During the last third of the 19th century, the ‘new’ French psychology developed within ‘the hypnotic context’ opened up by Charcot. In spite of their claims to the scientific nature of their hypnotic experiments, Charcot and his followers were unable to avoid the miracles that had accompanied mesmerism, the forerunner of hypnosis. The hysterics hypnotized in the Salpêtrière Hospital were expected to have supernormal faculties and these experiments opened the door to psychical research. In 1885 the first (...) French psychology society was founded. The research carried out by this society may seem surprising: its members – Charles Richet in particular – were interested in strange phenomena, like magnetic lucidity, ‘mental suggestion’, thought-reading, etc. Very quickly, psychologists applied themselves to finding rational explanations for these supposedly miraculous gifts. Generally, they ascribed them to unconscious or subconscious perceptual mechanisms. Finally, after a few years, studies of psychical phenomena were excluded from the field of psychology. However, during the 4th International Congress of Psychology, which took place in Paris in 1900, the foundation of an institute devoted to the study of psychical phenomena was announced, but Pierre Janet and Georges Dumas founded within it the Société Française de Psychologie, from which psychical research was excluded. As for Charles Richet, disappointed by the psychologists, he devoted himself to the development of a new ‘science’ which he called ‘Métapsychique’. Several hypotheses have been put forward to account for this early research undertaken by the French psychologists, pertaining as much to parapsychology as to scientific psychology. (shrink)

Microphotography was one of the earliest applications of photography in science: The first monograph on tissue organization illustrated with microphotographs was published in 1845. In the 1860s, a large number of introductions to scientific microphotography were published by anatomists. They argued that microphotography was a means of documenting the results of microscopic analysis, uncontaminated by the subjectivity of the observer. In the early decades of the 19th century, before the general acceptance of cell theory, such a technique (...) was of special importance, as no criteria were available to distinguish between important and superficial characters in the description of tissue microstructures. Microphotography was praised as the method of choice for documenting the scientific observations of microscopic material. Some of the microphotographic practices described in these early manuals, however, did not conform with the idea of a purely mechanical process of documentation. The authors of these manuals saw photography not as a technique which produced artifacts, but as a complete and reliable substitute for the original preparations. Thus, according to these authors, the artificial world of photography was seen as the actual representation of the microworld. Consequently, they tried to understand the microcosm by analyzing photographs instead of the microscopic preparation themselves. Such attitudes discredited the use of microphotography in the sciences. Consequently, the definitive breakthrough of scientific microphotography was delayed until the 1880s and was largely due to the efforts of Robert Koch, who made microphotography a central tool of bacteriology. (shrink)

This article interrogates the way/s in which rival schools studying hypnotism in late 19th-century France framed what counts as valid evidence for the purposes of science. Concern over the scientific reality of results is particularly situated in the notion of simulation ; the respective approaches to simulation of the Salpêtrière and Nancy schools are analysed through close reading of key texts: Binet and Féré for the Salpêtrière, and Bernheim for Nancy. The article reveals a striking divergence between (...) their scientific frames, which helps account for the bitterness of the schools’ disputes. It then explores Bernheim’s construction of scientific authority in more detail, for insights into the messiness entailed by theorizing hypnotism in psychical terms, while also attempting to retain scientific legitimacy. Indicative of this messiness, it is argued, is the way in which Bernheim’s approach draws on multiple epistemic frames. (shrink)

From its earliest beginnings in the 1840s up to its democratization as a widespread leisure pursuit, photography was swept along by a tide of artistic and entrepreneurial activity that gathered pace throughout the nineteenth century. Both as an art form and a social document, the photograph quickly took on a critical role as the primary means of visual expression in the modern age. Points of View brings together, for the first time, a selection of images from the British Library’s (...) unique photography collections, examining the history, diversity, and influence of the medium from its invention and early years up until the coming of the twentieth century. Beginning with the work of William Henry Fox Talbot and including some of our most celebrated photographic pioneers—Francis Frith, Felix Teynard, Samuel Bourne, and Peter Henry Emerson among them—this volume focuses on the question Who was taking the photograph and why? Ultimately the answer is found in the rise of mass market interest, the increasing role of technology, and the emergence of this thrilling new discipline amid rapid scientific, social, and industrial progress. (shrink)

The present article examines the historical narrative proposed by modernization theory about the recent Spanish past. Its assumptions and consequences for historical research focused on the 19th century are described in order to understand the lack of intellectual exchange among historians and sociologists in the Spanish academic world. Modernization theory has justified the political consensus that allowed the Spanish transition to democracy and its academic authority has narrowed the scope of historical research about previous democratization processes. Although the (...) paradigm of Spanish backwardness has been refuted by specialists on 19th-century Spain, sociologists, economists and historians of the 20th century still propose a teleological interpretation of the democratization process that assumes the validity of the paradigm of secular Spanish backwardness. The scientific and political authority of modernization theory has made impossible an open academic debate and consequently the work of historians that refute teleological interpretations of development has been neglected, since modernization theory provides a political interpretation of the Spanish Second Republic and the Spanish Civil War as historically determined failures in order to legitimize the present democratic monarchy and constitution. (shrink)

