How does science create knowledge? Epistemic cultures, shaped by affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence, determine how we know what we know. In this book, Karin Knorr Cetina compares two of the most important and intriguing epistemic cultures of our day, those in high energy physics and molecular biology. The first ethnographic study to systematically compare two different scientific laboratory cultures, this book sharpens our focus on epistemic cultures as the basis of the knowledge society.

The Posthuman Child combats institutionalised ageist practices in primary, early childhood and teacher education. Grounded in a critical posthumanist perspective on the purpose of education, it provides a genealogy of psychology, sociology and philosophy of childhood in which dominant figurations of child and childhood are exposed as positioning child as epistemically and ontologically inferior. Entangled throughout this book are practical and theorised examples of philosophical work with student teachers, teachers, other practitioners and children (aged 3-11) from South Africa and (...) Britain. These engage arguments about how children are routinely marginalised, discriminated against and denied, especially when the child is also female, black, lives in poverty and whose home language is not English. The book makes a distinctive contribution to the decolonisation of childhood discourses. Underpinned by good quality picturebooks and other striking images, the book's radical proposal for transformation is to reconfigure the child as rich, resourceful and resilient through relationships with (non) human others, and explores the implications for literary and literacy education, teacher education, curriculum construction, implementation and assessment. It is essential reading for all who research, work and live with children. (shrink)

This book argues that the development of German philosophy from Kant, through post-Kantian German Idealism, to the thought of Franz Rosenzweig, was largely driven by the perceived promise of Kant's philosophy for solving the conflict of reason, but also by its perceived shortcomings in solving this conflict.

This radical, profoundly scholarly book explores the purposes and nature of proof in a range of historical settings. It overturns the view that the first mathematical proofs were in Greek geometry and rested on the logical insights of Aristotle by showing how much of that view is an artefact of nineteenth-century historical scholarship. It documents the existence of proofs in ancient mathematical writings about numbers and shows that practitioners of mathematics in Mesopotamian, Chinese and Indian cultures knew how to (...) prove the correctness of algorithms, which are much more prominent outside the limited range of surviving classical Greek texts that historians have taken as the paradigm of ancient mathematics. It opens the way to providing the first comprehensive, textually based history of proof. (shrink)

Cultural accounts of scientific ideas and practices have increasingly come to be welcomed as a corrective to previous—and still widely held—theories of scientific knowledge and practices as universal. The editors caution, however, against the temptation to overgeneralize the work of culture, and to lapse into a kind of essentialism that flattens the range and variety of scientific work. The book refers to this tendency as culturalism. The contributors to the volume model a new path where historicized and cultural accounts (...) of scientific practice retain their specificity and complexity without falling into the traps of culturalism. They examine, among other issues, the potential of using notions of culture to study behavior in financial markets; the ideology, organization, and practice of earthquake monitoring and prediction during China's Cultural Revolution; the history of quadratic equations in China; and how studying the "glass ceiling" and employment discrimination became accepted in the social sciences. Demonstrating the need to understand the work of culture as a fluid and dynamic process that directly both shapes and is shaped by scientific practice, Cultures without Culturalism makes an important intervention in science studies. Contributors. Bruno Belhoste, Karine Chemla, Caroline Ehrhardt, Fa-ti Fan,Kenji Ito, Evelyn Fox Keller, Guillaume Lachenal, Donald MacKenzie, Mary S. Morgan, Nancy J. Nersessian, David Rabouin, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Claude Rosental, Koen Vermeir. (shrink)

In Probability Designs, Karin Kukkonen presents the predictive processing model of cognition as a means of exploring narrative structure and reader experience. Utilizing the literary canon of various cultures, Kukkonen combines theory and cognitive science to analyze how reader expectation and prediction shape literature, and how literature accomplishes cognitive feats that determine the human capacity for free, exploratory thought.

Karin Michels Werk hebt sich von der bisherigen Literatur zum Thema deutlich ab, indem sie zeigt, dass Kants Zeittheorie nicht ohne seine Theorie des Raumes und seine Idealismuskritik verständlich zu machen ist. Die Autorin legt eine Rekonstruktion von Kants Beweis der genuinen Subjektivität der Zeit vor. Sie berücksichtigt dabei Beweisform sowie Beweisinhalt und setzt sich außerdem durchgehend mit Kant-Kommentatoren und -kritikern auseinander. Verständlich wird dadurch nicht nur Kants radikaler Neuansatz in der Zeitphilosophie, sondern auch die Bedeutung des Beweises für (...) sein Gesamtprojekt der Vernunftkritik. (shrink)

