Argument

Heidegger's philosophy of science is notable for the prominence it gives to visuals and visualization. This is because for Heidegger, truth – including scientific truth – is the consequence of unconcealment, the lifting of a veil. But as scientific truth is a special kind, its visualization is also special: scientific truth reveals itself to us as, in Heidegger's words, “a calculable nexus of forces.” This nexus unconceals itself largely by means of instrumentation: it is this process of revelation that turns objects into objects of science. Despite its focus on visualization, however, Heidegger's philosophy of science cannot be applied directly to scientific visuals. His categories are not designed with visual exegesis in mind. For that purpose, semiotics, the science of meaning as defined by Charles Peirce, is a necessary intermediary between the abstract and the concrete, a taxonomy of icon, index, and symbol that can be employed as a set of hermeneutic probes that permit the exploration of scientific visuals as embodiments and carriers of scientific meaning. But not their sole embodiments and carriers. In achieving scientific semiosis, the verbal and visual must combine their particular strengths. This is also in accord with a Heideggerian view: science moves methodically from the visual to the propositional, though it never leaves the visual behind.

How does the advancement of the sciences relate to the ways in which their founding figures are remembered? According to the stark picture painted by Alfred N. Whitehead in 1917, “the establishment of a reverential attitude towards any statement made by a classical author” had barred the progress of logic for several centuries: “Scholars became commentators on truths too fragile to bear translation. A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost” (Whitehead 1917, 115). In the eyes of many critics (who often tend to equate science and logic in similar fashion), Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis may well be an example of such a lost cause. From the founding book The Interpretation of Dreams ([1899] 1900) to his very last statements, Freud never ceased to affirm that psychoanalysis was a science: “What else can it be?” (Freud 1940, 282). Yet not only the fact that he has become one of the classic authors of the twentieth century, but also a number of very specific traits of psychoanalytic institutions (such as the numerous schisms resulting from personal fights between their members) have nourished the suspicion that Freud was less the founder of a science than of a sort of quasi-religious movement, a secular sect thriving on a personality cult.

Argument

Larry Laudan defends “methodological naturalism” – the position that scientific methodology can be fully empirical and be subject to radical change without sacrificing the rationality of science. This view has two main components: (a) the historical claim that just as substantive science has changed and developed in response to new information and evidence, so have the basic rules and methods which guide theory appraisal in science changed in response to new information about the world; and (b) the philosophical claim that all aspects of science are in principle subject to radical change and evolution in the light of new information about the world. In this paper, I argue that one main historical example used by Laudan, namely, the scientific revolution that accompanied the change from the corpuscular to the wave theory of light, does not in fact support the view that there have been radical methodological changes in the history of science.

Scientific medicine carries within it an inherent contradiction. On the one hand, given its general scientific inquiry into health and disease, their conditions, etiologies, and treatments, it makes a claim for universality. To justify this claim, at different times and in different places, scientific medicine has prioritized techniques such as the medical gaze and autopsies to assure its diagnoses; it has applied numerical methods in order to have a better grasp of diseases and their possible treatments; it has used laboratory analyses in order to understand life at its molecular level; and more recently it has introduced Randomized Clinical Trials (RCT) in order to generalize clinical treatments. On the other hand, contrary to its universalistic claims, scientific medicine sets up and reifies boundaries. It creates distinctions between the healthy and the sick and defines categories, such as gender and race, that have deep political and social meanings.

Argument

This paper aims to show how a nineteenth-century Korean scholar's mathematical study reflects the Korean intellectual environment of his time by focusing on the rule of false double position and the method of root extraction. There were two major trends in Korean mathematics of the early nineteenth century: the first was “Tongsan,” literally “Eastern Mathematics,” which largely depended on Chinese mathematics of the Song and Yuan period adopting counting rod calculation; the second trend was Western mathematics, which was transmitted by the Jesuits and their Chinese collaborators from the late sixteenth century. There was also an intellectual transition in late eighteenth-century Korea when mathematics, which had been of only minor interest for Confucian scholars, became an important part of Confucian pursuits. We can gain an insight into the history of mathematics in Korea by examining and understanding Hong Kil-chu's (1786–1841) mathematical studies and the context of the academic world of his time.

Argument

I wish to propose that the history of genetics reflects the history of the concept of reductionism in the life sciences. Reductionism is the thesis that explanation of laws or phenomena in one realm by those of another realm are always likely to be successful as explanations. By 1900 reduction of biology to the laws of chemistry and physics was not self evident: Although bottom-up preformationist explanations were largely inadequate for development, top-down epigenetic hypotheses often adopted metaphysical assumptions. Similarly, top-down theories of evolution as dependent on the accumulated impact of the past confronted those of bottom-up notions of fitness of specific traits that are relevant for future evolution. Mendel's 1865 methodological reductionist study of inheritance of traits was embraced in 1900 as evidence for reduction at the conceptual level. With the achievements of research of the mechanisms of inheritance, genetics became increasingly genocentric in its explanatory arsenal of development, and accordingly it was in conflict with the top-down, life-as-organized-systems' notions of embryology. Similarly, evolution was conceptually reduced to changes of gene-frequencies in populations. It was, however, precisely the increasing attempts to ground the bottom-up approach at the molecular level that eventually pushed conceptual reductionism to its crisis. Modern developments of molecular and computational methods finally forced, or allowed, researchers to apply bottom-up methodologies to top-down systems' analyses.