In my paper I follow the emergence of the science of electricity in Poland. I believe that the science of electricity established in 1777 served as a new social program. Through the introduced translations, this science was intended to create a new social imaginary and social relations. I describe two interrelated processes: the social construction of the science of electricity, and negotiations between secular and religious definitions of electricity. In the first part of the article I show that both processes (...) were related to each other and contributed to hybrid interpretations of electricity – as a “material being” and “spirit of the world.” In the second part of the paper I pay attention to the efforts made by Jan and Jędrzej Śniadecki to secularize the science of electricity in Vilnius. I follow the metaphor of ‘laboratory’ used in their works in order to describe the natural phenomena. I claim that Jędrzej Śniadecki established not only a new theory of electricity (a “radiant being”), but in fact a new understanding of social space. I point out that he did that by transferring scientific practices into the cultural space. (shrink)

The article examines government regulations in the 18th - the first half of the 19th century, which were used by the parish clergy in order to confirm the legality of marriages and allowance for brides to the wedding ceremony. The scientific novelty of the research is in the attempt to identify, systematize and analyze the government regulations of the specified period, which regulated the preparatory stage in the conduct of the sacrament of marriage. The cited church written (...) sources in accordance with the name, content and presented conditional classification of the legal documentation were singled out into special groups of official directions, the most significant fragments were cited, it was drawn attention to the writing forms, the differences in the presentation of information about the main personalities of the wedding ceremony were shown. (shrink)

Lecture 1. What is intellectual history? -- Lecture 2. The scientific origins of the Enlightenment -- Lecture 3. The emergence of the modern intellectual -- Lecture 4. The cultural meaning of the French Revolution -- Lecture 5. The new conservatism in post-revolutionary Europe -- Lecture 6. The new German philosophy -- Lecture 7. Hegel's philosophical conception of history -- Lecture 8. The new liberalism -- Lecture 9. The literary culture of Romanticism -- Lecture 10. The meaning of the romantic (...) hero -- Lecture 11. The Industrial Revolution and classical economics -- Lecture 12. Early critiques of industrial capitalism -- Lecture 13. Hegelianism and the young Marx -- Lecture 14. Marx's social critique -- Lecture 15. Feminism in the 19th century culture -- Lecture 16. Women's rights in a man's world -- Lecture 17. Tocqueville & Mill, rethinking liberal theory -- Lecture 18. Nationalisms and national identities -- Lecture 19. The novel as art and social criticism -- Lecture 20. Science and its literary critics -- Lecture 21. Charles Darwin and the new biology -- Lecture 22. Controversies of social Darwinism -- Lecture 23. The heroic critic in mass society -- Lecture 24. Nietzsche's critique of European culture. (shrink)

In this paper, private gardens are portrayed as spaces and implements of aristocratic passion for plant collecting, of competition within the gentry, as well as of scientific professionalisation for botanists. This paper traces the early history of botanical collections in the Russian Empire from the 18th to the early 19th century as part of an elite culture which encouraged amateur patrons to invest in expeditions, gardens, and, consequently, in professionals to manage such projects. Young graduates of (...) European universities who began their careers working at private botanical institutions could later successfully apply for academic positions. The circulation of specimens had developed as a key element of botanical collection and an important basis for the networking of professionals and amateurs around the world. This paper argues that collecting plant specimens became an important means for engaging in “power games” and even “plant diplomacy.” These new responsibilities significantly increased botanists' status as experts. A diverse group of personalities, such as the Empress Catherine II, King George III of England, the industrialist Prokophy Demidov, aristocrat Alexei Razumovsky, Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, the academician Peter Simon Pallas—all shared a passion for botanical collecting and were engaged in power games at different levels, using botany as an instrument of influence. (shrink)

In historiography there is a tendency to see the Great War as marking the end of scientific optimism and the period that followed the war as a time of discord. Connecting to current (inter)national historiographical debate on the question of whether the First World War meant a disruption from the pre-war period or not, this article strives to prove that faith in scientific progress still prevailed in the 1920s. This is shown through the use of Belgium as a (...) case study, which suggests that the generally adopted cultural pessimism in the post-war years did not apply to the public rhetoric of science in this country. Diverse actors—scientists, industrialists, politicians, the public opinion and the military staff—declared a confidence in science, enhanced by wartime results. Furthermore, belief in science in Belgium was not affected by public outcry over the use of mustard gas, unlike in the former belligerent countries where the gas became an unpleasant reminder of how science was used during the war. Even German science with its industrial applications remained the norm after 1918. In fact, the faith in science exhibited during the pre-war years continued to exist, at least until the 1920s, despite anti-German sentiments being voiced by many sections of Belgian society in the immediate aftermath of the war. (shrink)