Upon Scheler’s death in 1928, Martin Heidegger remarked that he was the most important force in philosophy at the time. Jose Ortega y Gasset called Scheler "the first man of the philosophical paradise." The Human Place in the Cosmos, the last of his works Scheler completed, is a pivotal piece in the development of his writing as a whole, marking a peculiar shift in his approach and thought. He had been asked to provide an initial sketch of his much larger (...) works on philosophical anthropology and metaphysics--works he was not able to complete because of his early demise. Frings' new translation of this key work allows us to read and understand Scheler's thought within current philosophical debates and interests. The book addresses two main questions: What is the human being? And what is the place of the human being in the universe? Scheler responds to these questions within contexts of said two projected much larger works but not without reference to scientific research. He covers various levels of being: inorganic reality, organic reality, all the way up to practical intelligence and the spiritual dimension of human beings, and touching upon the holy. Negotiating two intertwined levels of being, life-energy and "spirit," this work marks not only a critical moment in the development of his own philosophy but also a significant contribution to the current discussions of continental and analytic philosophers on the nature of the person. (shrink)

L'oeuvre de Pic de la Mirandole offre un terrain d'expansion très large à la notion de métamorphose en même temps qu'elle l'investit au profit de la notion de dignité humaine cristallisée autour d'une liberté créatrice qui est tout d'abord libération de la pensée.

Gustave Caillebotte not only depicted the 19th-century Paris of Haussmann, but also painted landscapes, still lifes, portraits and interiors. Today, he has taken his place as one of the most outstanding French Impressionists. His avant-garde approach to perspective and composition anticipated pictorial forms of 20th-century photography. The work of Caillebotte added a new dimension to French Impressionist painting. His radical and modern designs with a photographic quality inspired a new kind of perception and anticipated the dynamism and abstraction of photography (...) which was in the process of being developed. Selected photographs by André Kertész, Wols and László Moholy-Nagy, among others, demonstrate a strong affinity with the work of Caillebotte. (shrink)

The thesis studies the problem of measuring freedom of choice. It analyzes the concept of freedom of choice, discusses conditions that a measure should satisfy, and introduces a new class of measures that uniquely satisfy ten proposed conditions.

Tracing efforts to control unwanted sound--the noise of industry, city traffic, gramophones and radios, and aircraft--from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century.

Investigates the intellectual affinities of Adorno and Nietzsche, culminating in a discussion of their readings of Wagner, who serves as a medium and supplement for their critiques of modern culture.

Die Rassentheorie, die Geschichtsphilosophie, die Ästhetik und die Naturteleologie haben eine Gemeinsamkeit: In all diesen Themengebieten entwickelte Immanuel Kant ein Denken der Zweckmässigkeit. Die Fokussierung auf diesen Strang macht eine Verbindung sichtbar, die von seinen frühen Schriften zu den unterschiedlichen »Rassen« der Menschen hin zur Kritik der Urteilskraft und damit zu seiner Selbstreflexion über die kritische Philosophie reicht. Karin Hostettler arbeitet das mit diesem Denken verbundene Othering und die damit einhergehende Selbstaffirmation heraus und zeigt so die Selbstverortung der kritischen (...) Philosophie in einer kolonialen Episteme auf. (shrink)

The anthropological approach is the central focus of this study. Laboratories are looked upon with the innocent eye of the traveller in exotic lands, and the societies found in these places are observed with the objective yet compassionate eye of the visitor from a quite other cultural milieu. There are many surprises that await us if we enter a laboratory in this frame of mind... This study is a realistic enterprise, an attempt to truly represent the social order of life (...) in laboratories and institutes of research, just as they are. By bringing the philosophical issues to the surface as matters not of prejudgement but as matters of concern, Karin Knorr-Cetina has developed the first really positive challenge to the philosophy of science since the days of paradigms and internal definitions of meanings. (shrink)

Hegel is most famous for his view that conflicts between contrary positions are necessarily resolved. Whereas this optimism, inherent in modernity as such, has been challenged from Kierkegaard onward, many critics have misconstrued Hegel's own intentions. Focusing on the Science of Logic, this transformative reading of Hegel on the one hand exposes the immense force of Hegel's conception of tragedy, logic, nature, history, time, language, spirit, politics, and philosophy itself. Drawing out the implications of Hegel's insight into tragic conflicts, on (...) the other hand, De Boer brings into play a form of negativity that allows us to understand why the entanglement of complementary positions always tends to turn into their conflict, but not necessarily into its resolution. (shrink)

