Modern epistemology is in the peculiar position of retaining its trust in man’s ability to acquire knowledge without being capable of specifying the reasons for our gnosis success. Popper was the first to state that any conclusion concerning the possibility or impossibility of knowing is a transcendental statement and he states, also, that man reaches knowledge while trying to guess. In my opinion, we know things because we assume to have always been aware of them, in the sense that some (...) form of immediate awareness has promptly enabled us to perceive them, identify them, use them. But one needs to ascertain whether the reason is the most suitable faculty to ensure the positive development of knowledge. At last, Kuhn claims the impossibility of comparing different theories. But if we establish a comparison between theories in terms of their complexity, then we must admit that there occurs some progress. (shrink)

The paper studies the medieval tradition of the 9th century al-Khwarizmi’s handbook on algebra compared with its Latin translation by Gerard of Cremona, later translated in Italian vernacular by an anonymous Florentine abacus master, during the 14th century. This long journey along five centuries and three countries deals accurately with the mathematical contents; by means of analysis of explicit and implied elements in the three works, we also focus on the different historical backgrounds, the social condition of the authors, the (...) cultural, mindset-related and religious obstacles they had to take into consideration, while disseminating these calculation techniques, and, finally, their teaching style. (shrink)

Pierre Duhem, cent ans plus tard. Actes de la journée d’étude internationale tenue à Tunis le 10 mars 2016, suivis de l’édition française de l’Histoire de la physique. [Pierre Duhem, a hundred years later. Proceedings of the International Study Day held in Tunis on March 10, 2016, followed by the French edition of the History of Physics ]. Edited by Jean-François Stoffel, with the collaboration of Souad Ben Ali. Tunis: Université de Tunis, 2017. 412 p. ISBN: 978-9973-06-968-9.

The evolution of the concept of function at the beginning of the 20th century in France after the definitions by Dirichlet and Riemann and the introduction of several pathological functions is studied. Some young mathematicians of those years made several attempts to propose a large class of functions as “accessible” objects. Their discussions, their purposes and polemics are reported often by their own words supported by a large bibliography. The contribution of some Italian mathematicians, as Vitali, is also underlined. Some (...) of such discussions are linked to the growth of measure and function theories, others will find mathematical answers in the modern theory of computability for real functions. (shrink)

In this essay, I will expand the philosophical discussion about the representational practice in science to examine its role in science education through four case studies. The cases are of what I call ‘educational laboratory experiments’, performative models used representationally by students to come to a better understanding of theoretical knowledge of a scientific discipline. The studies help to demonstrate some idiosyncratic features of representational practices in science education, most importantly a lack of novelty and discovery built into the ELEs (...) as their methodology is solidified when it becomes a widely spread educational tool within a discipline. There is thus an irreducible role for the historical development of ELEs in understanding their representational nature and use. The important role of the historical development of ELEs leads to an interesting way that educators can use ELEs as a means of connecting students to important historical developments within their disciplines. (shrink)

In the 1980s naive physics almost suddenly became a field of research for physicists interested in teaching and experimental psychologists. Such research, however, was limited to accurately recording the bizarre Aristotelian responses of “layman” struggling with simple physics issues. Another research on this topic is that one of phenomenological origin: starting from the studies of the psychologist of perception Paolo Bozzi naive physics had entered the laboratory, and he was the first to find that the physical knowledge of the adult (...) individuals were “Aristotelian”. Bozzi took advantage of these results in order to hypothesize a substantial diversity and independence of the sensory system with respect to the cognitive-rational one. Other interesting perspectives were considered by Piaget, who in the 1980s, confirming the spontaneous Aristotelism of children, provided a still prolific epistemological direction of such investigations: finding an explanatory mechanism that projects on the level of science construction that one of individual cognitive development. (shrink)