This article aims to clarify the epistemological foundations of the Freudian energetics model, starting with a historical review of the 19th century scientific context in which Freud's research lay down its roots. Beyond the physiological and anatomical references of Project for a Scientific Psychology, the physiology Freud makes reference to is in reality primarily anchored in an epistemological model derived from physics. Whilst across the Rhine, the autonomy of physiology in relation to physics was far from (...) being accomplished, as a counterpoint, in France, the revolution in physiology driven by Claude Bernard established itself autonomously from physics,. In contrast, Freud's scientific landscape is entirely dominated by the physics elevated to the rank of an ideal science. The influence of Helmholtz, who is both a medical doctor and a physicist, has a determining influence on Freud's training. The discoveries in physics at that time, in particular the formulation of the principle of 'conservation of force' - first principle of thermodynamics - will constitute the points of reference upon which Freud will elaborate his energetics model, then subsequently, the idea of economy in his metapsychology. In this way we can trace both the historic and epistemological path that led Freud from a concept based on physics, and more specifically thermodynamic energy, to an idea of nervous energy that constitutes the basis of the concept of "quantity" as it is stated as 'first fundamental idea' in Project for a Scientific Psychology. This notion will subsequently evolve, and lead Freud to the introduction of the concept of 'psychical energy,' this time in a purely metapsychological sense. (shrink)

Hypotheses about a mysterious ancient civilization were born in the eighteenth century among European intellectuals, who vied with each other to report on the high culture of India, supposedly having a universal mission. The impetus for this was the national consciousness awakened in European society back in the Renaissance. The European scientific community of the nineteenth century formed the term “Aryans”, which was originally used as a neutral term to define the Indo-European language family, as well as (...) ancient culture, and was synonymous with the term “Indo-Europeans”. The ethnonym “Arius” itself comes from the oldest Indian and Iranian sacred texts and meant “noble” or “luminous”. However, starting at the end of the 19th century, it began to be used to define “racial theories”, and later a specific nation, justifying their “natural right” to rule over the so-called “unelected” peoples. In the first half of the twentieth century, the term “Aryans” was used by the leaders of the Third Reich, which led to its final distortion, and the synonymous meaning “Indo-Europeans” was barely used. Since the second half of the twentieth century, the development of Indo-European/Aryan theories has taken on a new meaning, largely due to archaeological science. After the fall of the Iron Curtain scientists gained access to the civilizations of the Black Sea steppes and the Dnieper region of Ukraine, which was significantly limited during the communist years. At the end of the twentieth century, scientists received archaeological data not previously taken into account in Indo-European studies. Thus, with the development of research, the archaeological culture of Trypillia from the territory of Ukraine acquires the significance of the Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European culture, which, to a large extent, expands the idea of the ancient history of Europe. The paper considers the swastika symbol as a stereotypical marker of the Indo-European/ Aryan logos and its ideological inversion in the first half of the 20th century. Indo-European hypotheses underwent their significant formation and development precisely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This particular period is historiographically well-covered in terms of research and therefore is included in this paper. At the same time, the paper also highlights new and promising methods of Indo-European issues researching that have already begun to be implemented in the twenty-first century. Since the formation and development of various Indo-European hypotheses in historical retrospect and an interconnected form is still an under-researched topic and has not been comprehensively considered in special scientific works, the author aims to carry out the above-mentioned research work. The study of the Indo-European hypotheses development covers the topics of the linguistic origin, worldview, local and racial hypotheses, examines Indo-European searches in the research of Ukrainian scholars, and reveals the subtopic of Trypillian culture and its specific symbolism, which corresponds to the above research topic. (shrink)

During the 19th century, missionaries profoundly impacted China’s social and scientific advancement. Their efforts faced challenges because of deeply ingrained superstitions and polytheistic traditions. Missionaries adopted diverse approaches such as spreading scientific knowledge, establishing educational institutions and conducting medical missions to further their mission. Notably, medical missions played a vital role in alleviating suffering, eradicating prejudice and fostering opportunities for the spread of Christianity in China. Through providing medical services, missionaries gained trust and goodwill within local (...) communities, showcasing Christian compassion and benevolence. Additionally, they founded medical schools, translated foreign medical works and established medical journals, contributing to the development of modern Chinese medicine to some extent. Contribution: This article delves into the medical practices of 19th-century medical missionaries. It asserts that these medical missionaries played a pivotal role in establishing the groundwork for the advancement of modern medicine in China. Furthermore, the article suggests that contemporary missionary activities in China can draw inspiration from the model set by these historical medical missionaries, emphasising the enduring relevance of their approach in conducting effective missionary work today. (shrink)

This review examines Alex Csiszar's book, The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century.

