Argument

Empirical knowledge concerning nonhuman animals is essential for any ethical inquiry of interspecific relations: knowledge of the animals' traits, of their experience under human control, and of the characteristics of that control. Yet such knowledge is persistently insufficient in ethical inquiries, as a result of the power gap between nonhuman animals and humans, the exploitation of many animals, and the deep bias that unavoidably marks this reality. Scientific records are the major source of information about most animals, yet science is unsatisfactory as a sole source of morally relevant knowledge, and scientific approaches to nonhuman animals tend to be especially inadequate. Hence seeking knowledge concerning nonhuman animals' interests should be acknowledged as the primary and most important task of any interspecific ethical quest. However, scientific data should be subjected to moral scrutiny, acknowledging the effect of human/nonhuman relations on knowledge, while constantly looking for alternative methods of acquiring knowledge, based on empathic familiarity.

In the Almagest, Ptolemy finds that the apogee of Mercury moves progressively at a speed equal to his value for the rate of precession, namely one degree per century, in the tropical reference system of the ecliptic coordinates. He generalizes this to the other planets, so that the motions of the apogees of all five planets are assumed to be equal, while the solar apsidal line is taken to be fixed. In medieval Islamic astronomy, one change in this general proposition took place because of the discovery of the motion of the solar apogee in the ninth century, which gave rise to lengthy discussions on the speed of its motion. Initially Bīrūnī and later Ibn al-Zarqālluh assigned a proper motion to it, although at different rates. Nevertheless, appealing to the Ptolemaic generalization and interpreting it as a methodological axiom, the dominant idea became to extend it in order to include the motion of the solar apogee as well. Another change occurred after correctly making a distinction between the motion of the apogees and the rate of precession. Some Western Islamic astronomers generalized Ibn al-Zarqālluh's proper motion of the solar apogee to the apogees of the planets. Analogously, Ibn al-Shāṭir maintained that the motion of the apogees is faster than precession. Nevertheless, the Ptolemaic generalization in the case of the equality of the motions of the apogees remained untouchable, despite the notable development of planetary astronomy, in both theoretical and observational aspects, in the late Islamic period.

This paper analyzes the research strategies of three different cases in the study of human genetics in Mexico – the work of Rubén Lisker in the 1960s, INMEGEN's mapping of Mexican genomic diversity between 2004 and 2009, and the analysis of Native American variation by Andrés Moreno and his colleagues in contemporary research. We make a distinction between an approach that incorporates multiple disciplinary resources into sampling design and interpretation (unpacking), from one that privileges pragmatic considerations over more robust multidisciplinary analysis (flattening). These choices have consequences for social, demographic, and biomedical practices, and also for accounts of genetic variation in human populations. While the former strategy unpacks fine-grained genetic variation – favoring precision and realism, the latter tends to flatten individual differences and historical depth in lieu of generalization.

In 1922 the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) Council approved a motion to send an invitation to Albert Einstein to visit Argentina and give a course of lectures on his theory of relativity. The motion was proposed by Jorge Duclout (1856–1927), who had been educated at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich (ETH). This proposal was the culmination of a series of initiatives of various Argentine intellectuals interested in the theory of relativity. In a very short time Dr. Mauricio Nirenstein (1877–1935), then the university's administrative secretary, fulfilled all the requirements for the university's invitation to be endorsed and delivered to the sage in Berlin. The visit took place three years later, in March–April 1925.

The present paper is an attempt to understand how medieval astronomers working within the Ptolemaic astronomical context in which the annular eclipse is an unjustified and impossible phenomenon, could know, define, justify, and later make attempts that led to success in predicting annular solar eclipses. As a context-based study, it reviews the situation of annular eclipses with regard to the medieval hypotheses applied to the calculation of the angular diameters of the sun and the moon, which was basic for contemplating the possibility of annular eclipses. This gives the premises and the preliminary insights that were necessary to clarify the complex situation of the annular eclipse in the late medieval Islamic period and to explain the historical mechanisms leading to justifying the phenomenon during that period. This was, first due to a convincing and efficient observational evidence which, of course, was available only to a number of medieval astronomers and significantly for only a limited time period, and, second, the result of an amazing interaction amongst various astronomical traditions available to them. At a more general level, the research aims to inspect or, at least, to give some impressions of the essential conditions, i.e., identification of phenomenon, empirical evidence, and the justifying underlying tradition, under which it became possible in the tradition-based science of the `medieval period to permit a not-already-defined and tradition-opposed phenomenon to be posed and justified.