Argument

By examining sources created by people who were detained or employed at the quarantine stations of Australia and the Western Pacific, this article illuminates aspects of the history of disease control that cannot be observed in other source material. Most research examining the history of maritime quarantine has tended to rely on the records of official and government agencies. As a result, discussion has largely been confined to government policy and larger issues of the political, economic, and social consequences of maritime disease control. This article contributes to the historiography by examining personal sources that show how quarantine policy and practice were experienced from the perspective of its participants. They reveal the experiences of otherwise obscured healthy detainees and illuminate agency among quarantined individuals that cannot be observed without these sources.

Argument

The argument of this paper is to situate The Interpretation of Dreams within an historical context. It is, therefore, impossible to believe Freud entirely when he staged himself in his letters to Fliess as a mere discoverer. In reality Freud also felt he belonged to a learned community of dream specialists, whom I call “dreaming scientists” and “scientific dreamers.” Instead of speaking, as Ellenberger does, in terms of influence, I will be offering as an example a portrait of Freud as a reader of two French authors, Maury, and indirectly, Hervey de Saint-Denys. I will analyze how Freud staged himself as replacing Maury and dreaming sometimes like Hervey de Saint-Denys. My premise in this work is that we must forget Freud, in order to adventure into a learned dream culture peculiar to the nineteenth century. Only afterwards can we come back to Freud and place him in this context as a creative heir.

Argument

The psychoanalytic setting counts today as one of the familiar therapeutic rituals of the Western world. Taking up some of the insights of the anthropology of science will allow us to account for both the social and the material arrangements from which Freud's invention emerged at the end of the nineteenth century out of the clinical laboratories and private consulting rooms of practitioners of hypnosis. The peculiar way of neglecting or forgetting the object world and the institution of the psychoanalyst as a “transference object” will be traced back to multiple reconfigurations in the history of hypnotism in France and in Germany. In this process, different practitioners tried to achieve a synthesis of clinical work and experimental psychology, with the aim of objectifying knowledge about human subjectivity. While Freud retained the claim of psychoanalysis performing an experimental situation, he set apart his own setting from the objectifying practices which were characteristic of this experimental psychology located in the clinic and the private consulting room.

It is not easy to over-estimate the importance of the part played by hypnotism in the history of the origin of psychoanalysis. From a theoretical as well as from a therapeutic point of view, psycho-analysis has at its command a legacy which it has inherited from hypnotism.

Sigmund Freud, A Short Account of Psycho-Analysis ([1923] 1924, 192)

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.

Argument

The paper is an exploration of the interactions between Einstein and Oppenheimer. It highlights the sharp differences in Einstein's and Oppenheimer's approach to physics, in their presentation of self as iconic figures, and in their relation to the communities they considered themselves part of. To understand their differing approaches to physics it briefly reviews the kinds of unifications that took place in physics during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and points to the 1961 MIT centennial celebration to demonstrate the potency of Einstein's vision that there might be a fundamental theory from which all known theories could be derived. It also briefly reviews various aspects of the development of theoretical physics and of general relativity in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, to better understand the context of the sharp, negative remarks that Oppenheimer made about Einstein and about his theory of general relativity in 1965 on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Einstein's death. To answer the question: “Why the antagonism on Oppenheimer's part?” it looks at Oppenheimer's and Einstein's relation to their Jewish roots, their stance regarding nationalism, and their philosophical commitments.

Argument

In this paper I examine the mass medical inspections of immigrants to the United States from the 1890s through the 1920s. I show how, framed as it was not only by nativism and eugenics but also by national industrial imperatives and priorities, scientific medicine served dual purposes. On the one hand, the medical exam was a tool for managing cultural and biological threats to the nation. There were regional variations in medical inspections that reflected the politics of race. On the other hand, the medical exam played an important role in the process of building an unskilled, highly mobile labor force. The industrial demands of the nation provided a rationale for drawing and absorbing millions of European immigrants into the labor force. It was thus a distinct product of the political economy of immigration. It was this second function that characterized the exam for the majority of immigrants entering the nation.

Argument

The paper explores the use of Freud's methods of dream interpretation by four English writers of the early twentieth century: T. H. Pear, W. H. R. Rivers, Ernest Jones, and Alix Strachey. Each employed their own dreams in rather different ways: as part of an assessment of Freud's work as a psychological theory, as illustrative of the cogency of Freud's method and theories as part of the psychoanalytic process. Each adopted different approaches to the question of privacy and decorum. The paper argues that assessment of the impact of Freud's work must take account of the application of the method to the researcher's own dreams and the personal impact this process of analysis had upon them, and must also gauge how the dreamers' deployment of Freud's methods influenced their explicit relationship to him and his theories.

