The historiographic tradition of the history of science that originated with Auguste Comte bears all the marks of narratives with roots in the Enlightenment, such as a view of religion as an underdeveloped stage in the ascending road in humanity's quest for a more mature understanding. This article explores the development of the peripheral branch of a tradition that developed in Argentina by the mid‐twentieth century with authors such as the Italians Aldo Mieli, José Babini, and the Hungarian Desiderius Papp. (...) It is argued that, contrary to the historiographic program of the conflict thesis developed in English‐speaking countries, those scholars who cultivated the kind of “positivist” history of science that thrived in continental Europe were inclined to see science as a social and epistemological replacement of a fossilized religious outlook. In the final section, I suggest a way to relate the more or less strong versions of the conflict thesis to different patterns of secularization. (shrink)

The conceptual framework of this paper is the structural conception of theories as formulated by Sneed-Stegmüller. We present an informal set-theoretical axiomatization of M. F. Xavier Bichat’s theory of the constitution of the organism, which conceived the tissue as the ultimate constitutive element of the living beings, and a reformulation of our previous axiomatization of the cell theory. We propose a tentative relation of reduction between both theories which possibilitates the derivation of the axioms of the tissue theory from those (...) of the cell theory. The limits and problems of the axiomatization are discussed and brief reference is being made to some historical aspects of the reception of the cell theory. (shrink)

E! De arte venandi cum avibus deFederico II ha sido ensalzado por pane de medievalistase historiadores de la ciencia como uno delos logros más importantes de la ciencia medieval,sobre la base de su supuesto carâcter "empírico"y "observacional" y su critica a Aiistóteles.En esta comunicación se intenta una reconsideracióndel significado de la obra, ubicândoladentro dei panorama de la literatura sobre losanimales en e! siglo XIII. Luego de proporcionaralgunos datos básicos sobre el tratado, se adoptaun criterio historiogrâfico, pasando revista criticaa las opiniones (...) de los distintos autores que haninvestigado el tema. Posteriormente se discute laconcepción dei De arte venandi como un libro"cientifico" asumiendo que la scientia en elsiglo XIII es radicalmente distinta de la cienciasurgida a partir del siglo XVII, que e! tratadode Federico es la exposición de un ars, en e!sentido que los médicos otorgaban a esta nocióny que la obra pertenece mâs bien ai género detratados sobre cetrería, uno de los modos en losque se articulaba el discurso sobre los animalesen el siglo XIII. (shrink)

ArgumentThe eighteenth-century natural histories ofParaquaria, a Jesuit province in South America ranging from the tropical forest to Río de la Plata (the River Plate), constitute a rich and consistent tradition of nature writing. The way the material is organized, the frequent use of lists of aboriginal names, and the focus on naming, all attest to the missionaries' preoccupation with language, understandable given that they were engaged in writing dictionaries and thesauri of the native tongues. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, (...) this body of work went through a series of appropriations, reflecting the various intellectual programs that contributed to the making of the national tradition in Argentina. While these natural histories are still often interpreted in terms of Argentina's national history, science, and literature, I will argue that they should be considered a product of a mixed culture oriented toward the practical and religious goals that are characteristic of most of Jesuit missionary culture, the result of the missionaries' attempt at organizing their experience of the wilderness and their encounter with the aboriginal peoples. (shrink)

Infin de siècleArgentina a secularist ideology of science was part of the positivist world view espoused by liberals and socialists. Between the years 1910 and 1935, a period in which the Catholic Church experienced a significant cultural expansion, the activities of the Catholic naturalist Ángel Gallardo and the astronomer and priest Fortunato Devoto challenged the so far prevailing idea of science as opposed to religion. This paper explores the connections between the scientific, religious and political aspects of those figures in (...) order to get some insights into the complexity of the relationships between science and secularization in societies with a Catholic majority. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper is intended as a contribution to the study of science and religion in late modern Catholic societies. I explore the treatment of natural philosophy vis-à-vis religious authority, the teaching of Biblical geology, and the use of natural theology in texts from Río de la Plata in the transition from late colonial to early independent times. After reviewing the assimilation of modern science into scholastic teaching and the articulation of reason and religious authority, the article considers the handling (...) of the early history of the Earth in the theses of scholastic teachers and in the geological memoirs of the naturalist priest from Montevideo Dámaso Larrañaga. The core of the paper is devoted to the treatment of natural theology in Larrañaga’s Diary of Natural History and in the speeches and documents of enlightened crown bureaucrats. The conclusion is reached that the harmonious character of the relationships between science and religion in this period and location harboured tensions which could be accounted for in terms of the inherent inconsistencies in the programme of Catholic Enlightenment. (shrink)

As in other countries, the public in Argentina became aware of the existence of something called “the theory of relativity” only after November 1919. Although the news of Arthur Eddington's eclipse expedition, which provided the first confirmation of Einstein's theory, was poorly reported in the newspapers, by the end of 1920 Einstein had become a household name for the educated middle class of Buenos Aires, the capital city of the country. This was in great measure the result of the activity (...) of a few enthusiastic lecturers. Significantly, none of them belonged to the prestigious Institute of Physics of the University of La Plata, which during the decade of the 1910s was considered the most important center of physical research in Latin America. Between July and August 1920 the Spanish physicist Blas Cabrera – perhaps the greatest popularizer of Einstein's theory in Spain – visited Argentina and talked about relativity. In September Georges Duclout, a French engineer who had graduated from the Zurich Polytechnic and by then was professor of applied mechanics at the School of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires, also gave a series of conferences on the subject. That same month José Ubach, a Jesuit astronomer trained at the Ebro Observatory in Spain, and established in Buenos Aires, lectured on relativity at the Colegio del Salvador. (shrink)