Abstracts of Papers Presented
at
The History of Science Society
2003 Annual Meeting
Tara Abraham, Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science (abraham@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm President's
Ballroom A
By
the end of the 1940s, a picture of the nervous system emerged that
characterized the neuron as a digital entity. This view was largely the result
of theories presented by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943, 1947, 1948)
that described hypothetical arrangements of neurons whose function was
expressed in terms of mathematics and logic. Their fundamental presupposition in these theories was taken
from neurophysiology itself: the all-or-none law. Expressed in 1914 by E.D.
Adrian, the all-or-none law held that the relation between a neural stimulus
and the activity it produces is all or nothing. Any neuron has a finite
threshold which the intensity of the impulse must exceed for production of
excitation, and the response is independent of the intensity of the stimulus.
McCulloch and Pitts translated this principle into the supposition that just as
propositions in logic can be true or false, neurons can be on or
off—they either fire or they do not. This assumption enabled them to discuss neuron function in
logical terms. However, by the mid
1930s, from the point of view of neurophysiologists, the all-or-none principle
could still be seen as an accurate description of the relation between stimulus
and response, but the underlying mechanism could empirically be shown to be
more continuous (or analog) than discrete. Although the McCulloch-Pitts neuron was a key element of the
cybernetic vision, and allowed cyberneticians to conceputalize the brain as a
digital computer, neurophysiologists were critical of their idealizations that
ignored details of neural activity such as chemical concentrations and
continuous electric fields. My paper will explore the debates that ensued among
neurophysiologists and cyberneticians during the 1940s and 1950s on the nature
of neural activity, focusing on the relationship between these two conceptions
of the neuron—digital and analog—in neurophysiology and
cybernetics. It will be shown that
the emphasis placed on the digital and analog aspects of the neuron was related
to the extent to which theoretical possibilities were valued over experimental
realities.
Annmarie Adams and Thomas
Schlich, McGill
University (annmarie.adams@mcgill.ca)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Haym
Saloman
Symbolizing Scientific Surgery: The Modern Hospital
and the Modern Surgeon
How did the
structure, planning and image of spaces for surgery symbolize the scientific
aspirations of the emerging team-oriented surgical practices so key to the
development of the 20th-century academic hospital? The central argument of our
paper is that the design of environments for surgery became increasingly
isolated from other units in the modern hospital and the institutions urban
context. This reflects surgerys character as a "technology of
control," after the model of experimental science. Surgery needs special spaces in order
to exert control in the same way that experimental science needs laboratories.
An innovative use of architectural and visual sources is the primary evidence
for this argument through a case study of one of the worlds foremost teaching
hospitals in the early 20th century, the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. A
theme of this paper is thus to test how visual evidence adds to or even
contradicts a history of medicine predicated on textual sources. Plans and photographs show how the
isolated early 20th-century surgical theatre, illuminated by daylight and
surrounded by fresh air, became in the postwar period a myriad of smaller rooms
at the core of the institution.
Surgical suites in the 1950s, for example, were typically surrounded by
corridors and patient rooms, and ventilated and illuminated wholly by
artificial means. This multi-disciplinary paper explores the relationship of modern
architecture and surgery in the 20th century.
Sam Alberti, University of Manchester
(sam.alberti@man.ac.uk)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm William
Dawes B
Collecting the Dead: Anatomy Museums in
Nineteenth-century Britain
St Bartholomew's
Hospital museum was a "Valhalla of spoils snatched from the dead, the
dying, the living, and those who have never been born". To illuminate the form and
function of such a collection, this paper presents a study of museological
practice, following the life - or death - of a museum specimen through the
'cadaver circuit', from acquisition through display. Acquisition routes leading to the hospital will set the
collections firmly in their medical and cultural context: twinned to the path
of the specimen to the museum was the process of legitimation, as curators
sought to remove their collections from the unsavoury cultural environs of the
freak show and circus. Enormous
energies were thus expended in acquiring choice specimens, and yet it was once
they arrived at the museum that the real labour began. Touching on preparation, preservation
and articulation methods, I examine the cataloguing and arranging of these vast
and eclectic collections - especially how they impacted upon the disciplinary
formation of pathology - before turning to their audiences and use. The paper explores the working
practices not only of curators, such as Thomas Hodgkin of Guy's hospital, but
other less prominent personnel - artists, modellers, keepers: the invisible
technicians of the museum.
Although the focus is on hospital museums, connections and comparisons
are explored with a range of other sites, from commercial freak shows such as
Kahn's Anatomical Museum to 'respectable' collections such as those of the
Royal Colleges of Surgeons in London and Edinburgh.
Katharine Anderson, York University
(kateya@yorku.ca)
Thursday,
November 20th: 4:00 - 6:00 pm Tom
Paine A
Weather Writ Large: The Imperial Scale of British
Meteorology
In the 1870s, as
international coordination in meteorological study was developing, researches
on cyclical patterns of rainfall entered into heated debates about the
management of the British Empire - which, just like meteorology, involved a
conception of governance on
"the largest possible scale." Focussing on rainfall, sunspots
and famine prediction, British meteorologists turned their attention to India's
intense but regulated tropical climates. The promising prospects of Indian
meteorology defused the theoretical and administrative uncertainty that surrounded
the science at home. The Indian experience also suggested how science and the
state became mutually reinforcing models of rational order.