In her book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing , Miranda Fricker introduces the helpful notion of “identity prejudice” as “a label for prejudices against people qua social type” . She focuses on race, class and gender, and Michael Hand in his article What Do Kids Know? A response to Karin Murris is indeed correct when he states that I have applied her arguments to age as a category of epistemic exclusion.I argue that among the usual (...) contenders of epistemic prejudices, we also need to be cognisant of adults’ implicit and explicit assumptions and prejudices about child and childhood. However, Hand incorrectly uses Fricker’s ideas to reject my proposal to include child as being on the receiving end of epistemic injustice. A close reading of some passages about stereotyping will show why this is the case and why his own claim that “children typically are immature, ill-informed and endearing” will turn out to .. (shrink)

Generality is a key value in scientific discourses and practices. Throughout history, it has received a variety of meanings and of uses. This collection of original essays aims to inquire into this diversity. Through case studies taken from the history of mathematics, physics and the life sciences, the book provides evidence of different ways of understanding the general in various contexts. It aims at showing how individuals have valued generality and how they have worked with specific types of "general" (...) entities, procedures, and arguments. (shrink)

This book traces and explores the evolution of taste from a design perspective: what it is, how it works and what it does. Karin Tehve examines taste primarily through its recursive relationship to media. This ongoing process changes the relationship between designers and the public, and our understanding of the relationship of individuals to their social contexts. Through an analysis of taste, design is understood to be an active constituent of social life, not as autonomous from it. This (...) book reclaims a term long dismissed from interior design and unveils taste's role as a powerful social and political agent within systems of aesthetics, affecting both its producers and consumers. Each chapter discusses a taste concept or definition, analyzes its reciprocal relationship with media, and explores its implications for interior design. Illustrated with 70 images, taste's relationship to media is viewed through a variety of different lenses, including books, photography, magazines, internet, social media and algorithms. Written for students and scholars of interior design and related design fields, this book will be a helpful resource for all those interested in the question of taste, and is an invitation to produce and consume all media critically. (shrink)

Because we tend to study fight books in isolation, we often forget how difficult it is to understand the precise place they occupy in the sociocultural and historical fabric of their time, and spill the many clues they inevitably contain on their owner, their local society, their precise purpose. In order to unlock that information, we need to study them in their broader sociocultural and historical context. This requires a background and research skills that are not always easily accessible to (...) everyone. To illustrate the point, in this paper I show in some detail what is required to make sense of the claim that Aristotelian philosophy and science influenced the medieval fight books in relevant ways, and that understanding this influence helps us to better understand the fight books per se. I give an outline of the general historical framework, and apply it to a testcase: Talhoffer’s Thott 290 2° Ms., with some interesting results. My hope is that this framework may be of some use to other researchers in HEMA Studies who want to dig deeper in sources of interest to them. (shrink)

Using an analysis of child care books and parenting Web sites, this article asks if second-wave feminism’s vision of gender-neutral child rearing has been incorporated into contemporary advice on child rearing. The data suggest that while feminist understandings of gender have made significant inroads into popular advice, especially with regard to the social construction of gender, something akin to “a stalled revolution” has taken place. Children’s gender nonconformity is still viewed as problematic because it is linked implicitly and explicitly to (...) homosexuality. (shrink)

The publication of the following four articles is the result of a Colloquium on Violence and Religion session at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, on November, 24, 2013.It is unbelievable, but on February 27, 2014, Raymund Schwager, SJ, the Innsbruck dogmatics professor and first president of the COV&R, will have been dead already for ten years. Sometime after his sudden death in 2004, his office had to be cleared out, and when this sad work was (...) begun, it soon became clear that there was a treasure to be retrieved: letters, typescripts, drafts for a book, and several articles, along with other academic material. Józef Niewiadomski, who was Schwager’s successor as .. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a philosophical approach to the emotion ‘love’, as a response to more psychological approaches presupposed in ‘emotional intelligence’, ‘emotional literacy’ programmes, or how some Philosophy for Children practitioners interpret ‘caring thinking’. Martha Nussbaum’s philosophy of emotions expressed in her book Love’s Knowledge, and the complex arguments contained within it have been given a narrative context: the picturebook Frog in Love by Max Velthuijs. The narrative contextualisation shows how literature can be used to explore the (...) meaning of love philosophically, but also it is an illustration of how some works of literature can do justice to the complexity involved in understanding emotions. The paper starts with an exposition of one of the sources of a currently popular view of emotion by psychologists and educators. Originally conceptualised by Plato, emotions are regarded as mental states in need of mastery and control. As a result, some parents and educators argue that their age and experience puts them in an advantageous position to tame youngsters’ wild ‘sides’ and to help them ‘mature’ into adults who understand and manage their emotions, and become so-called emotionally ‘literate’ or ‘emotionally intelligent’. For educators it is an appealing promise of empowerment and achievement for all . One particular approach to teaching and learning called Philosophy with Children is also increasingly promoted and adopted in schools as a vehicle for emotional ‘intelligence’ or emotional ‘literacy’ . The caring thinking it encourages is interpreted psychologically often without acknowledging its moral and political dimensions. After a brief introduction of P4C, I problematise a psychological understanding of emotion by focusing on one book in particular, Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge. With the help of the picturebook Frog in Love I entangle some of her complex arguments about ‘love’, what it means, and how literature can provide insight. I argue against a behaviourist approach to emotions, and through phronesis, that is, a detailed exploration of ‘love’ in the context of Frog in Love I intend to show an alternative, philosophical approach to emotions that regards emotions as neither fixed entities, nor feelings ‘inside’ our ‘selves’ that need to be managed or controlled, but as complex judgments, as linguistic concepts. Psychological approaches to emotions often misunderstand the ‘golden mean’ principle to mean self-discipline and willpower, but for Aristotle self-control is not a virtue. Instead, I argue how emotions need to be regarded as informative expressions of and responses to dynamic social relationships and return at the end of the paper to the relevance of this point of view for the theory and practice of P4C as phronesis. (shrink)