The question posed by this paper is why the Russian autocracy failed to pursue successfully Peter the Great's conscious policy of creating a society dominated by technique and competitive with technological levels achieved by Western Europe. The brief answer is that Peter's idea of a cultural revolution that would create new values and institutions hospitable to the introduction of technology clashed with powerful interests within society. The political opposition centered around three groups which were indispensable to the state in fulfilling his vision: the nobility, the clergy, and the scientific establishment. Peter's original intention was to combine theoretical models and technology transfer from the West with educational reforms in Russia to produce new cadres of technical specialists. He attempted to adapt the Leibniz-Wolff cosmology to Russian conditions in order to reconcile ideological conflicts between military service and technical training, science and religion, theory and practice. The embodiment of his ideas in Russian science and religion were Mikhail Lomonosov and Feofan Prokopovich. Under his successors Peter's supporters encountered increased resistance: from the nobility to technical education, from the clergy to the scientific outlook, and from the Academy of Sciences to practical work. All three interest groups were willing to sacrifice real political rights for a recognition by the states of their autonomy to define their social roles. In the end the compromise was effected at the expense of Peter's ideal of the society dominated by technique.

In spite of Koyré's conclusions, there are sufficient reasons to claim that Galileo, and with him the beginnings of classical mechanics in early modern times, was closely related to practical mechanics. It is, however, not completely clear how, and to what extent, practitioners and engineers could have had a part in shaping the modern sciences. By comparing the beginnings of modern dynamics with the beginnings of statics in Antiquity, and in particular with Archimedes — whose rediscovery in the sixteenth century was of great consequence — I will focus on the question of which devices played a comparable role in dynamics to that of the lever and balance in statics. I will also examine where these devices came from. In this way, I will show that the entire world of mechanics of that time — “high” and “low,” practical and theoretical — was of significance for shaping classical mechanics and that a specific relationship between art and science was and is constitutive for modern sciences.

The deficit model of science communication assumes that the creation and dissemination of knowledge is limited to researchers with formal credentials. Recent challenges to this model have emerged among “e-patients” who develop extensive online activist communities, demand access to their own health data, conduct crowd-sourced experiments, and “hack” health problems that traditional medical experts have failed to solve. This article explores the aesthetics of medical media that enact the transition from a deficit model to a patient-driven model of visual representation and health communication. I present a framework for understanding the role of film and video in patient movements by analyzing the historical transition from researchers filming patients as nameless, voiceless human research subjects to patients recording their own health narratives through activist cinematography. By comparing several approaches to patient-centered video, I argue that imperfect production aesthetics play a critically important role in establishing the credibility of health communications.

Standards of botanical practice in Sweden between 1850 and 1950 were set, not only in schools and universities, but also in naturalist societies and botanical exchange clubs, and were articulated in handbooks and manuals produced for schoolboys. These standards were maintained among volunteer naturalists in the environmental movement in the 1970s, long after the decline and disappearance of collecting from the curriculum. School science provides a link between the laboratory, the classroom, and the norms and practices of everyday life: between the various “insides” and “outsides” of educational and research settings.

Historians have claimed that the two closely related concepts of animism and natural teleology were both decisively rejected in the Scientific Revolution. They tout Robert Boyle as an early modern warden against pre-modern animism. Discussing Avicenna, Aquinas, and Buridan, as well as Renaissance psychology, I instead suggest that teleology went through a slow and uneven process of rationalization. As Neoplatonic theology gained influence over Aristotelian natural philosophy, the meaning of animism likewise grew obscure. Boyle, as some historians have shown, exemplifies this uneven process. There is an unresolved tension between his religious convictions and the implicit animism of his empirical practice.

Argument

Changing conceptions of science at the beginning of the twentieth century questioned the link between science and secularism, thus contributing to the development of a process of desecularization.

Science was no longer viewed as automatically relating truth to reality. This development was in part a consequence of the influence of mathematics on conceptions of science. The mathematical “existence” of true yet “non-existent” worlds permitted the inference that the connection between the true and the real is contingent. Alongside this problematization of science's link to nature there also developed a quite different critique of the cultural effects of science, which viewed science as being some kind of threat to human capacities for decoding the self or the social environment. Vis-à-vis both nature and culture, science could no longer serve as the basis for a program of secularization.

One motive for the cultural significance of the non-rational has been the perceived lack of identity between consciousness and rationality. But the equivalence between consciousness and rationality was the essence of the project of modernity. Their perceived non-equivalence made modern secularism untenable.

Ludwik Antoni Birkenmajer (1855-1929), following along the paths pioneered by Leopold Prowe, Maximilian Curtze, Franz Hipler, and J. L. E. Dreyer, joined them as trailblazers of Copernican scholarship in the nineteenth century. Educated in the classics and mathematics, Birkenmajer began by examining more closely the Cracow background to Copernicus's development and studying his works and annotations in books he owned or read. Birkenmajer contributed many discoveries that eventually became common knowledge, and his studies loomed over Polish research on Copernicus into the 1970s. Focusing on historical context and his original insights, the essay reminds readers of his contributions (sections 1–2), relates them to discussions of Copernicus's precursors (section 3), to the debate about Maragha precedents (section 4), his reading of the Uppsala Notebook (sections 2 and 5), and his account of the origin of Copernicus's heliocentrism (section 6). By means of a more critical assessment of his interpretation, the essay revises earlier accounts, rescuing the original insights that mark Birkenmajer's most important contributions to current debates and his efforts to reconstruct Copernicus's path to heliocentrism.