Nancy Anderson, Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science (anderson@mpiwg-berlin-mpg.de)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Crispus
Attucks
Transitive Light and Digital Pictures: Fluorophores
and Electronic Imaging in Cell Biology During the 1980s
In a 1978 article for
the journal Cell,
two molecular biologists highlighted the current and potential uses of video
for visualizing fluorescence probes in living cells. In particular, video cameras could detect extremely low
levels of illumination so photobleaching was markedly reduced as was
photodamage to the cellular organelles.
Throughout the following decade experimental systems developed that
coupled fluorophore and electronic imaging technologies. CCD cameras (along with accompanying
computer hardware and software) appeared in the microscopists laboratory in
the mid-1980s and opened up greater opportunities for quantitative analysis,
image manipulation and enhancement, and 3D optical microscopy. Today, fluorophores and CCD cameras are
familiar tools in molecular biology and proteomics, but twenty-five years ago
researchers were just beginning to grasp the advantages of highly
light-sensitive video cameras over conventional photography. This paper will
discuss the development of fluorophores and electronic imaging in the 1980s,
emphasizing how the visualization of subcellular entities and activities in
living cells has become a matter of transforming molecular light into
electronic pixel.
Jimena Canales and Andrew
Herscher,
Harvard University (jcanales@fas.harvard.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Haym
Saloman
Ornament and Crime: Modern Architecture, Criminal
Anthropology, and Evolutionary Theory
Adolf Looss essay,
"Ornament and Crime," decisively linked unornamented architecture and
the culture of modernity and, in so doing, became one of the key formulations
of modern architecture. To a great extent, the essay's force comes from
arguments drawn from nineteenth-century criminal anthropology and evolutionary
theory. In this paper, we focus on Looss extension of criminal anthropology's
evolutionary gaze from the human body to architecture and to the body's
material prostheses, the Gebrauchsgegenstande, or objects of everyday use. We
thus position Looss essay as connecting scientific uses of ornament as a
divider between the normal and the pathological or objects of everyday use. We
thus position Looss essay as connecting scientific uses of ornament as a
divider between the normal and the pathological to the aesthetic use of
ornament as a divider between the functional and the free in art and
architecture.
Peder Anker, University of Oslo
(peder.anker@sum.uio.no)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Haym
Saloman
The Bauhaus of Nature
This paper examines
the history of architecture based upon ecological principles. The point of
departure is visionary ecological design in the film Things to Come (1936)
written by H. G. Wells and produced by Alexander Korda. Inspired by the Bauhaus
style of architecture and city planning they worked with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,
among others, to design an environmentally friendly ecotopia based on the science
of human ecology and biotechnology. Architects of the avant-garde and scholars
shared a social concern for the wellbeing of humans living in the dark homes
and polluted environments of London. For some this was a matter of evolutionary
survival of the human species, and they saw the solution to such problems in
the new architecture of fresh air, sunlight and efficient use of energy. The
geometric order of Bauhaus architecture in the designed, for example, by
Berthold Lubetkin for the London Zoo also reflected the promising mathematical
turn in biological research models. The new modernist households mirrored this
new order of the household of nature. It was a science driven architecture
based on the understanding of humans as animals struggling for evolutionary
continuation and territorial expansion.
Rima D. Apple, University of Wisconsin-Madison
(rdapple@consci.wisc.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine B
Service and research: The Medical Career of Dr.
Dorothy Reed Mendenhall
The
career of Dr. Dorothy Reed Mendenhall exemplifies the evolution of a health
reformer whose experiences as a woman, a wife, a mother, and a doctor led her
to a life of service. Most
significantly, her efforts enabled the philanthropic and service impulses of
others to be realized. Early in
the 20th century, Mendenhall's medical credentials attracted the attention of
educators, such as Caroline Hunt, the first director of the University of
Wisconsin's Department of Home Economics, and of the eager young women of
Madison, Wisconsin's who had already founded Attic Angels, a philanthropic
society. Hunt asked Mendenhall to
speak to Wisconsin farm women about infant care during the popular
Housekeeper's Conferences held by the University in the first decade of the
century, thus cementing a life-long commitment to maternal education. This commitment found additional
expression when in response to efforts of the Attic Angels, she established the
first well baby clinic in Wisconsin and later the Madison Visiting Nurse
Association, which she chaired until 1936. When her husband travelled to Washington, D.C. for war duty,
Mendenhall followed and joined the U.S. Children's Bureau as a medical officer
in 1917. She also continued
her position at the University of Wisconsin where, with the encouragement of
Marlatt, she lectured to students and women around the state on issues of child
health, maternal health, and sex hygiene.
Drawing on sources located in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin,
the Archives of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Mendenhall's
UW-Extension and U.S. Children's Bureau pamphlets, as well as her unpublished
autobiography located in the Sophia Smith Archives, this analysis of
Mendenhall's career illuminates important social, cultural, and gendered
factors that attracted scientifically minded women to a life of service and
reform in the early 20th century United States.
Noga Arikha, Bard College (narikha@aol.com)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Haym
Saloman
Humours and Passions in Early Modern Europe
Concentrating on the
early modern era in Europe, I examine the survival of the theory of humours for
psychological explanation and the treatment of mental illness, beyond the
demise of Renaissance scholasticism and beyond the advent of Cartesian dualism.
