los estilos de vida en las familias estudiadas. The article deals with risk factors associated to atopic dermatitis in children, a disease with a significant effect on Nuevitas municipality. Starting from the checking of clinical histories in doctors' offices 4, 5 and 6 in the municipality from January to September 2015, genetic and environmental factors were confirmed to be important. Aiming at lessening these risks, an educational strategy for the children's families was developed. An initial and a final survey of a population of 60 families and a sample of 30, make for a 50 % with inclusion criterion of having some or a lot of these factors. It was reached the conclusion that the strategy contributed to transforming lifestyles in the studied families. (shrink)

John Maynard Smith is the person most responsible for the use of game theory in evolutionary biology, having introduced and developed its major concepts, and later surveyed its uses. In this paper I look at some rhetorical work done by Maynard Smith and his co-author G.R. Price to make game theory a standard and common modelling tool for the evolutionary study of behavior. The original presentation of the ideas — in a 1973 Nature article — is frequently cited but almost (...) certainly rarely read. It took reformulation of the approach to create a usable model and an object of study. Perhaps paradoxically, the new model dealt with more abstract objects than did its predecessor, but because of that a better case could be made for its realism. The particular strategy of abstraction allowed game-theoretic modelling to gain a certain measure of autonomy from empirical problems, and thus to flourish. (shrink)

This article draws upon thirteen months of ethnographic research in a Chicago pawnshop to show how prices of objects in pawnshops are actively, socially negotiated using what I term discursive strategies of valuation. Three kinds of discursive strategies of valuation emerge repeatedly in the data: a. references to the specific material attributes of the objects, b. references to the unique biographical histories of the objects, c. reference to the financial need and (relative) social positioning of the customer involved in the (...) negotiation. Examining these strategies reveals the relationship between socially contingent and culturally constructed perceptions of value and the production of price. I find that rhetorical strategies can and do affect price, within limits. Perhaps most surprisingly, the data show that discursive strategies emphasizing a lower socio-economic status can inflate the value, and ultimately the price, of an object during negotiations. (shrink)

Recent work on the history of General Relativity by Renn, Sauer, Janssen et al. shows that Einstein found his field equations partly by a physical strategy including the Newtonian limit, the electromagnetic analogy, and energy conservation. Such themes are similar to those later used by particle physicists. How do Einstein's physical strategy and the particle physics derivations compare? What energy-momentum complex did he use and why? Did Einstein tie conservation to symmetries, and if so, to which? How did (...) his work relate to emerging knowledge of the canonical energy-momentum tensor and its translation-induced conservation? After initially using energy-momentum tensors hand-crafted from the gravitational field equations, Einstein used an identity from his assumed linear coordinate covariance x'=Mx to relate it to the canonical tensor. Usually he avoided using matter Euler-Lagrange equations and so was not well positioned to use or reinvent the Herglotz-Mie-Born understanding that the canonical tensor was conserved due to translation symmetries, a result with roots in Lagrange, Hamilton and Jacobi. Whereas Mie and Born were concerned about the canonical tensor's asymmetry, Einstein did not need to worry because his Entwurf Lagrangian is modeled not so much on Maxwell's theory as on a scalar theory. Einstein's theory thus has a symmetric canonical energy-momentum tensor. But as a result, it also has 3 negative-energy field degrees of freedom. Thus the Entwurf theory fails a 1920s-30s a priori particle physics stability test with antecedents in Lagrange's and Dirichlet's stability work; one might anticipate possible gravitational instability. This critique of the Entwurf theory can be compared with Einstein's 1915 critique of his Entwurf theory for not admitting rotating coordinates and not getting Mercury's perihelion right. One can live with absolute rotation but cannot live with instability. Particle physics also can be useful in the historiography of gravity and space-time, both in assessing the growth of objective knowledge and in suggesting novel lines of inquiry to see whether and how Einstein faced the substantially mathematical issues later encountered in particle physics. This topic can be a useful case study in the history of science on recently reconsidered questions of presentism, whiggism and the like. Future work will show how the history of General Relativity, especially Noether's work, sheds light on particle physics. (shrink)

In this ambitious work, Fred Weinstein confronts the obstacles that have increasingly frustrated our attempts to explain social and historical reality. Traditionally, we have relied on history and social theory to describe the ways people understand the world they live in. But the ordering explanations we have always used--derived from the classical social theories originally forged by Marx, Tocqueville, Weber, Durkheim, Freud--have collapsed. In the wake of this collapse or "fall," the rival claims of fiction, psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, and history (...) have created the dilemma of radical relativism, the prospect of multiple interpretations of any complex historical event. The basic strategy of social theory and the social sciences--the search for underlying unities--proves so inherently contradictory and has provided so little in the way of reliable knowledge of social and historical relationships that to many critics it seems no longer worth pursuing. Weinstein enters the debate by rejecting any search for underlying structural unities, dynamic or social, through which historians have attempted to find continuity with the past. He looks instead to ideological processes, to the construction of successive and changing versions of reality that mediate between the power of fantasy on the one side and the power of the social world on the other. He argues further that the need to use ideological constructs in this way accounts for the heterogeneous and changing content of social movements and for the persistent need people have always had for authoritative leaders, even in democratized societies. He suggests that people have historically been able to take a step away from leaders only by substituting the possession of objects such as property or money. This book is a breakthrough in poststructuralist theory that is sure to stimulate considerable discussion, especially about the shape of the social sciences and the future of historical interpretation. (shrink)

The ArgumentEuropean ethology and North American comparative psychology have been the two most prominent approaches to the study of animal behavior through most of the twentieth century. In this paper I analyze sets of popular articles by ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and psychologist Frank Beach, in an effort to understand the contrasting rhetorical styles of the two. Among the numerous ways in which Tinbergen and Beach differed were with respect to expressing the joy of research, the kind of scientific approach adopted, (...) their treatment of animals, their sense of history, and the types of illustrations they chose. In general, Tinbergen‘s articles placed him closer to nature and Beach‘s more in the tradition of dispassionate scientific inquiry. These differences in rhetoric may have been one factor in the greater success of ethology after World War II. (shrink)