In the 1970s a public controversy erupted over the proposed use of brain operations to curtail violent behavior. Civil libertarians, civil rights and community activists, leaders of the anti-psychiatry movement, and some U.S. Congressmen charged psychosurgeons and the National Institute of Mental Health, with furthering a political project: the suppression of dissent. Several government-sponsored investigations into psychosurgery rebutted this charge and led to an official qualified endorsement of the practice while calling attention to the need for more “scientific” understanding and better ethical safeguards. This paper argues that the psychosurgery debate of the 1970s was more than a power struggle between members of the public and the psychiatric establishment. The debate represented a clash between a postmodern skepticism about science and renewed focus on ultimate ends, on the one hand, and a modern faith in standards and procedures, a preoccupation with means, on the other. These diverging commitments made the dispute ultimately irresolvable.

Among the many limitations of the deficit model of science communication is its inability to account for the qualities of communication products that arise from creative decisions about form and style. This paper examines two documentaries about the nature of time – Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light and the first episode of the BBC's Wonders of the Universe series – in order to consider how film style inflects science with different meanings. The analysis pays particular attention to the ways in which authority is assigned between film author, narrator, and depicted subjects and the degree to which different film styles promote epistemological certainty or hesitancy.

The use of diagrams is pervasive in theoretical physics. Together with mathematical formulae and natural language, diagrams play a major role in theoretical modeling. They enrich the expressive power of physicists and help them to explore new theoretical ideas. Diagrams are not only heuristic or pedagogical tools, but they are also tools that enable developing the content of models into novel implications.

Space projects represent, after World War II, the archetype of large-scale organization of scientific practices that are flexible, temporary, and oriented towards specific goals. A new form of activity, the project, emerged through the management of technical means, allocation of skills, and coordination of various players. Project management emerged as the synthesis of a set of social practices designed to subordinate as well as synchronize the initiatives of researchers, engineers, and technicians who had temporarily joined forces. This article presents the genesis and deployment of the Franco-Soviet space program ARCAD 3 whose purpose was to study the magnetosphere with a satellite. This study is situated at the junction of three historiographical dimensions: scientific writings, links between action and graphic forms, and Big Science. The diagrams, organization charts and schedules produced by the French space agency throughout the entire project form the documentary substrata of this analysis. These graphic management tools define the role of each player, designate fields of competence, and specify the temporality of actions. A self-monitoring system as well as surveillance instrument, diagrams, organization charts and schedules are linked to form a certain vision of authority along the lines of the “neoliberal governmentality” defined by Michel Foucault. By defining in advance and in writing all the possible (or impossible) relationships, the chronological order of activities as well as the actions to be performed, graphic project management tools contribute to the transfer of coercive panoptic mechanisms towards a minimal organization of relationships between individuals.

Many inventors, engineers, and scientists think in verbal images. Elmer Sperry (1860–1930), a noted American inventor, was able to “operate” in his mind's eye the machines he was developing. For inventors, engineers, and experimental scientists, visualization is often followed by construction of a physical model of the invention, which can be an experimental apparatus. The model, or apparatus, is then tested in increasingly complex environments and changes are made in the physical artifact until it is ready to be used. Examples of this process of development are Sperry's development of a ship stabilizer for the U.S. Navy and a revolving mirror to be used by Albert Michelson in the determination of the speed of light. Thomas Edison called experimentation his development of an invention through the building and testing of a series of models. So, both scientists and inventors experiment. They are not discovering the “secrets of nature”: they are observing how artifacts – their physical creations – behave. These physical models of thought reflect the characteristics of the tools with which they were made. They are socially constructed, as well.

When the Association of German Scientists and Physicians last met in Düsseldorf exactly twenty-eight years ago on September 24, a debate took place following lectures by Felix Klein and Alfred Pringsheim on roughly the same topic to which I would like to direct your attention today. The printed report of the Düsseldorf debate only remarked that, “It is not possible to go into details here,” so one can only guess how two of the most powerful teacher personalities among German mathematicians of that time had confronted one another with their diametrically opposed views on this topic and how they did so with their characteristically lively spirit.

The sixteenth-century physician and philosopher Julius Caesar Scaliger suggests that in particular cases plants can come into being that belong to a plant species that did not exist before. At the same time, he holds that God could not have created a more perfect world. However, does the occurrence of new species not imply that the world was not the best possible world from the beginning? In this article, I explore a set of metaphysical ideas that could provide Scaliger with the means of solving this problem: (1) His version of the notion of a plurality of substantial forms in every living being, and (2) his version of the notion of the ordained divine power. As it turns out, Scaliger analyzes the generation of new species in terms of a development of subordinate substantial forms into dominant substantial forms. Thereby, previously existing essences of plant parts become essences of plants. These plants, thus, possess essences that no previously existing plant possessed and, in this sense, belong to a new species. In this way, Scaliger avoids positing the occurrence of new essences, thus saving the best possible world thesis. Moreover, he believes that all substantial forms stand in a relationship of mutual existential dependence by means of which God safeguards the persistence and unity of the world. This is why the agency of subordinate forms turned dominant can be understood as an expression of the ordained power of God.