The growing interest in scientific studies of emotions (by Joseph LeDoux or
Antonio Damasio, for example) is accompanying a redefinition of the compass of
the cognitive sciences and enabling us to understand the interconnection of emotion
and reason. However, the history of the ways in which emotions have been
conceived does not inform this new work, partly because of the 17th-century
separation of psychology from epistemology. Humoural theories of mind and
emotion survived this separation; the animal spirits which, since Hippocrates
in the 5th century BC, were deemed to circulate within humours, were taken over
by the 18th-century natural philosophers who studied the nervous system. The
humoural model offered an explanatory structure for a confluence between mind
and body which post-Cartesian metaphysics had problematized, confirming a view
of emotions as separated, and in conflict with, reason. I shall recount the
genealogy of this explanatory structure and show how it informs the ways in
which we understand the scientific data about emotions.
Eric Ash, Wayne State Univeristy
(ao0103@wayne.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Molly
Pitcher
Serving the 'Prince of Purpoole': Francis Bacon and
the Expertise of Natural Philosophy
Francis Bacon's
agenda to reform the pursuit of natural philosophy placed great emphasis on the
inclusion of practical knowledge, including even the trade skills of humble
artisans. This emphasis may be seen not only in his more famous philosophical treatises,
but also in his earliest attempts to obtain patronage from the Elizabethan
court. The precise role the artisans themselves were to play in Bacon's natural
philosophical program, however, was actually very limited-the vast majority
would be assigned to simple data collection, while the more rigorous task of
generating theorems from the data they supplied would be reserved for Bacon
alone. I will argue that, in effect, Bacon intended to "black box"
the pursuit of natural philosophy, allowing practitioners to deal only with the
"input" of data and the "output" of theorems, while
remaining utterly ignorant of what happened to their knowledge in between.
Soren Bak-Jensen, University of Copenhagen
(sbj@mhm.ku.dk)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Molly
Pitcher
The Patient as Scientist: Chiropractors and the
Production of Medical Knowledge in Interwar Denmark
Promoting claims to
therapeutic innovation involves presentations of the kind of knowledge that
will support such claims. But what constitutes such legitimizing knowledge?
Several studies have pointed to how groups of health care practitioners tend to
use either rationalist or empiricist arguments in order to support or refute
healing methods. And much research has gone into demonstrating how different
groups may try to raise and consolidate their professional status through the
suggestion of specific criteria for what should count as scientific knowledge.
In this paper, I will use the attempts by Danish chiropractors to prove the
value of their healing method as an opportunity to discuss how a health care
profession may identify relevant knowledge concerning such a question.
Chiropractic moved from America to Europe following the First World War, and
Denmark attracted a relatively large number of chiropractors. In the mid-1920
these united in an attempt to gain state authorisation for their profession,
campaigning under the central claim that this should be granted because
chiropractic worked and provided cures where all other therapies had failed.
Yet when looked at in detail, it is clear that rather than being committed to
justifying chiropractic through practical results, it was the way in which
specific knowledge-claims were produced that determined whether chiropractors
thought them useful for their purposes. The criteria by which they identified
legitimate arguments point towards the employment of an epistemology fit to
include not just chiropractors or formally trained doctors, but also the
subjective experience of patients in the production of scientific knowledge.
Daniela Barberis, University of Chicago/ Franke
Institute (d-barberis@uchicago.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Crispus
Attucks
A novel object for science: 'society' as defined by
the organic metaphor
Between the 1870s and
the early 1900s numerous attempts were made to lay the foundations of a science
of society in France: science du social, science sociale, or sociologie.
Programmatic books were published, journals created, societies founded, and
attempts to create chairs in academic institutions were made. Different groups formed, with
conflicting views of what such a science of society should be; various
standards were proposed and developed for such a science. The very existence of
the object of this new science, society, was contested, and its contours only
slowly came to be defined through many debates and exchanges among
authors. It is important to keep
in mind the diversity and dispersion of the science of society in the beginning
of the 1880s in order to appreciate the structure that it gained in the
following decades. This paper focuses on one of the models proposed for
sociology in this period, that of organicism, also known as biological
sociology. I examine the way it defined sociology's object and the approach it
took in treating this object. I
argue that, despite its relatively quick demise as a sociological trend,
organicist literature contributed to the acceptance of certain fundamental
traits of the new object proposed by the emergent science of society, traits
that remained constitutive of this object after the organicist analogy that had
grounded them was rejected.