The change in the organization of science education over the past fifty years is quickly recalled. Being its cultural bound the lack of a conception of the foundation of science, the multiple innovations have resulted as temporary improvements without a clear direction, apart from the technocratic goal of an automation of learning processes. The discovery of two dichotomies as the foundations of science suggests a pluralist conception of science, and hence the need to entirely renew science education, in particular by (...) introducing the notions of incommensurability and radical variations in meaning of the basic notions. This change was already anticipated by several proposals within each subject-matter. (shrink)

In 1772, Joseph Priestley published The History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light and Colours, also known as The History of Optics. The book intended to present all the achievements in the matter of light and colors, from the Ancient times to the 18thcentury. This paper presents a study of the content of The History of Optics, in order to analyze how it sold Newtonian optics in the historiography of light. It will comprise discussions on Priestley’s views (...) on History, his involvement with optical studies, his perceptions on Newtonian optics and the Biographical Chart included in the book. This analysis can add new elements for the current Historiography on Priestley, clarifying other aspects that demonstrate his commitment to a Newtonian view of the History of Optics, as well as an example of the prestige that Newton’s Natural Philosophy had throughout the 18th century. (shrink)

This article presents a methodology to teach about the nature of sciences and their histories through the construction of controversial dialogs in order to promote reflective and engaging practices among undergraduate and graduate students. This proposal seeks to establish the study’s guidelines and organize the distribution of tasks in groups to draft scripts of dialogs that bring relevant information and that produce antagonistic positions on controversial socioscientific issues. This information will later be recorded in short home videos of 5 to (...) 10 minutes each, which will then be shown and discussed in the classroom. Finally, this article highlights some limitations of this methodology, primarily in the way it has been used in this study. By contrast, the advantages of its use are pinpointed as a didactic strategy that serves to stimulate historical research and critical thinking regarding the nature of science and its sociotechnical relations. (shrink)

The following article describes a pilot study on the possible integration of digital historiography into teaching practice. It focuses on Émilie Du Châtelet’s considerations of space and time against the background of Leibniz’s program of analysis situs. Historians have characterized philosophical controversies on space and time as a dichotomy between the absolute and relational concepts of space and time. In response to this, the present case study pursues two aims: First, it shows that the common portrayal simplifies the complex pattern (...) of change and the semantic shift from absolute-relational concepts of space and time to invariance and conservation principles. Second, against this background, I present the Online Reading Guide on Émilie Du Châtelet’s Foundations of Physics, a teaching and research project designed to help navigate Du Châtelet’s Institutions physiques. This project makes Du Châtelet’s important text visible to a broad audience and allows for a more critical and deeper view on classical topics of the history of philosophy and science in a more accessible way than traditional introductions. (shrink)

For interdisciplinarity between physics and mathematics to take its proper place in secondary schools, its value must be demonstrated and used during the future teacher’s university education. We have observed from examples and surveys, however, that an ever-widening gulf is emerging between degree courses in mathematics and physics. This article therefore develops comparative approaches to some common concepts to demonstrate their complementarities from the angle of the relation between mechanics and analysis. The example of the differential, which is described as (...) an obstacle to the “mathematization” of physics, is used to transform it into a tool to aid conceptualization, offering a dual approach to the concepts and their applications. This should enable students to have a better understanding that is related to their specific curriculum. (shrink)

Can video games teach students about the history and philosophy of science? This paper reports the results of a study investigating the effects of playing an educational video game on students’ knowledge of Galileo’s life and times, the nature of scientific evidence, and Aristotle’s and Galileo’s views of the cosmos. In the game, students were immersed in a computer simulation of 16th century Venice where they interacted with an avatar of Galileo and other characters. Over a period of two weeks, (...) 71 undergraduates were exposed to lectures about Galileo and the Copernican revolution in a traditional classroom setting. However, only half of the students also played the game. The other half were only exposed to lectures. The knowledge of both groups was assessed at the beginning and end of the two-week period. The results demonstrated objective improvements in knowledge for the experimental group while the control group showed virtually no change. Implications of these findings for teaching and learning the history and philosophy of science are discussed. (shrink)

Introduction to Dossier Georges Canguilhem.

