The origin and the development of scientific disciplines has been a topic of reflection for several decades. The few extensive case studies support the thesis that scientific disciplines are not monolithic structures but can be characterized by distinct social, organizational and scientific–technical practices. Nonetheless, most disciplinary histories of genetics confine themselves largely to an uncontested account of the content of the discipline or occasionally institutional factors. Little attention is paid to the large number of researchers who, by their joint efforts, (...) ultimately shaped the discipline. We contribute to this aspect of disciplinary historiography by discussing the role of women researchers at the Institute for Heredity Research, founded in 1914 in Berlin under the directorship of Erwin Baur, and the sister of the John Innes Institute at Cambridge. This paper investigates how and why Baur built a highly successful research programme that relied on the efforts of his female staff, whose careers, notably Elisabeth Schiemann's, are also assessedin toto. These women undertook the necessary ‘technoscience’ and in some cases innovative work and helped increase the prestige of the institute and its director. Together they played a pivotal role in the establishment of genetics in Germany. Without them the discipline would have developed much more slowly and along a divergent path. (shrink)

In 1857, a Statistical Society was founded in the Netherlands. Within this society, statistics was considered a systematic, quantitative, and qualitative description of society. In the course of time, the society attracted a wide and diverse membership, although the number of physicians on its rolls was low. The society itself was dynamic, discussing statistical and economic topics at its annual meetings, working to compile a ‘General Statistics of the Netherlands’, and publishing a yearbook. Although the lack of well-organised, official, state-generated (...) statistics played a role in the foundation and continued existence of the Statistical Society, this does not seem reason enough to explain why the society changed its name and stopped being engaged in statistical matters when a central official statistics organisation was finally created in the Netherlands in 1892. Explaining this transformation is important, as the abolition of that aspect of the society was crucial to the development of statistics in the Netherlands. In this paper, I sketch the foundation, history, and the demise of the Dutch Statistical Society and compare some of its characteristics with the English Royal Statistical Society. Through this examination, I try to answer the question why this 19th-century statistical society abandoned statistics. (shrink)

In 1807 the first life insurance society was established in The Netherlands. In the second half of the century, life insurance societies underwent considerable expansion. During the intervening period, the lines had to be laid along which this new phenomenon was to develop in the future: between 1827 and 1830, the government started discussing the nature of its responsibility in this field and the kind of policy to be developed, and in 1830, a book on the organization of life insurance (...) societies, the calculation of life annuities and widows' fund premiums was published, written by the mathematician Rehuel Lobatto. This book played an important role in the government's discussion. Royal Decrees which prescribed government approval for the establishment of life assurance societies were promulgated in 1830, 1833 and 1840. In 1832, Lobatto became the government's scientific adviser on the assessment of the calculations performed by these societies, and in the same year, he was also appointed adviser to the first life insurance society. From 1832 until his death in 1866 he advised the company on the use of life tables for life as well as for reversionary annuities, and he calculated the premiums based on these life tables. Another decree was promulgated in 1864 prescribing exactly which life tables were to be used. Because Lobatto probably played a part in this decree, he was responsible for a very ‘conservative’ government policy, which was no longer adequate in the second half of the century. (shrink)

The beginning of the twentieth century saw the emergence of the discipline of genetics. It is striking how many female scientists were contributing to this new field at the time. At least three female pioneers succeeded in becoming professors: Kristine Bonnevie (Norway), Elisabeth Schiemann (Germany) and the Tine Tammes (The Netherlands). The question is which factors contributed to the success of these women's careers? At the time women were gaining access to university education it had become quite the norm for (...) universities to be sites for teaching and research. They were still expanding: new laboratories were being built and new disciplines were being established. All three women benefited from the fact that genetics was considered a new field promising in terms of its utility to society; in the case of Tammes and Schiemann in agriculture and in the case of Bonnevie in eugenics. On the other hand, the field of genetics also benefited from the fact that these first female researchers were eager for the chance to work in science and wanted to make active contributions. They all worked and studied in environments which, although different from one another, were positive towards them, at least at the start. Having a patron was generally a prerequisite. Tammes profited from her teacher's contacts and status. Bonnevie made herself indispensable through her success as a teacher and eventually made her position so strong that she was no longer dependent on a single patron. The case of Schiemann adds something new; it shows the vulnerability of such dependency. Initially, Schiemann's teacher had to rely on the first generation of university women simply because he was unable to attract ambitious young men to his institute. In those early, uncertain years of the new discipline, male scientists tended to choose other, better established, and more prestigious disciplines. However, when genetics itself had become an established field, it also became more attractive to men. Our case studies also demonstrate that a new field at first relatively open to women closes its doors to them once it becomes established. (shrink)

This article discusses the early history of academic statistics in the Netherlands in relation to the reform challenges of the Dutch state. Statistics, before it developed into a predominantly quantitative social science, was adopted around 1800 by Adriaan Kluit as a method for shaping and articulating his political vision. Kluit's politics, the article suggests, echoed the specific outlook on the ‘intrinsic power’ of the Dutch Republic as a trading state that was developed during William IV's stadholderate in the mid eighteenth (...) century. Through the ideas of later writers and statesmen who had trained as statisticians this same approach to envisaging the Dutch future in international trade and politics was carried over into nineteenth-century Dutch political economy and constitutional reform. (shrink)