Nicole B. Barenbaum, University of the South
(nbarenba@sewanee.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Thomas
Paine A
An Identity of Difference: A. A. Robacks Jewish
Hereditarianism
This paper examines
the hereditarian thought of A. A. Roback (1890-1965), who earned a doctorate in
psychology from Harvard in 1917 and became an author of scholarly and popular
works on psychology and on Jewish culture. It draws upon published and archival
sources, including a collection of Robacks papers that has been overlooked for
nearly 40 years as a result of an error in cataloguing. In his popular writing,
Roback addressed themes of race, heredity, irrationalism, and evil –
themes that characterized the work of many Jews in popular psychology between
1890 and 1940, as Andrew Heinze (2001) has shown. However, unlike the Jewish
psychologists Heinze examines, Roback maintained early hereditarian views of
Jewish characteristics and rejected the environmentalist conclusions of
anthropologists Maurice Fishberg and Franz Boas, who argued that Jews did not
constitute a separate race. Roback extended his hereditarian view to a
constitutional theory of individual character, and he opposed environmentalist
perspectives throughout his career. These theoretical preferences reflected the
Yiddishist cultural nationalism he had developed as an Eastern European
immigrant living in Montreal in the 1890s and early 1900s. Robacks work
suggests that Jewish psychologists views of heredity, like those of the Jewish
racial scientists examined by Mitchell Hart (1999), varied with their
engagement in the complex debate between assimilationists and nationalists regarding
the place of Jews in modern society. Although Roback did not address this
debate directly in his psychological writings, his cultural nationalism appears
to have conflicted with his career aspirations. Robacks distinctive Jewish
voice suggests the importance of interlocking historical, cultural, and social
contexts – cohort, national origin, social class, political and religious
affiliations, and professional training, to name a few – in which Jewish
psychologists theoretical views and career patterns were embedded in early
twentieth-century America.
Peter Barker, University of Oklahoma
(barkerp@ou.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom A
Astronomy, Providence and the Lutheran Contribution to
Science
Recent work by S.
Kusukawa and C. Methuen attributes slightly different religious significance to the Wittenberg program
in natural philosophy, and especially astronomy. Methuen believes that
Wittenberg students were expected to draw moral lessons from their study of the
heavens. Kusukawa, on the other hand, connects Wittenberg scientific activity
generally to Phillip Melanchthons vision of a causally ordered providence. I
will suggest that, for Melanchthons followers, moral knowledge and knowledge
in the mathematically based exact sciences shared a single divine origin, and
was accessible through a single mental faculty: the natural light of human
reason. Thus it was not necessary to derive moral truths from astronomical knowledge, although the
study of astronomy showed the existence of a providential, causal order that
was divine in origin, a theme that recurs in the work of Erasmus Reinhold,
Caspar Peucer and their successors. Kepler believed he had definitively
uncovered this providential order
in his 1596 Mysterium Cosmographicum, and established its causal structure in the 1609 Astronomia
nova.
Antonio Barrera, Colgate University
(abarrera@colgate.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm President's
Ballroom A
Knowledge and Nature in the Spanish Atlantic World
My paper presents an
overview of the empirical activities pursued by Spaniards in the Atlantic World
during the sixteenth century. I argue that the commercial and imperial
expansion of Spain in the Atlantic fostered the development of empirical practices
for the study of nature. This expansion facilitated relations and negotiations
between diverse groups (scholars, artisans, merchants, royal officials, and
Native Americans) and their respective epistemological practices. From these
negotiations emerged a tendency towards empiricism and the institutionalization
of these practices, which characterized sixteenth- and seventeenth -century
production of natural knowledge in Europe and America. This paper discusses the
significant role played by the Atlantic and those engaged in the American
enterprise in the development of empirical practices.
Naomi Beck, Universit de Paris I and
University of Chicago (nbeck@uchicago.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Crispus
Attucks
The Appeal of the Organic Metaphor in Spencerism
The first step in the
way of a politicised interpretation of Spencers evolutionism was laid down by
one of his theorys principal elements: the organic analogy. Indeed, Spencers
ultimate goal was to provide laissez-faire liberalism with a scientific
legitimacy through positing a bio-sociological continuity, of which the organic
analogy was both cause and illustration. Some political thinkers in Italy and
France were inspired by Spencers portrayal of social reality as an organic object,
which obeyed the laws of nature just like any other living being. However, they
differed considerably in the political meaning they invested in this notion,
notably through its integration in socialist doctrines. In my paper, I examine
the particularities of Spencers organicism and investigate into the reasons
for its appeal to contemporary thinkers in both Italy and France of the later
nineteenth century, insisting on the importance of the socio-political context
in the process of appropriation of ideas.
Susan D. Bernstein, University of Wisconsin-Madison
(Department of English) (sdbernst@wisc.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Haym
Saloman
'The Mystery of Their Alteration in Form': Lydia
Becker's Letters to Darwin
In May of 1863 Lydia
Becker initiated a correspondence with Charles Darwin by enclosing a packet of
hermaphroditic flowers, unusual specimens she had collected near her Lancashire
home and thought might be a variety of interest to this celebrated naturalist. During five decades Darwin corresponded
with more than 120 different women of whom over half were related in some
fashion to friends, colleagues, or to himself. Of the select number of correspondents on scientific topics
with women he did not know, Beckers letters rival in number those of Lady
Dorothy Frances Nevill on orchids and Mary Treat on insects. In over a dozen letters during the
1860s Becker exchanged observations, specimens, and hypotheses with Darwin
about these heterogeneous and altering forms in nature, as she repeatedly
expressed the pleasures of botanical investigations. This private
correspondence served many purposes for Beckers emergence in the public sphere
of science debates: a material and textual field of botanical observation and
theory-testing, an impetus for starting a philosophical society in which
Manchester women discussed scientific topics of the day, a medium for sounding
out her own ideas on heterogeneity in nature which she then presented at the
BAAS and published in the Journal of Botany. My paper explores this correspondence as a kind of
heterotopia, Foucaults term for transitional spaces such as museums or
libraries, in-between spaces that in this case bridge the private and public,
the amateur and the professional, the everyday and the celebrated, in the field
of science research. In 1863 when
Becker first wrote to Darwin her resources for collaboration and exchange on
scientific questions were limited both by her gender and class, but by 1869 she
had established herself several times on the podium and in print. These letters also provide a border
space in which Beckers broader commitments to science co-education for women
and men together take shape.
Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Indiana University
(dbmeli@indiana.edu)
Thursday,
November 22nd: 4:00 - 6:00 pm Crispus
Attucks
Experiments in Newton's Principia: The First Edition
Traditionally
Newton's Principia
has been read following its division in three books on motion in non-resisting
media, motion in resisting media, and the system of the world. This paper
approaches the text from a different perspective, namely Newton's usage of
experiments. I identify common themes, concerns and experimental apparatus
used, and draw some general conclusions on the functions of experiments in the
first edition of Newton's work.
Richard H. Beyler, Portland State University
(beylerr@pdx.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine A
'Free' Science and Purged Scientists: The Kaiser
Wilhelm/Max Planck Society 1933
and 1945
This paper examines
the institutional response of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft to Nazi dismissal
policies – chiefly the "Civil Service Law" of April 1933
– in comparison to the response of the erstwhile KWG and its successor
organization, the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, to Allied-mandated
"denazification" policies following 1945. In both contexts, KWG leadership ostensibly sought to
maintain, as much as possible, the "autonomy" or "freedom"
of science as a social institution.
But it is necessary to "operationalize" this concept: what constituted the
"autonomy" or "freedom" of science in these periods of
politically mandated purges? In
1933 the KWG adopted a policy of general cooperation and selective
non-cooperation with the dismissal policies which aimed at maintaining
traditional patterns of authority in the community of science, while
renegotiating but not fundamentally challenging the pact between scientific
knowledge and state power. After
the war, though for quite different reasons than in the Nazi era, once again
the concept of the integrity of "science" comes to the fore. The putative defense of the scientific
discipline often proved successful in overcoming or diminishing the problem of
denazification for specific individuals.
Siam Bhayro, Yale University (siam.bhayro@yale.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Thomas
Paine B
Syriac Botanical Terminology: The Work of Sergius of
Ra's al-'Ayn
In this paper, I will
discuss the attempts of the sixth-century monk Sergius to transmit the
medicinal/botanical work of Galen into a completely new linguistic and cultural
setting. Examples will be
analyzed, taken from British Library ms BL Add 14,661 which contains three
complete books of Galen–his sixth, seventh and eighth treatises on simple
medicines - De Simplicium Medicamentorum Temperamentis et Facultatibus. This work describes many plants and
their therapeutic uses. In
addition to translating Galen's work, Sergius provided introductions to each
book and transliterations into Syriac of the Greek botanical terminology. He also attempted to identify the
proper Syriac term for many of these plants.
Daniela Bleichmar, Princeton University
(dbleichm@princeton.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes B
Viewing as Possessing: The Visual Culture of Natural
History and the Locality of
Colonial Science, 1750-1800
This paper argues
that image production was the central practice of colonial natural history in
the eighteenth century, and that images were the most important production
through which Europeans identified, translated, transported, and appropriated
foreign natures during the period. The paper engages with the literature on
exploration, science, and visual culture and expands this discussion by
focusing on the eighteenth-century Spanish scientific expeditions to Latin
America, which remain largely unexplored by Anglophone historiography,
particularly in comparison to the vast literature on Cook, Bougainville, La
Prouse, Humboldt, &c. Between 1735 and 1800, Spain sponsored over twenty-five
scientific expeditions to its colonies; eight of them focused specifically on
natural history, employed over fifty artists, and produced a pictorial corpus
numbering approximately 7,500 images. Examining the scientific practices and
visual production of the Spanish natural history expeditions complicates the
way in which much of the literature on the English and French expeditions has
described scientific travel and illustration, since the situation between Spain
and its American colonies was quite different -not first-contact experiences as
in new colonies in the South Pacific but a Creole colonial society going back
over two centuries with strong local identities and interests, and the end
rather than the beginning of an empire. Similarly, the Spanish Americas help us
rethink and refine many of the important arguments that post-colonial and
subaltern studies have made about science and the visual. A first section of
the paper presents an overview of the visual culture of natural history in
18th-century Europe, describing the importance of images in printed books on
distant natures, their role in scientific training and research, and the ways
in which academic art training, natural history training, and published
guidelines for collectors of natural specimens ('professional' and amateur)
served to construct expert eyes and hands that produced a specific type of
representations and displays that were used to claim authority and ownership
over nature. Much of the writing on scientific images has focused on the
transformation of science through the incorporation of visual technologies such
as the microscope, the telescope, and mapping practices. While the role of
technology is undoubtedly important, such emphasis on instruments would suggest
that optics and mathematics were the exclusive technologies through which
vision was mediated. Instead, I argue, natural history and artistic practices
and traditions constituted a different kind of visual technologies that also
shaped the way in which nature was apprehended and understood. A second section
of the paper discusses and contrasts natural history images from the Spanish
expeditions, produced by European and non-European artists, with images of
foreign natures produced by other Europeans in other regions, in this way
exploring the generalities and local specificities of image-making and
scientific production.