The 1800?4 scientific expedition that was commissioned by Bonaparte and captained by Nicolas Baudin was a vast note?producing machine. Recording information in the form of notes was indeed its mode of being. The expedition, conceived in the late eighteenth century, represents in its scope and achievements Enlightenment knowledge?gathering at its most ambitious: the exhaustive collection, measurement, description and classification of objects of the natural world. Aiming at encyclopædic inclusiveness and at the same time seeking accurate knowledge, the achievements (...) of the expedition were remarkable. Some 72,120 items (including drawings and writings) were brought back to France: raw material for future research, as well as quantities of notes, reports and narratives that in themselves constituted fragments of new knowledge about the natural world. Underpinning this plethora of note?taking was a particular understanding of what constituted science and the scientific enterprise at this time in post?Revolutionary France, and this understanding welded together both officers and naturalists in a common aim. The written traditions of sea?voyaging intersected with the reporting requirements of the emerging natural sciences, producing a unique social and intellectual interaction and cross?fertilisation, supported by the methods of recording. (shrink)

This chapter explores some of the major developments in the philosophical understanding of suicide in 19th Century Western thought. Two developments in particular are considered. The first is a widespread shift towards thinking about suicide in medical terms rather than moral terms. Deploying methods initiated by a number of French and German thinkers in the preceding century who worked at the then emerging interface between the social and biological sciences, a number of 19th century thinkers (...) ejected what they took to be old metaphysical superstitions about ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and replaced them with (allegedly) hard-nosed scientific diagnoses of ‘health’ and ‘sickness’. Dismissing traditional moral arguments against the permissibility of suicide, the phenomenon came to be viewed as a symptom of decline or degeneration. How variations of this view, in biological and social contexts, reorientated practical responses to suicide in terms of treatment rather than moral condemnation is explored. The second 19th century development in philosophical thought with respect to suicide the chapter considers concerns its place in one of the most significant controversies in Germany from 1860 to the turn of the century: the Pessimismusstreit or ‘pessimism dispute’. While philosophical pessimism might be thought to vindicate or even entail suicide, many of the most prominent pessimists—including Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann—denied that this was the case, and perhaps surprisingly took suicide to involve a special kind of moral and/or epistemic failing. The chapter aims to elucidate the different arguments which pessimists appealed to in order to ground this position. (shrink)

State patronage and the role of central government in modernization are often cited as the key factors that underpin the development of science in Russia. This paper argues that the development of Russian agricultural science had predominantly local and non-governmental sources of support. Historically Russian agricultural research was funded and promoted through private patronage, but from the middle of the 19th century agricultural societies and community administrations began to sponsor research and promotion of new ideas in the agricultural (...) sector. At the end of the 19th century the majority of initiatives to set up agricultural experiment stations were undertaken on behalf of provincial agricultural societies, supported by local community administrations independent of the state bureaucratic apparatus (zemstvos). During the last two decades of the Russian Empire, agricultural societies and zemstvos became leaders in the modernization of Russian agriculture. Establishing regional experiment stations, and thus promoting development of local knowledge, they provided models for the subsequent governmental activity in this field. In the case of supporting agricultural research and institutionalizing the new discipline of scientific plant breeding, the Russian public led the state, rather than the reverse. (shrink)

Christoph Meiners (1747—1810) was one of 18th-century Europe's most important readers of global travel literature, and he has been credited as a founder of the disciplines of ethnology and anthropology. This article examines a part of his final work, Untersuchungen über die Verschiedenheiten der Menschennaturen [Inquiries on the differences of human natures], published posthumously in the 1810s. Here Meiners developed an elaborate argument, based on empirical evidence, that the different races of men emerged indigenously at different times and in (...) different places in natural history. Specifically this article shows how a sedentary scholar who never left Europe constructed a narrative of human origins and migrations on the basis of (1) French theory from the 1750s (Charles de Brosses and Simon Pelloutier) and (2) data gathered by explorers as reported in travel literature (J. R. Forster, Pérouse, Cook, Marsden). (shrink)

