Argument

The term “universal” is ambiguous; it can indicate either what actually exists in several instances, or what can so exist, even if it is actually exemplified in only one instance. The former sense implies the latter, but not vice versa. It is suggested that form for Aristotle is universal in the latter sense, including what is part of the nature of a species but not individual accidents due to the matter, and that this may help to explain a problematic passage in Metaphysics Z 15. Analysis of passages in Metaphysics Z 8 may however suggest that form as universal in the former sense exists only as a potentiality. The claim that form includes only specific, not individual features has implications for Aristotle's theory of heredity; more generally, his theory of form reflects the tensions between Platonist and non-Platonist elements in his thought and his methods of enquiry.

Argument

This paper examines the role of metaphors in science on the basis of a historical case study. The study explores how metaphors of “genetic information,” “genetic code,” and scripture representations of heredity (i.e. the metaphorical comparison of DNA with text and alphabet) entered molecular biology and reshaped experimentation during the 1950s and 1960s. Following the approach of the philosopher Hans Blumenberg, I will argue that metaphors are not merely a means of popularization or a specific kind of modeling (by building analogies) but rather are representations that can unfold an operational force of their own.

While the influence of cybernetics and information theory on molecular biology is well documented in historical analysis throughout recent years, this paper offers new insights into the metaphysical and religious resonances of textual metaphors in the life sciences. The main focus will be on developments in Germany, in particular on the work of the German biochemist Gerhard Schramm. In this historical case study the interaction between metaphors and experimental practices will be discussed. The paper analyzes different phases in the use of metaphors during the 1950s and 1960s: it will explore how the metaphors of a “genetic alphabet” or of “genetic code” (which were used with an illustrative purpose in the 1950s) developed into a new research program and eventually attained ontological status in the early 1960s. At that time Schramm's use of textual metaphors was reminiscent of nineteenth-century German natural philosophy. In this case, the metaphorical shift shows how the metaphor of a “genetic text” or a “genetic code,” which were central for the emerging molecular biology, drew on older cultural traditions with all of their metaphysical and religious preoccupations.

For several decades now a set of researches from a wide range of different sectors has been developed which goes by the name of “science of complexity” and is opposed point by point to the paradigm of classical science. It challenges the idea that world is “simple.” To the reductionist idea that each process is the sum of the actions of its components it opposes a holistic view (the whole is more than the sum of the parts). The aim of the present article is to analyze the epistemological status attributed in the science of complexity to several fundamental ideas, such as those of scientific law, objectivity, and prediction. The aim is to show that the hope of superseding reductionism by means of concepts such as that of “emergence” is fallacious and that the science of complexity proposes forms of reductionism that are even more restrictive than the classical ones, particularly when it claims to unify in a single treatment problems that vary widely in nature such as physical, biological, and social problems.

In the mid-1940s, Argentina was partially isolated and ruled by a military regime. The political confrontation between the military and the scientific community as well as international pressures played a major role in the failure of the first attempts to cope with nuclear development. Only after the relationship between the military and local scientists was readjusted and control of atomic energy was placed in the hands of the Navy, and Argentina's international relations restored, did nuclear development begin to take off. This paper examines the traumatic process of creating the political and institutional conditions for the reception of nuclear technology in a peripheral context. The key to shaping future policies was the decision made by Argentina's Atomic Energy Commission in April 1957 to construct its first research nuclear reactor instead of buying it as other countries such as Spain and Brazil were doing at the time.

As in other countries, the public in Argentina became aware of the existence of something called “the theory of relativity” only after November 1919. Although the news of Arthur Eddington's eclipse expedition, which provided the first confirmation of Einstein's theory, was poorly reported in the newspapers, by the end of 1920 Einstein had become a household name for the educated middle class of Buenos Aires, the capital city of the country. This was in great measure the result of the activity of a few enthusiastic lecturers. Significantly, none of them belonged to the prestigious Institute of Physics of the University of La Plata, which during the decade of the 1910s was considered the most important center of physical research in Latin America. Between July and August 1920 the Spanish physicist Blas Cabrera – perhaps the greatest popularizer of Einstein's theory in Spain – visited Argentina and talked about relativity. In September Georges Duclout, a French engineer who had graduated from the Zurich Polytechnic and by then was professor of applied mechanics at the School of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences (FCEFyN) of the University of Buenos Aires, also gave a series of conferences on the subject. That same month José Ubach, a Jesuit astronomer trained at the Ebro Observatory in Spain, and established in Buenos Aires, lectured on relativity at the Colegio del Salvador.