Francesca Bordogna, Northwestern University
(f-bordogna@northwestern.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom B
Disciplinarity and its Values: William Jamess 1906
Address on 'The Energies of Men'
In 1906 William James
(1842-1910) delivered his presidential address before the American
Philosophical Association. The address, entitled The Energies of Men, invited
a philosophical audience to take up the task of formulating a psychological
science of bodily and mental energy. By choosing to lecture on such a topic,
James deliberately challenged American philosophers efforts to exclude
incursions into the newly professionalized association from outsiders,
something they did by building rigid disciplinary boundaries. This paper
discusses the reasons why on that occasion, as well as on many others, James
chose to transgress disciplinary and other types of divides. The paper examines the social and
political dimension of Jamess resistance to specialization and to the modern
disciplinary mode of knowledge production. I argue that James feared the
socially conservative implications of disciplinary training, and I suggest
that, at a deeper level, his resistance to the disciplinary fragmentation of
knowledge (especially, to the fragmentation of the studies of the human
subject) paralleled his worries about the fragmentation of the modern self. I
interpret Jamess APA address as an attempt to constitute a cross-disciplinary
and holistic discourse of the human subject. Thus, his call for the creation of
a science of energy in his APA address was a strategy that James mobilized in
order to reconfigure philosophy as an open and free social space, where not
only professional philosophers, but also scientists, practically oriented
professional groups, and amateurs could fruitfully and cooperatively converse
beyond all disciplinary confines. The paper concludes by arguing that in the
era of disciplinary specialization James strove to make philosophy expressive
of a social unity of the sciences.
Alan C. Bowen, IRCPS (bowen@ircps.org)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes A
The Assimilation of Babylonian Celestial Science in
Greco-Latin Astronomy of the First Century BC
During the first
century BC many writers in the Greco-Latin world addressed an increasing
interest in horoscopic astrology, which was itself a very recent and on-going
adaptation of a Babylonian celestial science that included its own horoscopy.
Some were highly critical of this innovation, but others were considerably more
tolerant. Indeed, this new interest inspired in some quarters a substantial
change in the very idea of astronomy, that is, in the range of what were thought
to be the subjects and techniques proper to astronomy. In this paper, I will
examine how a particular writer, Geminus, adapts to the emergent horoscopic
astrology in his Introduction to Astronomy, and I will locate his efforts in a process of
assimilating Babylonian celestial science that was not completed until Ptolemy.
Emily Brock, Princeton University
(ebrock@princeton.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm William
Dawes B
Industry, Government, and Academia in the Formation of
American Professional Forestry
In its early years at
the turn of the twentieth century, the science of forestry in the United States
was fundamentally shaped by the ideas and ideals of European academic
forestry. Within the next
several decades, however, the appeal of European forestry faded. The ecology of the American forest was
proving to be quite different than that of the European forest, especially that
of the Germanic lands. The
economic status of the forest and the structure of the timber industry were
also fundamentally different from Europe.
Because of these differences, the continuing reliance on European
frameworks of knowledge, especially those pioneered in the German-speaking
schools, came into question.
American professional forestry occupied a space in which individuals
could be employed by industry, government or academia, and in which movement
between these three institutions was common. Because of the diverse employment of its members, and
because of the diverse ownership of forest lands, professional American
foresters were very cognizant of national political changes. Disputes in the profession during the
1920s and 1930s concerned not only formulating a clear distinction of American
forestry from its European roots, but also concerned the political content of
the professional discourse. This
period saw the rise of the conservation movement, and with it a new public and
political perception of the nations forests. The relative participation of individuals in different
employ was contested as much for its political ramifications as for its impact
on professionalization. The
conservation movement split professional foresters and deeply politicized the
policy and scientific recommendations they produced.
Thomas Broman, University of Wisconsin -
Madison (thbroman@wisc.edu)
Sunday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine A and B
All the nouvelles that is fit to print: Pierre
Bayle and the retailing of scholarly news in the late 17th century.
It has become a
commonplace among historians of science and of print that Henry Oldenburgs Philosophical
Transactions was
launched in 1665 at least in part as a reflection of his role as a nodal point
in the correspondence network of the Republic of Letters. Other journals, such as the Acta
Eruditorum, have
similarly been cast as printed reflections of this community. Yet these publications were
supplemented by another group of journals that aimed not only to facilitate
communication between scholars, but also to publicize the world of scholarship
to an audience of non-scholars.
Led by Pierre Bayles Nouvelles de la Rpublique des Lettres, which was inaugurated in 1684,
such journals traded in news from the world of letters. In this talk I will explore how the Nouvelles and contemporary publications
such as the Journal des Savans defined what was newsworthy from the world of letters
and how they attempted to identify as broad an audience as possible for this
news. By doing so, I hope to expand our current appreciation of natural
philosophys popular appeal in the early 18th century.
Eve E. Buckley, University of Pennsylvania
(ebuckley@sas.upenn.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30pm Thomas
Paine A
Development Discourse on a Post-colonial
Periphery: Engineering in
Northeast Brazil's Drought Zone, 1909-1930.
