At the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, ageing was specifically a medical issue. Indeed, on the one hand, ageing is a normal process of living; on the other hand, old age often entails specific pathologies. Is it really possible to dissociate old age from pathology? If so, how can we think of old age and explain both the necessity and the normality of it? If not, what is the cause of this dysfunction? Modern medical controversies argue along the lines of the respective partisans of iatromecanism (Descartes), empirical medicine (Sydenham), and animist medicine (Stahl). Furthermore, it progressively appears that the issue of aging must also be addressed within the social field, where old age is affected by sanitary, economic, and strategic conditions. Indeed, doctors, economists, and philosophers (Graunt, Petty, Leibniz) even tried to assess old age quantitatively with new methods of arithmetic. Thus, in this paper, we want to draw what constitutes the systems of knowledge of old age as a medical category located at the borderlines between epistemological, practical, and social challenges.

By the year 1720, one could visit at least three large-scale wooden models of Solomon's Temple in the cities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Halle. For short periods of time, the Amsterdam and Hamburg Temple models were exhibited in London, where they attracted a great deal of attention. The Halle model, on the other hand, never moved from its original location: a complex of schools known today as the Francke Foundations (die Franckesche Stiftungen). This article explores the reasons for the Halle model's striking immobility by considering its position at the center of a long-distance network, also referred to as the Danish-Halle mission. In this article I argue that the Halle Temple model functioned as an effigy and memory theater that helped proponents of this mission make a case for the Temple's status as the world's first information technology. Young people moved around the wooden model; they took virtual pilgrimages with it and internalized its infrastructure by memorizing its various components. The model's position at the center of the complex's striking ethnographical collection and curricula exposes relations between the Danish-Halle mission, Christian philosophy, and an irenical turn as public policy in early eighteenth-century Brandenburg-Prussia.

This article argues that during the seventeenth century chemistry achieved intellectual and institutional recognition, starting its transition from a practical art – subordinated to medicine – into an independent discipline. This process was by no means a smooth one, as it took place amidst polemics and conflicts lasting more than a century. It began when Andreas Libavius endeavored to turn chemistry into a teaching discipline, imposing method and order. Chemistry underwent harsh criticism from Descartes and the Cartesians, who reduced natural phenomena to the mechanical affections of matter, leaving little room for chemistry as an independent discipline. Boyle rejected the chemical principles and promoted the fusion of chemistry with corpuscularianism. He did not reduce chemical phenomena to the mechanical affections of matter, but strived to promote chemistry as part of natural philosophy. Lemery gave strong impulse to the recognition of chemistry as a discipline in its own right by fostering a compromise of chemistry and mechanism. Lemery adopted the chemical principles, but did not see them as the ultimate ingredients of bodies. In order to promote chemistry, he distanced it from alchemy and pursued the reform of chemical terminology.

Talk of “reason” and “rationality” has been perennial in the philosophy and sciences of the European, Latin tradition since antiquity. But the use of these terms in the early-modern period has left especial marks on the specialties and disciplines that emerged as components of “science” in the modern world. By examining discussions by seventeenth-century philosophers, including natural philosophers such as Descartes, Pascal, and Hobbes, the practical meanings of, specifically, inferential reasoning can be seen as reducing, for most, to intellectual processes deriving from foundations that required intuitional insight that was owing to God. Mechanical reasoning, or artificial intelligence, was a contradiction in terms for such as Pascal, whose views of his own arithmetical machine illustrate the issue well. Hobbes’ analysis of reason, however, replaced the ineffable authority of God with the authority of the civil power, to reveal the social reality of “reason” as nothing other than authorized judgment.

Contrary to common portrayals of social Darwinism as a transference of laissez-faire values, the widely read evolutionism of Japan's foremost Darwinist of the early twentieth-century, Oka Asajirō (1868–1944), reflects a statist outlook that regards capitalism as the beginning of the nation's degeneration. The evolutionary theory of orthogenesis that Oka employed in his 1910 essay, “The Future of Humankind,” links him to a pre-Darwinian idealist tradition that depicted the state as an organism that develops through life-cycle stages. For Oka, laissez-faire capitalism marked the moment when the state began to decline toward extinction due to the orthogenetic overdevelopment of hitherto subordinate individual egos. Because conservative bureaucrat-intellectuals had been drawing upon this same organicist-developmental tradition since the 1880s in an attempt to forestall the social ills of industrialism, Oka's call for statist measures, including eugenics, to lessen and delay the atomizing, enervating, and corrupting influence of capitalism articulated the political vision of officialdom. Statist evolutionism, not social Darwinism, might be the term that best describes Oka's approach.