Argument

The influence of Galen on the subsequent interpretation of the history of ancient medicine has been substantial. This paper explores the consequences of adopting a non-Galenic perspective in two different areas of research. It argues that Galen's own career, and his own views of the ideal physician, cannot be taken as typical of most ancient medical practitioners; and that the theory of the four humors, blood, bile, black bile, and phlegm, did not become a universal standard until after Galen. That theory was merely one of several variations on the theme of body fluids, and entered Greek medicine relatively late. Hippocratic contemporaries of Galen accepted it alongside other theories from the Corpus, e.g. Diseases I, that modern scholars have viewed as incompatible.

Argument

In calling psychoanalysis a “school of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970, 32), Ricoeur marks at once its use in a disposition characteristic of modernity: the disposition of suspicion. Modernity gives rise to various forms of suspicion, to modern forms of ressentiment and practices of disciplining oneself (the suspicion of oneself) as well as to an epistemology of suspicion. In this essay, I shall analyze the epistemological function of suspicion – which as the “paradigm of clues” (Ginzburg 1988) becomes the leading paradigm of the human sciences in the last third of the nineteenth century – and its close interrelationship with the techniques of power. As I shall demonstrate through a comparative reading of psychoanalytical, literary, and criminological texts, the modern production of knowledge in the human sciences cannot be separated from the modern “micro-physics of power,” which for Foucault was established in the eighteenth century, and the technologies of the self. I shall situate the paradigm of clues within the framework of the modern disposition of suspicion in order to combine the epistemological reflections with an analysis of cultural history. Thus I will first examine the paradigm of clues from the perspectives of cultural theory (Foucault and Nietzsche) and semiotics (Peirce), in order to illuminate the structural unreliability of the episteme as well as the way it is closely linked to the techniques of power. In what follows, I will apply this view to Bertillon's photographic identification system, the psychoanalytical concept of the trace, and Kafka's short story The Burrow.

Argument

This paper argues that there was a shift in China in the nature, and use, of geometrical figures between around the beginning of the Common Era and the third century. Moreover, I suggest that the emphasis mathematicians in ancient China placed on generality as a guiding theoretical value may account for this shift. To make this point, I first give a new interpretation of a text often discussed, which is part of the opening section of The Gnomon of the Zhou (first century B.C.E. or C.E.). This interpretation suggests that the argument presented in this text for establishing the so-called “Pythagorean theorem” is based upon a certain kind of drawing. Secondly, I contrast this passage with Chinese texts from the third century on the same topic, but relying on a completely different type of drawing. What commands the difference in the kinds of drawing is that the latter drawings are “more general” than the former, in a sense to be made explicit. This paper hence aims at making a contribution to the study of geometrical figures in ancient China.

Commenting on one of the latter figures, one of the authors of the third century, Liu Hui, describes how various algorithms emerge out of the same transformation of one particular figure. His remarks provide grounds for commenting on the link between the general and the particular, in relation to figures and how algorithms rely on them, as the issue was perceived by the practitioners themselves.

The particular figure in question and its transformation are exactly what we find in the Meno, though in relation to a different mathematical issue. The link of that very figure to the one that is perceived as its “generalization” for several algorithms, including the so-called “Pythagorean theorem,” is made not only in Liu Hui, but also by Thabit ibn Qurra (ninth century C.E.), in a letter where he explicitly addresses the purpose of generalizing the reasoning of the Meno. This parallel offers an appropriate basis to highlight differences in terms of conception and use of figures.

The contemplation of the heavenly vault suggests to any generalizing intelligence the idea of the world suspended within this concavity. During rude barbaric times such as the High Middle Ages – the records of which are precious in this respect – it was thought that this vault rested on the surface of the Earth like a glass bell. And when experience gained firstly by terrestrial travels and afterwards by circumnavigation showed that this was a delusory phenomenon and, at the same time, that the Earth was an autonomous sphere floating within space, the [heavenly] vault became in turn a hollow and translucent sphere containing the concentric world, like the white of an egg surrounding the yolk. Cosmological experience then revealed that the stars were situated at different heights in the supposed vault, which compelled imagining new concentric spheres. Finally, it was discovered that there are neither such spheres nor such a vault; that the amplification and multiplicity of the latter were illusions – as was the concave aspect of the sky – and that the space enclosing the universe is an abyss.

Argument

While undeniably more restricted in many respects than the history of modern science (both in that the evidence is lacunose and because the science itself is more elementary) the comparative inquiry into ancient investigations may, from another point of view, be said to be far richer. We can open up the question of why science should have taken such different forms in different ancient civilizations. How did the ancient investigators come to define the problems, and the methods to tackle them, in the ways they did? A history of pre-modern science provides access to ancient aims, values, and ideologies in a distinctive fashion, differing from other areas of ancient thought in that “reality” – as the ancients themselves understood it in different ways – could and did act as a check on their speculations.