The dream, then, is the chief gate by which we can enter into the knowledge of the unconscious…. Thoughts and desires, which, if they attempted to dominate consciousness in waking life, would be promptly suppressed, arise, develop and expand to an astonishing extent in the dream.

This statement, of course, is entirely independent of the implications of any one “theory of dreams.” Its truth is evident to anyone who has honestly recorded or considered his own dreams for even a short period.

(Elliot Smith and Pear 1917, 61)

Argument

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Russian mathematician Andrey A. Markov extended the laws of the calculus of probability to trials that were dependent on each other, purely theoretically. In two articles from 1913, which are presented here in English translation, he applied his theory for the first time to empirical material, namely text. After a presentation of Markov's methods, results, and possible inspirations, the introduction investigates the dissemination of his ideas to Western Europe and North America in detail. The experimental application of his method to various types of text finally determines its scope.

Argument

The border in turn-of-the-century Argentina was a place of heightened anxiety. State officials ignored the nation's vast land borders and focused on the port, located in the capital city of Buenos Aires, which attracted nearly six million European immigrants in the decades after 1870. Federal authorities were seeking to attract new immigrants and yet they were terrified that opening their gates would allow entry among the potential citizenry a new category of “toxins” dangerous to the national body. The authorities hired physicians as gatekeepers to identify desirable and undesirable traits that went beyond the definition of communicable disease. Science and medicine appeared to provide a means of legitimating a variety of attempts by the state to control the makeup of the population; in reality, the state's power to inspect immigrants for disease, racial toxins, social upheaval, and political instability was minimized by realistic decisions to open borders and by a weak and limited ability to control the influx of people. Alongside calls for immigrant selection there coexisted a strong trend in political discourse that sought to build a unified, homogenous national culture by accepting and assimilating the foreign masses. Both approaches, however, had similar goals – the material progress of the nation, the advancement of Argentina's “civilization,” and the erasure of traces of “foreignness” among the new population.

Argument

This article examines some ideological issues behind the academic debate that surrounds a new field called evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology has emerged as the most popular successor theory to human sociobiology. Its proponents search for evolved psychological mechanisms and emphasize universal features of the human mind. Its proponents also self-consciously resist engaging other social scientists studying the same field of problems. Specifically, I find that the evolutionary psychologists shortchange practitioners from the fields of biological anthropology, empirical linguistics, and developmental psychology. By doing so, they miss the opportunity to benefit from work that could contribute to an enhanced, albeit modified evolutionary psychology. I make the plea for a more expansive discussion.

Argument

New letters from Augustin Fresnel have been uncommon in the literature. This letter was discovered in 2003. It was written to his uncle early in the year 1815 and it gives us a glimpse of Fresnel's state of mind before he emerged on the scientific stage later that same year with a striking essay on light diffraction. In it he tells his uncle of his feelings of agitation at that time. While he believed that he had found something innovative, an explanation of starlight aberration using wave theory instead of corpuscular theory, he felt insecure about how he might deserve the attention of the scientific community, especially given the success of Newton's light theory. The subjects of aether and star aberration were decisive in leading Fresnel to develop his theory.

This study investigates a text excerpt containing 20,000 Russian letters of the alphabet, excluding $\Cprime$ and $\Cdprime$, from Pushkin's novel Eugene Onegin–the entire first chapter and sixteen stanzas of the second.

Argument

The analogy between dream and film represents a central thread in the psychoanalytic discussion of cinema. Using examples taken from films created between 1900 and 1906, this paper develops a typology of dream scenes in early film. The basis for the proposed typology is provided by the dream knowledge in circulation toward the end of the nineteenth century. This knowledge was fed by a great variety of sources, some of them in the proximity of scientific research and some of them far from it, including wish-fulfilling prognostic models and those based on the reservoir of memory or on bodily stimuli. By setting cinema in a context of contemporary dream psychologies, it is possible to trace the specific conditions under which the analogy between dream and cinema could become effective.

Argument

This article focuses on the specific ways in which Zionist scientists studying malaria in Mandatory Palestine (1920–1947) presented their work to international scientific circles, moving between the transnational aspects and the local aspects of their work on malaria while suffusing that work with nationalist meanings. This slippery yet seemingly unproblematic movement between the general and the specific, between the colonial world and Palestine, was a necessary mechanism of scientific exchange. In the Zionist case the work on malaria for these scientists was both a marker of their belief in progress and also a sign of their devotion to a specific political and social project. The knowledge imparted by Zionist malariologists and the international reception it received lent scientific legitimacy to the Zionist project while it advanced the goals of settling the land and defining the communal borders within Palestine between the Arab population and the Jewish one. In this way, the Zionist anti-malaria project in Palestine holds a unique place in malaria research of the time.