Reviews the book, The transformation of psychology: Influences of 19th century philosophy, technology, and natural science, edited by Christopher D. Green, Marlene Shore, and Thomas Teo . Many historians of psychology have noted that at the end of the 18th century, most leading thinkers felt strongly that by the vary nature of its subject matter psychology could never attain the level of natural science. However, by the beginning of the 20th century, an almost complete reversal of (...) this position had occurred and scientific psychology had become a pervasive feature of the intellectual and academic landscape. In this thoughtfully assembled volume, authors undertake to examine both how this change occurred and how it occurred so quickly. They examine a wide variety of areas of study that helped render psychology scientific. This anthology is a very welcome addition to the scholarly endeavor of critically re-examining the history or our discipline. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Annotation: The article contains the research concerning the possible impact of Karl Barth`s figure and theological issues on the theology of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century. There is a comparative analysis of how powerful and significant was the level of impact of Barth`s scientific experience on the theologians of his era, in comparison with the most prominent representatives of Christian thought from the earlier centuries, beginning with the times of ancient church, (...) the Middle Ages, the 16th century protestant Reformation, as well as his contemporaries. As it was clarified, Karl Barth made a striking impulse for the further radical deconstruction of what is considered to be the achievements of 19th`s century liberal protestant theology (which made him a lot of detractors among his colleagues), made a loud accent on the necessity of the Christocentric approach to all the spheres of theology, newly updated, actualized and convincingly demonstrated the importance of ancient church creeds and dogmas in the field of Triadology and Christology, as well as in an unusual way he intensified and revived the intellectual search in the protestant universities and academies by his reshaping and changing the paradigms of the whole western theology in a radical way. In the article were taken into account some reviews on Barth`s “Epistle to the Romans” (second edition, 1922), which caused lively discussions and prolonged controversy because of specific and non-standard hermeneutical approaches to the biblical text, which Barth demonstrated in this one of the most eminent theological works of the 20th century. The article reveals not only the attitude towards Barth`s theological heritage that was showed by his protestant colleagues, but also reveals the sincere admiration for his theology from some Orthodox researchers, in particular, the honored professor of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, John Karavidopulos, and the world famous specialist in the history of Christianity and medieval intellectual history, Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr., who converted to Orthodoxy in 1998. In the article`s conclusion there`s a piece of information concerning the fact that the impact of Barth`s dogmatics and hermeneutics on the modern departments of theology is not so noticeable as one might expect. In particular, we can make such a conclusion because of (1) the absence of true consolidation and common vision about the methods of theologizing between the western universities and church seminaries, (2) the popularity of so called “natural theology” which nowadays often seems to be regarded as an important prerequisite for all further theological researches, while Barth himself was a categorical opponent of this discourse, (3) the domination of binary opposition between conservatives and liberals in context of some modern theological discussions, while Karl Barth always tried to organically combine his devotion to the protestant orthodoxy with his efforts to be relevant and adequate to the requirements of his time. (shrink)

Este artigo descreve o modo pelo qual a noção de modelo começou a ingressar na ciência, em particular na física, no final do século XIX. Este é talvez o primeiro domínio científico a fazer uso explícito e consciente dessa noção, para o qual o uso de modelos significou o abandono de toda e qualquer tentativa de representar fielmente os fenômenos naturais. Em questão, estava a representação dos fenômenos elétricos e magnéticos por meio de analogias. This article describes the way in (...) which the idea of model began to be discussed in science, in particular in physics, towards the end of the 19th century. Physics is perhaps the first scientific domain that explicitly and consciously made use of models in a way that was understood to involve abandoning any attempt faithfully to represent natural phenomena. The representation of electromagnetic phenomena by means of analogies was in question. (shrink)

The late 19th century debate among German-speaking physicists about theoretical entities is often regarded as foreshadowing the scientific realism debate. This paper brings out differences between them by concentrating on the part of the earlier debate that was concerned with the conceptual consistency of the competing conceptions of matter—mainly, but not exclusively, of atomism. Philosophical antinomies of atomism were taken up by Emil Du Bois-Reymond in an influential lecture in 1872. Such challenges to the consistency of atomism (...) had repercussions within the physics community, as can be shown for the examples of Heinrich Hertz and Ludwig Boltzmann. The latter developed a series of counter-arguments, culminating in an ingenious attempt to turn the tables on the critics of atomism and prove the inconsistency of non-atomistic conceptions of nature. Underlying this controversy is a disagreement over specific goals of physical research which was considered crucially relevant to the further course of physical inquiry. It thereby exemplifies an attitude towards the realism issue that can be contrasted with a different, more neutral attitude of construing the realism issue as merely philosophical and indifferent with respect to concrete research programs in physics, which one also occasionally finds expressed in the 19th century controversy and which may be seen as the prevailing attitude of the 20th century debate. (shrink)

