In writing the history of science, the fluctuations between two meanings of the concept of style are of special interest: a simple or direct meaning of this concept referring to a means of expression and of presentation, and a philosophical interpretation of this term referring to “a world of objective spiritual order.” The last two chapters of this paper consider the perspective of the simple meaning of the concept, the first two chapters take the philosophical meaning as their starting point.

The concept of style in its general epistemological meaning emerges within a conceptual space that becomes effective as a totality at the end of the eighteenth century and which is built up of further notions such as: individual, genius, expression, symbol, education, creativity, and others.

The individual and, as believed, the nevertheless infinitely creative subject has taken the place that the concept of god had occupied within rationalism. But it is not only the subject as construction and will, but also the subject who reflected in a new way about the objective foundations of his conscience and tried to bring the object and the means of knowledge into a new relation.

A generation ago scientific ideas floated free in the air, as historians gazed up at them in wonder and admiration. From time to time, historians agreed, the ideas that made up the body of scientific truth became incarnate: they were embedded into the fleshly forms of human culture and attached to particular times and places. How this incarnation occurred was a great mystery. How could spirit be made flesh? How did the transcendent and the timeless enter the forms of the mundane and the contingent? Platonist and providentialist perspectives offered ways of speaking about the mystery, but, in general, it remained unresolved at the core of orthodox idealist historiography.1

Visible colleges, in contrast to the “invisible colleges” familiar to historians of science, are the collective places of science, the places where the “creation of phenomena” and theoretical speculation proceed side by side. To understand their spatial form, we must understand first how buildings can structure space to both conserve and generate social forms, depending on how they relate structure in space to randomness. Randomness is shown to play a crucial role in morphogenetic models of many kinds, especially in spatial forms and in social networks. We argue here that it can also play a crucial role in the advance of science.

The paper argues for the restricted viability of the concept of style in the history of science. Since historians of science borrow this term from art history or the sociology of knowledge, the paper outlines its emergence and function in these disciplines, in order to show that the need for ever subtler stylistic distinctions in historical description inevitably leads to the dissolution of the concept of style itself.

“Style” will be defined in predominantly cognitive or technical terms when imputed to an individual; in social or moral terms when thought to be carried by some collective entity. Both descriptions are given normative interpretations. A good individual style, then, is regarded as the pledge for valid knowledge or insights of a “higher order,” while a collective style, understood as the vehicle of successful intra group communication, involves the acceptance of certain rhetorical norms and/or socially shared values that are supposed to structure that style. “National styles” belong to the latter category; the emergence of this dubious notion can best be explained in sociological terms.

If historians of science insist on adopting the concept of style, they will have to agree on its meaning. The paper concludes, therefore, with a rough typology of its most frequent meanings and uses.

In this paper, the perception of mathematics by a nonspecialist, the Romantic poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), is investigated. The study is intended to contribute to a better understanding of the interactions between mathematics and the surrounding scientific culture in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. In regard to the problem how the cultural reception of a theory can influence its conceptual development, I argue that the reaction of nonspecialists can be imagined as a sort of resonating body. Some aspects of a theory are stressed, others are ignored or even suppressed. In this way the value system of a theory and thereby the choice of problems and the style of argumentation can be influenced by groups of people who are not active scientists. In fact, the case at hand shows that a change of values has taken place. The original aim of the combinatorial school, whose mathematics Novalis studied, was the mechanization of symbolical calculations. But later, presumably under the influence of the general cultural climate in Germany, this same mathematics was interpreted as furthering — in modern words — a study of abstract structures.

