Argument

This paper argues for two claims. (1) In his biological views, Kenelm Digby tries to reconcile aspects of an Aristotelian theory of composite substance with early modern corpuscularianism. (2) From a methodological point of view, he uses the Stoic-Epicurean epistemology of common notions in order to show the adequacy of his conciliatory approach. The first claim is substantiated by an analysis of Digby's views on the role of mixture and homogeneity in the process of animal generation. The second claim is substantiated by an analysis of Digby's views on the role of the concept of quantity in the evaluation of scientific hypotheses. Both arguments make use of the context of Digby's philosophy: the first argument draws on his background in the work of early modern corpuscularian Aristotelians such as Daniel Sennert; the second argument draws on his background in the epistemology of Pierre Gassendi.

Argument

In 1945 Vannevar Bush proposed a machine that acted as a “supplement” to memory and met the particular information needs of its user. Because this “memex” recorded “trails” of selected documents, it has been seen as a precursor to hypertext. However, this paper considers Bush in relation to earlier concerns about memory and information, via the ideas of Robert Hooke and John Locke. Whereas Bush modeled the memex on the associative processes of natural memory, Hooke and Locke concluded that an external archive had to allow collective reason to overcome the limits of individual memory, including its tendency to freeze and repeat patterns of ideas. Moreover, they envisaged an institutional archive rather than one controlled by the interests and mental associations of an individual. From this early modern perspective, Bush's memex appears as a personal device for managing information that incorporates assumptions inimical to the strategies required for scientific analysis.

Argument

Both the British naturalist Charles Darwin and the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz attempted explanations of the origin of variation: the former of the biological kind, the latter of the cultural kind. In so doing, both made claims that outstripped the evidence they possessed. But, in retrospect, in light of the history of the Nature versus Nurture debate, they nevertheless seem prescient, thereby possessing a kind of scientific “intuition.” By looking closely at these two intuitions, historically divided, but united by the concept of “variation,” this article argues that it is not always a “bad” thing to be either unaware or ignorant, that truths need not necessarily lead to other truths, and that one form of knowledge may be relevant to another, even when the second form is not consciously understood.

Argument

A central thesis of the cell theory of biological organization is that plant and animal cells are, to some degree, autonomous vital units. Just how much autonomy cells possess was a matter of serious debate in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. The idea of cell autonomy was most strikingly expressed in the “theory of the cell state,” an idea based upon the metaphorical conception of higher plants and animals as social colonies of cells or elementary organisms, commonly associated with Rudolf Virchow and Ernst Haeckel. This paper explores the question of cell autonomy as it was debated within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century embryology, cytology, and physiology. While greater evidence for cell autonomy emerged from tissue culture experiments, there arose, almost simultaneously, a tendency within physiology and biochemical studies to conceive of the cell metaphorically as a chemical factory and as a subordinate part of a larger organismal whole. I argue that while these metaphors suggested conflicting views of cell autonomy, they were highly effective devices for explaining and investigating within their respective fields: the autonomous cell-organism in embryology and morphology, the subordinate cell-factory in physiology and biochemistry.

Argument

This article focuses on the scientific practice of a specific class of models in neuroscience and biology that approach biological systems as computational or information processing systems. This specific approach to biological systems has a long tradition that started with the information discourse in the 1940s. Borrowing concepts, methods, and techniques from cybernetics, information theory, and physics, these models are situated at the interface of different scientific disciplines. This article examines in detail the Hopfield model, a model of the specific brain function of auto-associative memory that is situated at the interface of neuroscience, theoretical physics, and engineering. By drawing analogies to a model of disordered magnetic systems in physics, John Hopfield constructed a model that was able to mimic auto-associative memory. The model became an active field of research in theoretical physics and in engineering but not in neuroscience. According to neuroscientists, in the process of construction the model had lost touch with the biological system and the function that it was supposed to model. How did this happen? As will be shown, the process of constructing the model was guided by conceptualizing the biological organism as a computational, information-processing device. This construction process gained its own momentum that involved an interrelated development of a computational concept and a redescription of the biological system or phenomenon for bringing the computational concept to work. We will see how physicists and engineers tried to get models in touch with biological systems by constructing “a synthetic model.”

Argument

We present, and place in its context, a previously unpublished paper by Nicholas (Nils) Collin, one of the eighteenth-century pioneers of the American Philosophical Society. Collin may have been one of the first to bring eighteenth-century advances in probability theory to the United States at the very time that applied probability was gaining importance in the design of constitutions and in the design of annuities. Specifically, Collin transmitted at least some of the revolutionary social mathematics of Condorcet to the Society and therefore into American intellectual life.