In the second half of the 19th-century, a group of psychiatric experts discussed the relation between brain malfunction and moral misconduct. In the ensuing debates, scientific discourses on immorality merged with those on insanity and the brain. This yielded a specific definition of what it means to be immoral: immoral and insane due to a disordered brain. In this context, diverse neurobiological explanations for immoral mind and behavior existed at the time. This article elucidates these different brain-based (...) explanations via five historical cases of immoral persons. In addition, the article analyses the associated controversies in the context of the period’s psychiatric thinking. The rendering of the immoral person as brain-disordered is scrutinized in terms of changes in moral agency. Furthermore, a present immoral person is discussed to highlight commonalities and differences in past and present reasoning. (shrink)

The entry aims to explain a core feature of otherwise different variants of romanticism: the commitment to “the primacy of aesthetics.” This commitment is often expressed by the claim that the “aesthetic”—most broadly that which concerns beauty and art—should permeate and shape human life. The entry proposes that this romantic imperative should be understood as a structural or formal demand. On that reading, the romantic imperative requires that we model our epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, political, social and scientific pursuits according (...) to the form of the aesthetic comportment to the world, exemplified in poetry. Rather than aiming to replace “real” life, science and philosophy with poetry, the romantics urge human beings to fashion their ordinary lives and to do science and philosophy according to the model provided by poetry. Philosophy, science and everyday life need not be poetry, but poetic or poetry-like. Structurally, they should become similar. Why so? The main task of this entry is to offer an answer to this question and to show that the reasons for “poeticizing” life, science and philosophy are themselves philosophical. (shrink)

The late 19th century debate among German-speaking physicists about theoretical entities is often regarded as foreshadowing the scientific realism debate. This paper brings out differences between them by concentrating on the part of the earlier debate that was concerned with the conceptual consistency of the competing conceptions of matter---{}mainly, but not exclusively, of atomism. Philosophical antinomies of atomism were taken up by Emil Du Bois-Reymond in an influential lecture in 1872. Such challenges to the consistency of atomism (...) had repercussions within the physics community, as can be shown for the examples of Heinrich Hertz and Ludwig Boltzmann. The latter developed a series of counter-arguments, culminating in an ingenious attempt to turn the tables on the critics of atomism and prove the inconsistency of non-atomistic conceptions of nature. Underlying this controversy is a disagreement over specific goals of physical research which was considered crucially relevant to the further course of physical inquiry. It thereby exemplifies an attitude towards the realism issue that can be contrasted with a different, more neutral attitude of construing the realism issue as merely philosophical and indifferent with respect to concrete research programs in physics, which one also occasionally finds expressed in the 19th century controversy and which may be seen as the prevailing attitude of the 20th century debate. (shrink)

The paper discusses the publications of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (RSAS) as part of a wider network of publication exchange, linking learned societies, libraries, and archives. The periodicals of the RSAS went through several reorganisations between 1813 and 1903, all to some extent related to their role in publication exchange. Although subject to many of the same deliberations of commercial value and institutional prestige as the expanding book trade, publication exchange offered a means of communication for institutions with (...) widely differing financial, linguistic and scientific status, and a forum for articulating a wide range of values significant in scientific publication. In the context of publication exchange, the roles of producers and consumers, and of publishers and repositories of scientific knowledge overlap, and librarians emerge alongside editors as central actors in scientific communication. Scientific editorship should be viewed not only as a means of disseminating scientific findings to wider audiences, but as designing a product that could be used to forge institutional connections, to acquire publications, and to build collections. The case of the RSAS periodicals highlights the importance of publication, not only for the distribution of scientific knowledge, but for its acquisition. (shrink)

The case of Félida X and her ‘doubled personality’ served in the last quarter of the 19th century as a proving ground for a distinctively French form of psychology that bore the stamp of physiology, including the comparative term normal state. Debates around Félida’s case provided the occasion for reflection about how that term and its opposites could take their places in the emerging discursive field of psychopathology. This article centres its analysis on Eugène Azam’s 1876–77 study of (...) Félida, and the ways his framing of the case was adopted or critiqued by subsequent researchers. Azam initially deployed the label normal state in a routine manner, in contrast to his use of condition seconde to designate Félida’s other state; this pairing served, I argue, to anchor the scientific legitimacy of Félida’s extraordinary psychological manifestations. Unpacking the conceptual associations of Azam’s use of normal state, we find it marked as qualitatively distinct, temporally fixed, and most of all individualized; this without becoming normative. It was only through responses to and criticism of Azam’s study that there emerged a more generalized sense of normality against which pathological (hysteric) subjects’ comportment could be contrasted. Félida’s case itself constitutes a highly individualized reconfiguration of the concept of a normal state, while the subsequent framing of doubled mental states provides a valuable vantage point from which to consider the articulations between the language of emerging French psychology and its evolving subjects of enquiry. (shrink)