There can be no doubt about the moral and epistemological significance of what Shapin (1988) calls the “physical place” of the scientific laboratory. The physical place is defined by the locales, barriers, ports of entry, and lines of sight that bound the laboratory and separate it from other urban and architectural environments. Shapin's discussion of the emergence of the scientific laboratory in seventeenth-century England provides a convincing demonstration that credible knowledge is situated at an intersection between physical locales and social distinctions. In this paper I take up Shapin's theme of the “siting of knowledge production,” but I give it a different treatment – one based on ethnomethodological studies of work (Garfinkel 1986; Garfinkel et al. 1981; Garfinkel et al. 1989; Livingston 1986; Liberman 1985; Lynch 1985a; Lynch et al. 1983; Bjelic and Lynch forthcoming; Morrison 1990; MacBeth 1989). Without denying all that can be witnessed in the spectacle of the scientist at the bench and of the architectural habitat of the bench, I argue that the “place” of scientific work is defined by locally organized topical contextures. The paper describes two examples of such spatial orders – “opticism” and “digitality” – associated with distinct complexes of equipment and practice. These topical spaces might initially be viewed as “ideal” or “symbolic” spaces, but I argue that they are no less material (and no less social) than the “physical setting” of the laboratory; indeed, they are the physical setting.

It has long been apparent that in the nineteenth century, mathematics in France and England developed along different lines. The differences, which might well be labelled stylistic, are most easy to see on the foundational level. At first this may seem surprising because it is such a fundamental area, but, upon reflection, it is to be expected. Ultimately discussions about the foundations of mathematics turn on views about what mathematics is, and this is a question which is answered by a variety of different groups including mathematicians, students, curricular planners, parents, etc. Mathematical practice rests on some kind of mixture of the answers to this fundamental question which come from these diverse groups. Comparing the cultural matrices which supported mathematics in France and Britain in the first decades of the nineteenth century sheds light on the real though often subtle differences in the ways the subject was pursued in the two countries.

Stylistic analysis of an admittedly speculative scientific article can suggest what is involved in the social act of speculation. Walter Gilbert's influential paper “Why Genes in Pieces?” serves as an example of the conflicting demands of the need to display politeness and the need to display the urgency and excitement of the issues. Socially significant stylistic features emerge in comparison with another paper Gilbert co-authored, where the speculations occur in the discussion section of an experimental report, and in comparison with another, more typical “News and Views” article by another author. The stylistic features include the use of impersonal subjects, the hedging of verbs, the unusual uses of the present tense, and the reliance on repetition, rather than conjunctions or pronouns, for textual cohesion. Later references to the article assimilate it to various lines of research without suggesting its speculative style.

Emergency medicine, a new medical specialty in the United States, is an ethical practice that has developed through its interaction with the spaces in which it is situated. We discuss this claim in two steps followed by a demonstration. First we examine the historical evolution of the hospital, to provide the background for a lengthier account of the historical transformation of the emergency room. We then introduce Foucault's approach to ethics, to explain the sense in which emergency medicine is an ethical practice constituted, in part, by its space(s) of operation. The preliminaries of the application of our historico-ethical framework to emergency medicine, are presented, focusing on cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Our intention is to provide a framework for the newest clinical specialty as an ethical practice in order to understand how to individuate its emerging ethical problems. The emphasis on space throughout enables us to integrate the historical development of emergency medicine with its present concrete setting, and to establish a basis for analyzing emergency medicine that does not rely uncritically on either a preferred ethical perspective or the perspective of its practitioners.

It is often observed by historians of postwar American art that painters and sculptors of the 1960s sought a more mechanized “look” for their art. I argue that the changes reflected in the art have their source in a deeper shift – a shift at the level of production, expressed in new studio practices as well as in the space of the artworks themselves.

In the period immediately before, during, and after World War II, the dominant topos of the American artist was that of a solitary (male) genius, alone in his studio, sole witness to the miraculous creation of his art. I demonstrate that artists of the 1960s, against this backdrop of heroic modernism, engaged in a different rhetoric and practice, one based on the models of industry and business. The studio of Andy Warhol, named the “Factory,” is viewed as apodictic of this great change, with its rudimentary assembly line and highly social mode of production.