This paper presents the role of Althusser and two of his students in the 1960s, Pierre Macherey and Dominique Lecourt, in the diffusion of the work of Georges Canguilhem in Brazil. We begin by a brief review of Macherey’s and Lecourt’s analysis on the work of Canguilhem taken from two texts that served as postface and preface to the Brazilian and the Argentine translations of Le normal et le pathologique. Next, we present the works of Brazilian authors Sérgio Arouca, Cecilia (...) Donnangelo and Ricardo Bruno Mendes-Gonçalves to show some aspects of the reception of Canguilhem’s ideas and concepts in the field of Collective Health. (shrink)

Book Review: Condé, Mauro L. “Um Papel para a História”: O Problema da Historicidade da Ciência. [“A role for the History”: The Problem of the Historicity of Science].

The year 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of a classic of the historiography of sciences, Michel Foucault’s The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical gaze. In different parts of the world, events were organized to reflect on this important work. The article argues that if one cannot draw a direct line linking the work of the leading historians-philosophers of the twentieth-century sciences in France to Michel Foucault’s archaeological study of the clinic, we must recognize that (...) the author of The Birth of the Clinic has taken up from these historians-philosophers the methodological and conceptual tools that made it possible to study the history of science and knowledge in a new way. (shrink)

We discuss a less known aspect of Feynman’s multifaceted scientific work, centered about his interest in molecular biology, which came out around 1959 and lasted for several years. After a quick historical reconstruction about the birth of molecular biology, we focus on Feynman’s work on genetics with Robert S. Edgar in the laboratory of Max Delbruck, which was later quoted by Francis Crick and others in relevant papers, as well as in Feynman’s lectures given at the Hughes Aircraft Company on (...) biology, organic chemistry and microbiology, whose notes taken by the attendee John Neer are available. An intriguing perspective comes out about one of the most interesting scientists of the XX century. (shrink)

The article explores theoretical convergences between the work of Georges Canguilhem and Lucien Febvre on the theme of science and technique. In comparing the scholarship of both authors from the 1920s through 1940s, we endeavor to show that their critique of mechanistic determinism was rooted in the concept of the genres of life and its creative interaction with the environment.

In this paper we examine aspects of Canguilhem’s philosophy of biology, concerning the knowledge of life and its consequences on science and vitalism. His concept of life stems from the idea of a living individual, endowed with creative subjectivity and norms, a Kantian view which “disconcerts logic”. In contrast, two different approaches ground naturalistic perspectives to explore the logic of life and the logic of the living individual in the 1970s. Although Canguilhem is closer to the second, there are divergences; (...) for example, unlike them, he does not dismiss vitalism, often referring to it in his work and even at times describing himself as a vitalist. The reason may lie in their different views of science. (shrink)

In the present article, we discuss the specificity of the object of the history of science as an autonomous and interdisciplinary field of studies by nature and origin, placed at the interface of history, epistemology and science, and focus on some key historiographical views. Within this context, Georges Canguilhem stands out for contributions such as calling the attention to the relevance of epistemology in science history research and the discontinuity-continuity antithesis, among many others. An accurate understanding of Canguilhem’s ideas demands (...) an unbiased review of Auguste Comte’s work, particularly his views on science in general, the various sciences in particular and the methods to present them, to wit, the historical and the dogmatic. We finish with a short description of our theoretical-methodological work and its implications for studies in the history of science. (shrink)

The metaphor is used in the construction process of scientific knowledge. There are, however, metaphors that do not suit the objects they should represent, which thus impacts the accuracy of the knowledge which derives from these objects. It is the case of the machine metaphor, when resorted to in the study of living organisms. Canguilhem has tackled problems it created in twentieth-century life sciences head on. In his criticism, he links the analysis of Descartes’ work to his own philosophical thesis (...) on “biological normativity”. By doing so, he so sheds a light on the pitfalls, both historical and biological, over which the machine metaphor stumbles. He thereby orders sciences to periodically make sure of the relevance of their metaphors and explanatory models to their objects. (shrink)

Olival Freire Jr interviewed by Gustavo Rodrigues Rocha.