The 19th-century missionary literary genre provides us with a window into how the missionaries viewed African cultural systems, such as polygamy. In their minds, polygamy was one of the obstacles to converting Africans to Christianity. Baptism functioned as a theatre of power and submission. To access baptism, a convert had to abandon and strip themselves of that which made them Africans and adopt Western colonial Christian norms and principles. In this article, we argue that the condemnation of polygamy (...) by missionaries was a wielding of power within the colonial matrix of power. We further maintain that the decolonisation of Christianity cannot be achieved without a critical analysis of the impact of the missionaries in the deformation and labelling of African cultural identities as heathen and uncivilised. Contribution: The cultural transfer that was achieved through Christianisation, civilisation and colonisation has led to what Biko referred to as the flight from the black self and what Du Bois referred to as double consciousness. The article applies the intersectionality of theoretical lenses of Africana critical thought, Foucauldian notion of power, negritude and decoloniality. (shrink)

The latter half of nineteenth-century England was rife with the evolution question. As English imperialism also reached its pinnacle during this time, racial gradations and superiority of the white race in the newly formed human chain loomed large culturally. In 1849, Thomas Carlyle anonymously published his anti-emancipationist perspective in “The Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” followed by John Stuart Mill’s divergent response to him in 1850 titled, “The Negro Question.” In 1878, The Westminster Review also published a woman’s (...) perspective, “The Importance of Race and Its Bearing on the Negro Question” by Alice Bodington, which resembled the Carlyle essay in various ways. Although Mill’s essay was a direct attack on Carlyle’s explosive article and is overtly against Carlyle and Bodington’s ideas, this paper argues that an imperialist agenda underlies Mill’s views and in fact poses the same theories of Carlyle and Bodington. The paper first proceeds to interrogate Mill’s hegemonic subtext through a comparison of these three essays by situating them within the scientific discourse of the era, arguing that science, especially phrenology and evolution theories, didn’t exist in a vacuum, but was used to perpetrate the normative racial ideologies of the period. The paper also uses Edward Said’s theory of ‘Othering the Orient’ in Culture and Imperialism to show that while Mill seemingly diverges from Carlyle’s stance, this ‘othering’ is in fact present in all three writers’ works. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper's primary goal is to compare the personalities, values, and influence of August Wilhelm Hofmann and Emil Fischer as exemplars and acknowledged leaders of successive generations of the German chemical profession and as scientists sharing a 19th-century liberal, internationalist outlook from the German wars of unification in the 1860s to Fischer's death in 1919 in the aftermath of German defeat in World War I. The paper will consider the influence of Hofmann and Fischer on the shaping of (...) national scientific institutions in Germany, from founding of the German Chemical Society in 1867 to the first institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society founded in 1911, their academic leadership in other areas including the shaping of a successful academic-industrial symbiosis in organic chemistry, and finally their response to war as a force disruptive of scientific internationalism. All of these developments posed serious dilemmas, exacerbated by emerging strains of nationalism and anti-Semitism in German society. Whereas Hofmann's lifework came to a relatively successful end in 1892, Fischer was not so fortunate, as the war brought him heavy responsibilities and terrible personal losses, but with no German victory and no peace of reconciliation – a bleak end for Fischer and the 19th-century liberal ideals that had inspired him. (shrink)

What is the relation between science and philosophy of science? Specifically, does it matter whether a philosopher of science knows much about science or is actually engaged in scientific research? William Whewell is an obvious person to consider in relation to this question. Whewell was actively engaged in science in several important ways, some of which have not been previously noted. He conducted research in a number of scientific fields, he devised new terminology for the new discoveries made (...) by other scientists, and he frequently attempted to guide the experimental work of other scientists. Moreover, he was a philosopher of science who explicitly claimed to be inferring his methodological injunctions from an extensive study of the history of scientific work . My recent study of his unpublished letters and notebooks indicates that the intimate relation between science and philosophy was always foremost in Whewell’s mind; it was not a theoretical stance adopted after his philosophy was well-developed, as some have suggested. In this paper I will present an examination of the relation between Whewell’s involvement in science and the writing of his philosophy of science as a springboard to consider the more general question . Further insight into the relation between science and philosophy of science will be gained by contrasting Whewell’s strong involvement in science with the lack of such involvement in the case of his philosophical antagonist, J.S. Mill. (shrink)