With the analysis of the scattering ashes in a Norwegian context as its point of departure, the article sets out to explore ash scattering and how it relates to the governance of deathscape and religion/worldview in the public space. Referring to ethnographic study, the focus is on the bereaved and the deceased in the governance process for ash scattering and on critically rethinking the governance of ash scattering from the private actors’ experiences. I argue that ash scattering is in the (...) process of establishing a spatial ritual institution, deregulated vis-à-vis organized religion/worldview, which, on the one hand, opens up the possibility for the privatization of death and provides ideals of individuality, privacy and discretion, and, on the other hand, this takes place paradoxically not in private but rather within public space. (shrink)

Balthasar impiega in tutta la sua Trilogia fattori fondamentali del pensiero di Platone: il bello, l’eros e l’analogia entis che chiama “Selbstbewegung” ignorando completamente la dottrina dei principi primi che la Scuola di Tübingen ha ricostruito grazie alle testimonianze dei suoi allievi nell’Accademia antica. Per parte sua, la Scuola di Tübingen esclude sistematicamente dall’indagine l’eros e la definizione di psychè del Fedro come “ciò che si muove sempre” e “muove sé stesso”. Non si occupa affatto del bello, perché lo assimila (...) senz’altro all’idea del bene. Propongo perciò una ricerca più filologica in cui espongo il Platone di Balthasar e quello della Scuola di Tübingen e una parte più storico-sistematica in cui delineo il divenire dell’estetica drammatica. Infine, propongo una soluzione del paradosso che ho identificato. La presenza di Platone nell’opera di Balthasar non è stata ancora riconosciuta. Solo due saggi ne parlano, ma sono problematici: in realtà si tratterebbe di Plotino, che sarebbe il vero compimento della filosofia greca. Non viene però preso in considerazione il fatto che Balthasar critica Plotino. (shrink)

Starting from the semantic difference between the Arabic terms samāḥa or tasāmuḥ, and the Latin tolerantia, this essay proposes some observations on the Islamic notion of tolerance according to some contemporary Arabic language texts of Islamic inspiration. This literature invariably emphasises the importance of tolerance in the context of the Islamic religion and thought; and, notwithstanding some evident differences among the authors, relating to schools and to varying degrees of openness to Western thought, the discourse remains anchored in the foundational (...) literature, especially the Sunnah of the Prophet. (shrink)

The primary question addressed in this article is how to understand and produce praxis development in the complex and contentious field of street communities of young marginalized men, an area highlighted almost on a daily basis in the Danish media under headlines with terms such as ‘foreigner problems’, ‘ghetto problems’, ‘gang conflicts’ and ‘gang war’. Since 2009, activists and professionals related to this field have gathered at Grundtvigs Højskole where they initiated and inspired community building activities in relation to the (...) recent gang conflicts in the Copenhagen area of Denmark. The article explores these practices and changes, including some of the communal initiatives arising in response to the escalating gang conflicts. The conflict and community building activities are contextualized in terms of broader tendencies and changes in Danish society, from enduring struggles with ethnic othering of young minority men since the late 1990s, to other societal changes escalating ‘gang-conflicts’ to ‘gang-war’. The article examines how these changes produce new dynamics, tensions and dimensions of binary thinking, which in turn creates new dilemmas in the everyday lives of the people involved in social work practice, community building activities and praxis research. (shrink)

Resistance movements, War ; religious aspects; Islam; history. Islamic civilization; Islam; 20th century.

Artificial Intelligence and algorithms are increasingly able to replace human workers in cognitively sophisticated tasks, including ones related to justice. Many governments and international organizations are discussing policies related to the application of algorithmic judges in courts. In this paper, we investigate the public perceptions of algorithmic judges. Across two experiments (N = 1,822), and an internal meta-analysis (N = 3,039), our results show that even though court users acknowledge several advantages of algorithms (i.e., cost and speed), they trust human (...) judges more and have greater intentions to go to the court when a human (vs. an algorithmic) judge adjudicates. Additionally, we demonstrate that the extent that individuals trust algorithmic and human judges depends on the nature of the case: trust for algorithmic judges is especially low when legal cases involve emotional complexities (vs. technically complex or uncomplicated cases). (shrink)

Self-discipline, ethics, character, and philosophy in Hindu poetry; criticism to Bhagavad Gita, Nītīśāstra, Sāra-samuccaya, etc.

Mind attribution may be divided into the subcategories of attribution of agency, associated with moral agency, and attribution of experience and emotion, associated with moral concern and moral patiency (Gray et al. Science 315(5812):619, 2007; Gray et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108(2):477–479, 2011b; Robbins and Jack Philosophical Studies 127(1):59–85, 2006). In this paper I attend to social context and the different psychological needs influencing the different types of mind attribution. A (...) need for social connection drives the attribution of experiences and emotions. The individual’s capacity to regulate emotional reactions is crucial for empathic concern. I further relate differences of mind attribution, attention, and emotional processing, to two different modes of functioning: In an interactive state of mind (comparable to the “second-person perspective” described by Schilbach et al. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, in press), social and emotional cues are attended to; In a detached task-oriented state of mind it may be beneficial to predict the behaviors of others but emotional information may not be attended to. The complexity and plasticity of mind attribution, including the possibility to train attentional mechanisms and regulation of emotions, is promising for the field of moral enhancement. (shrink)