_Airy Nothings_ contains eleven contributions on the scholarly and literary representations of the Otherworld of Faerie from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.

Vol. 1 includes text and commentary in Sanskrit and German translation ; vol. 2 notes to the translation.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

THE immense popularity which Bergson's philosophy enjoys is sometimes cast up against him, by those who do not agree with him, as a reproach. It has been suggested that Berg-son's writings are welcomed simply because they offer a theoretical justification for a tendency which is natural in all of us but against which philosophy has always fought, the tendency to throw reason overboard and just let ourselves go. Bergson is regarded by rationalists almost as a traitor to philosophy, or as (...) a Bolshevik inciting the public to overthrow what it has taken years of painful effort to build up. (shrink)

This is the first book-length analysis of the techniques and procedures of ancient mathematical commentaries. It focuses on examples in Chinese, Sanskrit, Akkadian and Sumerian, and Ancient Greek, presenting the general issues by constant detailed reference to these commentaries, of which substantial extracts are included in the original languages and in translation, sometimes for the first time. This makes the issues accessible to readers without specialized training in mathematics or in the languages involved. The result is a much richer (...) understanding than was hitherto possible of the crucial role of commentaries in the history of mathematics in four different linguistic areas, of the nature of mathematical commentaries in general, of the contribution that the study of mathematical commentaries can make to the history of science and to the study of commentaries in general, and of the ways in which mathematical commentaries are like and unlike other kinds of commentaries. (shrink)

I think in images. Poems help me to do this.1 In the Beginning was a major exhibition of Anselm Kiefer’s work at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn in 2012. The exhibition included, among other works, several large-scale lead book sculptures, and featured Bavel Balal Mabul,2 an installation filling an entire room and bringing together many of Kiefer’s key themes: mythology, memory, and history; apocalypse, regeneration, and transformation. It shows the tower of Babel in the shape of a spiral staircase-like structure, (...) spanning from floor to ceiling. Tumbling down the metal stairs are picture rolls that gather at the bottom of the tower like the wastage on the cutting room floor of.. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of Putnam, Michael Dummett and Donald Davidson, the author elaborates a non-metaphysical realist perspective that she recommends as a ...

This innovative book is one of the first to conduct a systematic comprehensive analysis of the ideals and practices of the evolving green state. It draws on elements of political theory, feminist theory, post-structuralism, governance and institutional theory to conceptualise the green state and advances thinking on how to understand its emergence in the context of climate and sustainability transitions. Focusing on the state as an actor in environmental, climate and sustainability politics, the book explores different principles guiding (...) the emergence of the green state and examines the performance of states and institutional responses to the sustainable and climate transitions in the European and Nordic context in particular. The book's unique focus on the Nordic countries underlines the important to learn from Nordics, which are perceived to be in the forefront of climate and sustainability governance as well as historically strong welfare states. With chapter contributions from leading international scholars in political science, sociology, economics, energy and environmental systems and climate policy studies, this book will be of great value to postgraduate students and researchers working on sustainability transitions, environmental politics and governance, and those with an area studies focus on the Nordic countries. (shrink)

The Anatomy of Dance Discourse offers a fresh, original perspective on ancient perceptions of dance. Focusing on the second century CE, it provides an overview of the dance discourse of this period, juxtaposing philosophical and literary conceptualizations of dance and exploring how they interacted with different areas of cultural expression.