The article shows the strategic analogies, but also the differences between Bachelard and Canguilhem on the use of the history of science for epistemology. It emphasizes the importance of the ideology for Canguilhem, and the conceptual essence he recognizes in the history of science, which is read in its internal specific differences and in its complex articulations with life and reality. No concept, in fact, comes from nothing. The link between history and epistemology is not however of subjection, but of (...) mutual influence. Canguilhem radicalizes the thought of Bachelard, and recognizes the historicity of every aspect of scientific knowledge, even of its less valued features and above all of errors. All aspects of Science are historical. The object of the history of science is not the object of the sciences, because it is always a discourse. This is why the history of science is inevitably linked to other forms of history. This opens up a pluralist conception of History and of Time, thinking of the sciences in their real body and no longer ideal or legal. Thus Canguilhem opens the way to the researches of Foucault and Serres. (shrink)

In the 1950s, George Canguilhem became known in France as a vocal exponent of the philosophy of the concept, an approach to epistemology that treated science as the highest expression of human rationality and scientific concepts as the necessary preconditions for the manifestation of scientific truth. Philosophers of the concept, Canguilhem included, viewed concepts as the key to the study of science; and science, in turn, as the key to a substantive theory of reason. This article explains what concepts are (...) for Canguilhem, how they are extracted from the history of the sciences, and why they continue to matter for contemporary debates in the History and Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

Book review: Menachem Fisch, Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency.

It has become customary since Foucault to present Canguilhem as a man whose work is voluntarily restricted to a particular domain of the history of science. Yet the current edition of his Complete Works reveals that Canguilhem has never considered himself a true historian of science. If he traced “the history of the formation, deformation and rectification of scientific concepts”, it is above all to nurture his profession of professor of philosophy with “unknown material”. On the assumption that Canguilhem subordinates (...) the history of science to teaching, this article will try to make a further step and show that its inter-regional approach of knowledge can serve as a paradigm in educational sciences, when the knowledge to be transmitted is a-disciplinary and has a strong normative dimension. (shrink)

The term “genetic load” first emerged in a paper written in 1950 by the geneticist H. Muller. It is a mathematical model based on biological, social, political and ethical arguments describing the dramatic accumulation of disadvantageous mutations in human populations that will occur in modern societies if eugenic measures are not taken. The model describes how the combined actions of medical and social progress will supposedly impede natural selection and make genes of inferior quality likely to spread across populations – (...) a process which in fine loads their progress. Genetic load is based on optimal fitness and emerges from a “typological view” of evolution. This model of evolution had previously, however, been invalidated by Robert Wright and Theodosius Dobzhansky who, as early as 1946, showed that polymorphism was the rule in natural populations. The blooming and persistence of the concept of genetic load, after its theoretical basis had already expired, are a historical puzzle. This persistence reveals the intricacy of science and policy-making in eugenic matters. The Canguilhemian concept of ‘scientific ideology’ is used along with the concept of ‘immutable mobile’ and compared with the concept of ‘co-production’, to provide complementary perspectives on this complex phenomenon. (shrink)

This paper develops a brief analysis of the book Du développement à l’évolution au XIXe siècle, by Georges Canguilhem and his research workgroup during the years 1958-1960. What is at stake is the history of two core concepts of biology in the 19th century whose unfolding continues to persist at the beginning of the 21st century. Concerning the positive history of modern science, influential works and authors in this history, particularly Spencer and Darwin, are addressed here, in addition to Auguste (...) Comte and Lamarck, when taking into consideration their legendary aspect. Each of these concepts has a birthplace of its own. It is also possible to identify a remarkable historical démarche but also moments of rapprochement and even of inversion of their meanings; a history of errors, as well as a fundamental history of their histories and of their many retrospective illusions. (shrink)