My paper examines competing
development strategies proposed for Northeast Brazils semi-arid interior
following the establishment of a technical planning agency for the
drought-plagued region. Politicians, physicians and engineers debated which
aspects of the areas economic backwardness were the result of natural,
climatic factors and which were attributable to social structure, in particular
the colonial legacy of concentrated landholding on agricultural and ranching
estates. Engineers dominated the National Department for Works Against the
Drought and modeled their development plans on the U.S. Bureau of Reclamations
recent projects in Western states. The dam and road construction that ensued
was based on scant analysis of the interior Northeasts natural endowments or
political landscape. I focus on the misuse in this development discourse of
analogies from foreign regions with different hydrologic and sociologic
features. Ranchers and other elites were well served by their pronounced resistance
to considering the multiple origins of drought crisis in the interior
Northeast, winning infrastructural investments on or near their properties. But
this strategy did little to reduce the human misery that cyclic droughts
produced. Regional boosters hailed the scientific and technological
achievements of other lands as symbols of democracy and widespread economic
improvement, while ignoring that the effects of such development programs
depended on the social context in which they were executed. In examining the
drought agencys policies, I contrast the professional culture and practice of
Brazilian engineers with that of the development agendas most vocal critics in
this period, doctors launching a rural sanitation program. Sanitarians
consistently emphasized the political imbalances that left the rural poor
vulnerable to disease and drought. They thus recommended land redistribution to
smallholders, agricultural extension efforts, and public health campaigns as
essential components of the drought relief program.
Juliet Burba, University of Minnesota--Twin Cities (burb0006@umn.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Molly
Pitcher
Reconstructing the 'Actual History of Mankind': Franz
Boas and Native American Origins Research
By the late-19th
century, the origins of American Indians and their cultures had become a
perennial topic among U.S. anthropologists. The anthropologist Franz Boas chose
to tackle this issue, advertising it as the central question of a six-year
program of intensive field research undertaken during his tenure at the
American Museum of Natural History. Boas, however, had an uneasy relationship
with this research question. As he embarked on this program, Boas had been
engaged in debates about the aims and methods of anthropology. He championed an
approach that has been called inductive, particularistic, and historical.
Success in finally answering long-standing questions about Native American
origins would demonstrate the superiority of his methods for addressing
prominent questions within anthropology. Boas, however, resisted the
generalizing necessary to develop a broad narrative of New World prehistory.
This paper explores the promise and limitations of Boass historical
methodology as he and his field crew employed it to address the relationship of
American Indians and their cultures to those of the Old World. It argues that
concerns over field methodology were at the core of debates about the shape of
anthropology during this formative period for the discipline.
David Cahan, University of Nebraska
(dcahan@unlnotes.unl.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom B
Science above Politics?: Helmholtz on the French and
the French on Helmholtz
This paper treats the
issue of the relations of science and politics by measuring Hermann von
Helmholtz's public pronouncements on the universality of science against his
private attitudes and behavior toward French science and France in general. It
relates how Helmholtz confronted a number of incidents in his life and career
that brought him into a variety of academic and political conflicts with French
science and France in general. It discusses how his attitudes towards France
were first shaped by his familial background and his home in Potsdam, where he
received a strong sense of Prussian/German patriotism; and how the hostile
reaction by Parisian scientists to some of his early work in electrophysiology
first revealed his own hidden and hostile behavior toward French science and
France. Furthermore, the paper reveals Helmholtz's attitude towards and
activities against France during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). Finally, it
argues that during the last decades of his life, thanks in part to the guidance
of his second wife, Anna von Helmholtz, a Francophile, and thanks in part to
his own growing international reputation as a polymath and his responsibilities
as an international savant, Helmholtz's attitudes towards the French softened.
As Helmholtz increasingly confronted the modern world as a public figure, he
moved beyond his earlier prejudices and hostilities towards French science and
France. Finally, and more generally, the paper treats the development of
Helmholtz's public persona and the implications of his attitudes and behavior
for the relations of science and politics on both sides of the Rhine.
Luis Campos, Harvard University
(lcampos@fas.harvard.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Molly
Pitcher
The Right Element for the Organism: Radium,
'Radiobes,' and the Origin of Life
Decades before J. B.
S. Haldane's 'hot dilute soup' theory of the origin of life, the Cambridge
physicist John Butler Burke claimed to have produced what he called
'radiobes'--putatively life-like entities--after having immersed radium in
sterilized bouillon. Burke's experiments, performed at the Cavendish Laboratory
in 1904, presented a contested path of attack into the origin of life, an
otherwise seemingly intractable problem at the turn of the century. In this
paper, I reconstruct the untold story of Burke's radiobes and analyze some
inherent instabilities in his claims to have produced life-like but not living
organisms. I also describe the widespread attention, praise, and condemnation
his results drew, and suggest that the immediate and far-reaching
popularization of Burke's work both represented and helped to inaugurate--along
with the work of Jacques Loeb, T. H. Morgan and others--a new realm of
biological possibility for radium. In more ways than one, radium became the
'right element for the organism."