The change in practice instantiated in Warhol's Factory is significant in and of itself, but I argue further that it expressed itself in the “place of knowledge” – the space within (or in front of) Warhol's paintings and objects, and the newly social space in which they signify. The context for that signification thus becomes crucial to our understanding of the “Warhol phenomenon” celebrated in popular and arthistorical texts. The ambivalencies embedded in Warhol's Factory, where the artist's role oscillated between manager and proletarian worker, are seen as a function of their context. Conflicting signals are also broadcast by the works of art, which speak in the dialect of mass production with the accent of the irreplaceably unique.

Over the years national styles have been invoked or denigrated in the writing of the history of science. This paper is an attempt to give the concept of national style a degree of precision and clarity enabling scholars to understand when and how it may be invoked and when and how its use would be dubious or even forbidden. The example of the United States of America is used because the history of the sciences in the United States was often written loosely in terms supposedly conducive to national style analyses. We first discuss the problem of commonalities, factors widely present within all countries in the Western tradition, which, by definition, cannot be exclusive national attributes. Here the problem is to somehow determine whether the supposed national style attribute is a case of a significantly different degree of intensity than some presumed norm in the Western tradition.

The principal thesis advanced is that pre-existing historiographic assumptions largely determine whether or not a scholar finds or does not find a national style. This is discussed in terms of some examples for the U.S. case. More particularly, a number of examples are discussed from the three principal genres or schools in current writing in the history of science: the knowledge-centered; the doing-science; and the context-oriented. Based on the analysis of the examples, an attempt is made to sketch an approach to a more rigorous use of the concept of national style.

The Republic of Letters of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries teaches us two lessons about style in science. First, the bearer of style—individual, nation, institution, religious group, region, class—depends crucially on historical context. When the organization and values of intellectual life are self-consciously cosmopolitan, and when allegiances to other entities (e.g., Protestant versus Catholic, or urban versus rural) are culturally more compelling than those to the nation-state, distinctively national styles are far to seek. This was largely the case for the Republic of Letters, that immaterial (it lacked location, formal administration, and brick and mortar) but nonetheless real (it exercised dominion over thoughts and deeds) realm among the sovereign states of the Enlightenment. Second, that form of objectivity which made science seem so curiously detached from scientists, and therefore so apparently unmarked by style at any level, also has a history. The unremitting emphasis on impartial criticism and evaluation within the Republic of Letters encouraged its citizens to distance themselves first from friends and family, then from compatriots and contemporaries, and finally, in the early nineteenth century, from themselves as well. Although this psychological process of estrangement and ultimately of self-estrangement may seldom have been completely realized, the striving was genuine and constitutes part of the moral history of objectivity.

Few spaces have been given such great importance as national space. It is often seen as the fulfillment of a predestination–simultaneously geographical, political, ethnic, and functional – granted affirmation by history. This being especially true for the French territory with its ancient history.

This paper takes a different approach as regards the establishment of knowledge concerning the national territory. Looking at two of the many ways of knowing the territory–proto-statistics and the map–it aims at showing that the acquisition of this knowledge is a discontinuous, partly cumulative process, with social, political, and cognitive rationales, which were heterogeneous and even contradictory for a long period of time.

I argue here that in its historical development, sexology developed differently in France than elsewhere in Europe. Though I concur that the modern notion of “sexuality” arose some time in the last half of the nineteenth century, the older notion of ”sex” persisted in French science and medicine for a far longer time than elsewhere because of a fear that nonreproductive sexual behavior would deepen the country's population crisis. I argue that the scientific and medical concepts of the sexual perversions, particularly homosexuality, were considered by French sexologists to be abnormal deviations from heterosexuality, whereas some English, German, and Austrian sexologists — including Freud — viewed the perversions more tolerantly as natural variations of the norm. I also address here the inadequacies of historical accounts of these developments that favor discursive ruptures in the Foucauldian manner, and stress the advantages of social history and causal historical explanation.