Annotation: The article contains the research concerning the possible impact of Karl Barth`s figure and theological issues on the theology of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century. There is a comparative analysis of how powerful and significant was the level of impact of Barth`s scientific experience on the theologians of his era, in comparison with the most prominent representatives of Christian thought from the earlier centuries, beginning with the times of ancient church, (...) the Middle Ages, the 16th century protestant Reformation, as well as his contemporaries. As it was clarified, Karl Barth made a striking impulse for the further radical deconstruction of what is considered to be the achievements of 19th`s century liberal protestant theology (which made him a lot of detractors among his colleagues), made a loud accent on the necessity of the Christocentric approach to all the spheres of theology, newly updated, actualized and convincingly demonstrated the importance of ancient church creeds and dogmas in the field of Triadology and Christology, as well as in an unusual way he intensified and revived the intellectual search in the protestant universities and academies by his reshaping and changing the paradigms of the whole western theology in a radical way. In the article were taken into account some reviews on Barth`s “Epistle to the Romans” (second edition, 1922), which caused lively discussions and prolonged controversy because of specific and non-standard hermeneutical approaches to the biblical text, which Barth demonstrated in this one of the most eminent theological works of the 20th century. The article reveals not only the attitude towards Barth`s theological heritage that was showed by his protestant colleagues, but also reveals the sincere admiration for his theology from some Orthodox researchers, in particular, the honored professor of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, John Karavidopulos, and the world famous specialist in the history of Christianity and medieval intellectual history, Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr., who converted to Orthodoxy in 1998. In the article`s conclusion there`s a piece of information concerning the fact that the impact of Barth`s dogmatics and hermeneutics on the modern departments of theology is not so noticeable as one might expect. In particular, we can make such a conclusion because of (1) the absence of true consolidation and common vision about the methods of theologizing between the western universities and church seminaries, (2) the popularity of so called “natural theology” which nowadays often seems to be regarded as an important prerequisite for all further theological researches, while Barth himself was a categorical opponent of this discourse, (3) the domination of binary opposition between conservatives and liberals in context of some modern theological discussions, while Karl Barth always tried to organically combine his devotion to the protestant orthodoxy with his efforts to be relevant and adequate to the requirements of his time. (shrink)

This historical study of early 19th-century opposition to vivisection suggests that the moral persona of the vivisector was an important theme. Vivisectors claimed they deliberately suppressed their feelings to perform scientifically necessary experiments: Where there was reason, there could be no cruelty. Their critics argued they were callous and indifferent to suffering, which was problematic for medical practitioners, who were expected to be merciful and compassionate. This anthropocentric debate can be located within the virtue ethics tradition: Compassion for (...) animals signified a humane character. The 1876 Vivisection Act facilitated experimentation by separating the practice of vivisection from that of medicine. (shrink)

This is a critical-hermeneutical and historical-comparative study on Political Economy, Economic History and Social Thought, applied to the American utopias in the 19th century and its role in the colonisation of the United States (US) west. This review is based on a heterodox economic approach, used in the disciplines of Religion and Economics. It gives a general view of religious and ideological utopias, as cooperative enterprises of intentional life in farms and workshop, making a comparative analysis of efficiency (...) and sustainability. This study attempts to explain the colonial paradox of American utopias because the last established, with more inversion, they were the first to fall. This study shapes the development of the western territories, from the Quaker’s Holy Experiment framework and its support for the utopias experiments in the expansion to Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Contribution: This review offers a descriptive and explanatory study on the colonisation of the US west, under the hermeneutical turn from heterodox economic approaches, to deal with some current contradictions and anachronism in the mainstream view. Also, there is a systematisation of the American utopias, divided into religious and ideological experiments, with a comparison. (shrink)

Resumen El presente estudio investiga la importancia de la “experiencia originaria” husserliana para la comprensión del conflicto de las ciencias exactas con el problema de Dios, que Edith Stein califica de “angustia inconsciente de encontrarse” con Él. A través de su controversia con la Psicología del siglo XIX, la discípula de Husserl muestra en su obra Causalidad Psíquica que hace falta un adecuado conocimiento de la índole propia de la ciencia para remontar con rigor metódico a la originariedad de la (...) experiencia humana y el Dios presente allí. Esto conducirá a la ciencia al descubrimiento de su propia identidad por la superación del bloqueo consciente o inconsciente ante la revelación de Dios en el alma humana. De ahí que el presente estudio ofrezca un aporte relevante para la dilucidación filosófica de una cuestión teológica candente hoy ―aporte logrado a través de un esfuerzo interdisciplinario arduo.The present study investigates the importance of the Husserlian “originary experience” for the understanding of the conflict of the exacts sciences with the problem of God, which Edith Stein describes as “unconscious anguish of being” with Him. Through her controversy with of the 19th century Psychology, the disciple of Husserl shows in her work Psychic Causality that it is necessary to have an adequate knowledge of the nature of science to trace with methodical rigor the originarity of the human experience and the God present in there. This will conduct science to a discovery of its own proper identity by the overcoming of the unconscious or conscious blocking before the revelation of God in the human soul Hence, the present study offers a relevant contribution to the philosophical elucidation of a burning theological question today -a contribution achieved through an arduous interdisciplinary effort. (shrink)