In Conversation with Karen Barad: Doings of Agential Realism is an accessible introduction to Karen Barad's agential realist philosophy. The authors take on a unique approach to involve the readers in in/formal conversations between Karen, postgraduates, and researchers at a research event held in 2017 at Cape Town, South Africa.

Summary Colourful plant images are often taken as the icon of natural history illustration. However, so far, little attention has been paid to the question of how this beautiful colouring was achieved. At a case study of the eighteenth-century Nuremberg doctor and botanist, Christoph Jacob Trew, the process of how illustrations were hand-coloured, who was involved in this work, and how the colouring was supervised and evaluated is reconstructed, mostly based on Trew's correspondence with the engraver and publisher of his (...) books, Johann Jacob Haid in Augsburg. Furthermore, the question of standardizing colours, their uses and their recipes is discussed at two examples of the same time period: the colour charts of the Bauer brothers, arguably the most renowned botanical draughtsmen of the period, and the colour tables by the Regensburg naturalist, Jacob Christian Schaeffer. Hand-colouring botanical illustrations, it is argued, was far from a straightforward task but confronted botanists and their employees with a plethora of practical and methodological problems, to which different solutions were developed in the course of time. Analysing these problems and solutions reveals some new and interesting aspects of the practices of eighteenth-century botany and of the production of scientific illustrations in general. (shrink)

The book presents the outcomes of an innovative research programme in the history of science and implements a Text Act Theory which extends Speech Act Theory, in order to illustrate a new approach to texts and textual communicative acts. It examines assertives (absolute or conditional statements, forecasts, insurance, etc.), directives, declarations and enumerations, as well as different types of textual units allowing authors to perform these acts: algorithms, recipes, prescriptions, lexical templates for terminological studies and enumerative structures. The (...) class='Hi'>book relies on the study of a broad range of documents of the past dealing with various domains: mathematics, zoology, medicine, lexicography. The documents examined come from scholarly sources from different parts of the world, such as China, Europe, India, Mesopotamia and are written in a variety of European languages as well as Chinese, Cuneiform and Sanskrit. This approach proves fruitful in both history of science and Text Act Theory. (shrink)

Humboldts texttheoretischer Ansatz, dessen Einfluß auf die moderne (Text-)Linguistik größer ist als bisher wahrgenommen, wird im ersten Teil dieses Bandes erstmals zusammenhängend nachgewiesen.

The ArgumentTo highlight speculative trends specific to the mathematical tradition that developed in China, the paper analyzes an excerpt of a third-century commentary on a mathematical classic, which arguably contains a proof. The paper shows that the following three tasks cannot be dissociated one from the other: (1) to discuss how the ancient text should be read; (2) to describe the practice of mathematical proof to which this text bears witness; (3) to bring to light connections between philosophy and mathematics (...) that it demonstrates were established in China. To this end the paper defines its use of the word “proof” and outlines a program for an international history of mathematical proof. It describes the sense in which the text conveys a proof and shows how it simultaneously fulfills algorithmic ends, bringing to light a formal pattern that appears to be fundamental both for mathematics and for other domains of reality. The interest in transformations that mathematical writings demonstrate in China at that time seems to have been influenced by philosophical developments based onThe Book of Changes (Yi-jing), which the excerpt quotes. This quotation within a mathematical context makes it possible to suggest an interpretation for a rather difficult philosophical statement. (shrink)

Late Medieval and Early Modern Fight Books offers insights into the cultural and historical transmission and practices of martial arts, based on the corpus of the Fight Books (Fechtbücher) in 14th- to 17th-century Europe. The first part of the book deals with methodological and specific issues for the studies of this emerging interdisciplinary field of research. The second section offers an overview of the corpus based on geographical areas. The final part offers some relevant case studies. This is the (...) first book proposing a comprehensive state of research and an overview of Historical European Martial Arts Studies. One of its major strengths lies in its association of interdisciplinary scholars with practitioners of martial arts. Contributors are Sydney Anglo, Matthias Johannes Bauer, Eric Burkart, Marco Cavina, Franck Cinato, John Clements, Timothy Dawson, Olivier Dupuis, Bert Gevaert, Dierk Hagedorn, Daniel Jaquet, Rachel E. Kellet, Jens Peter Kleinau, Ken Mondschein, Reinier van Noort, B. Ann Tlusty, Manuel Valle Ortiz, Karin Verelst, and Paul Wagner. (shrink)