Montaigne's Essays were an exercise in self-knowledge carried out for more than twenty years in Montaigne's private library located in his mansion near Bordeaux. The library was a place of solitude as well as a place of knowledge, a kind of heterotopia in which two sets of spatial relations coexisted and interacted: the social and the epistemic. The spatial demarcation and arrangement of the site – in both the physical and the symbolic sense – were necessary elements of the constitution of Montaigne's self as an object of knowledge and as a subject of discourse. The spatial setting of the library made possible and constrained certain discursive patterns through which words were systematically linked to things, authority was correlated with access and visibility, and the epistemological was coordinated with the social. In this sense, Montaigne's library resembled other places of empirical knowledge of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (e.g., early laboratories or observatories) in which subjects of knowledge were constituted, objects were posited in their proper phenomenal fields and the entire structure of intellectual activity was reproduced through various cultural mechanisms. But the initial similarity is only apparent. The private library never became a culturally recognized place for knowledge of the self; its heterotopic structure could not have been reproduced without the concrete presence of an author and of a self, while Montaigne's skepticism systematically undermined the possibility of the author's position and of the identity of the self.

This paper argues that different epistemic styles exist in science, and that these make up an important unit of analysis for studying science. On occasion these different sets of commitments to ways of doing and knowing about the world may fall along national boundaries. The case presented here examines German and American embryology around 1900 and shows that differences in goals and approaches make up different epistemic styles.

In particular, the Germans sought causal mechanical explanations of as many phenomena as possible, guided by strong theories which achieved confirmation when they fit with as much of the available data as possible. The Americans, in contrast, sought definitive facts, as many as possible, which might be quite specific or narrowly based. These facts could lead to empirical generalizations which, in turn, could guide the generation of new knowledge in the form of new facts. Thus, the two epistemic styles emphasized different goals, processes of investigation, and standards of evidence.

This paper is concerned with “holism” as a German cultural “style” of doing psychobiology in Central Europe between the two world wars. The paper takes its starting point from a critical analysis of Forman's writings on nationalism versus internationalism in interwar German science, and the alleged “accommodation” of interwar German physics to an antiscientific, irrationalist culture. The paper argues that psychobiological holism was not just a reaction against nineteenth-century atomistic or mechanistic approaches to modeling life and mind; it also represented a domestically directed answer from within the German biomedical scientific community to broad religious and cultural “disenchantment.” As such, holistic psychobiology emerges as a phenomenon that challenges us with at least four levels of discourse: (1) experimental/clinical, (2) epistemological/philosophical, (3) existential/religious, and (4) ideological/political. The paper defends the methodological appropriateness of a collective case-study approach to the problem of holism as a multilevel discourse. It concludes by offering a preliminary contextualized analysis of the thought of three representative holistic leaders of the time: behavioral biologist and ethologist Jakob von Uexküll; clinical neurologist Constantin von Monakow; and neuropsychiatrist Kurt Goldstein.

It is not easy to point to the place of knowledge in our culture. More precisely, it is difficult to locate the production of our most valued forms of knowledge, including those of religion, literature and science. A pervasive topos in Western culture, from the Greeks onward, stipulates that the most authentic intellectual agents are the most solitary. The place of knowledge is nowhere in particular and anywhere at all. I sketch some uses of the theme of the solitary philosopher across a broad sweep of history, giving particular attention to its deployment in and around the scientific culture of seventeenth-century England. I argue that the rhetoric of solitude is strongly implicated in individualistic views of society and empiricist portrayals of scientific knowledge. Solitude is a state that symbolically expresses direct engagement with the sources of knowledge – divine and transcendent or natural and empirical. At the same time, solitude publicly expresses disengagement from society, identified as a set of conventions and concerns which act to corrupt knowledge. Hence, the study of the social uses of solitude adds further support to the notion that problems of knowledge and problems of social order are solved together.