Jane Louise Carey, University of Melbourne
(jcarey@unimelb.edu.au)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine B
Sex, Race and Kindergartens: Australian Women in the
Pursuit of Scientific Social Reform, 1900–1940
This paper traces
middle-class Australian womens involvement in scientific social reform
movements from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s-—a period in
which effective social reform was increasingly seen as a scientific project,
rather than simply a Christian philanthropic endeavour. It will explore some of
the implications of this scientific turn in the traditional womans sphere
of social reform. Just as the reinsertion of western womens engagement with
popular, amateur scientific pursuits in the nineteenth century has enhanced our
understanding of the extent of womens scientific endeavours, so, I suggest,
would the inclusion of scientific social reform within the rubric of feminist
science studies. While historians of the womens movement in America and the
British Empire have noted its extensive engagement with science in this period,
these histories have yet to be firmly situated within the history of women and
science. Examining elite womens participation in arenas such as the eugenic,
kindergarten and sex education movements allows the recovery of elite womens
engagement with the broader culture of science in this era. The rise of
modernity—based as it was in an increasing cultural commitment to
science, rationality and progress—has frequently been presented as an exclusively
masculine project. Focussing on womens strong involvement in scientific social
reform complicates this broad framework, and provides a new lens through which
to explore the gendered boundaries of the modern and the scientific. This
evidence suggests that, rather than being alienated from the increasingly
scientific modern world, elite women embraced and promoted it.
Michael C. Carhart, University of Nevada
(carhart@unr.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Crispus
Attucks
Culture and the Rejection of the Organic Metaphor in
the 1780s
As the human sciences
emerged in the 1770s and 1780s the term "culture" came into
circulation as a way of explaining the development of nations. When speaking of totalities like
society, i.e. the human mind and everything it created (the arts, sciences,
crafts, religious and ethical systems, societies with constitutions,
governments, manners, and so forth), it was useful to reduce the topic of
discussion to a metaphor. Society-as-organism was such a metaphor, and in the
eighteenth century it had the philosophical distinction of being associated
with Leibniz's idea of the autonomous monad. Herder, for example, relied heavily on Leibniz for his
understanding of human society, and he sequestered different nations away from
each other as different monads that developed according to their own internal
logic. But the metaphor of
society-as-organism had a distasteful implication: organisms die. This was clear enough in the histories
of ancient Greece and Rome which experienced periods of rise-and-progress followed by decline-and-fall,
and recent evidence from Easter Island suggested a similar pattern there. But when one turned from anthropologist
to sociologist, the organic metaphor implied the same fate for Europe. As revolts, revolutions, and
constitutional crises swept the continent in the 1770s and 1780s, one wondered
whether the end was nigh. Was
decline and fall inevitable? Scientists
of humanity in the 1770s and 1780s hoped not. If the human sciences taught one thing, it was that there
were no inevitabilities.
Theoretically - and if there was such a thing as the "Enlightenment
project" then this was its goal - a nation could make infinite progress
toward perfection or completion.
The destination was vague, certainly, but it was preferable to certain
death or destruction. Culture, therefore, came into circulation specifically as
an alternative to the organic life-cycle metaphor. Culture too was a dynamic concept implying change, either
progress or regress, but it lacked the eschatological implications of the
organic metaphor. Drawing on
anthropology and travel literature, on encyclopedism and linguistics, on famous
authors like Condorcet and Herder, and on obscure ones like Goguet and Meiners,
this paper will offer a transnational look at the ways the human sciences were
practiced in the 1770s and 1780s as scientists sought to understand Europe's
own place in global human history and tried to divine what might lie in the
darkness ahead.
Angelo Cattaneo, European University Institute
(cattaneo@iue.it)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Molly
Pitcher
Johannes Regiomontanus, Nicolaus Germanus, and
Albrecht Drer as Readers of Ptolemy's Geography: Towards an Analysis of the
Links between Map Projections and Perspective in the Renaissance
This paper defines
the relationships between the theory of perspective in Alberti's De pictura and
fifteenth-century reception of Ptolemaic map projections, placing the
historical and theoretical links between the two in Regiomontanus' Annotationes
Joannis De Regio Monte, in errores commissos a Jacobo Angelo in traslatione sua
('Notes on
Jacopo Angeli's translation of the Geography'), in the Dedication of Donnus Nicolaus Germanus to
the Duke Borso d'Este, and, finally, in three early sixteenth century
representations (one by Albrecht Drer) of the third Ptolemaic projection. It
is important to underline that the paper will not deal with the investigation
of the theoretical and conceptual links and similarities between map projections
and perspective. It will instead concentrate on the way in which Ptolemaic map
projections were incorporated into humanistic knowledge. In other words, it
investigates what kind of mental - and linguistic - frameworks were used to
understand and concretely use Ptolemaic map projections in the Renaissance. The
analysis of the way in which Regiomontanus, Donnus Nicolaus Germanus and Drer
understood Ptolemaic grids and projections has made it possible to argue that,
in the early Renaissance phase of reception of Ptolemy's Geography, the Ptolemaic issue of
"depicting the image of the oecumene in an armillary sphere" (Geography, VII, 6) was understood and used
not only within the mental framework of geometrical perspective, but as a geometric
perspective projection in itself. Ptolemy paid great attention on the issue of
visualisation. Ptolemy introduced the second and third map projections for the
specific purpose of increasing the resemblance of maps depicted on flat
surfaces to the "visual perception of a globe" (Geography, I.22; VII, 6.). His approach
did not go unnoticed by fifteenth and sixteenth-century readers of the Geography. Johannes Regiomontanus used a
pictorial exemplification and Alberti's perspective concepts of radius
centricus and of
pyramidis radiosae in order to explain and define the position of the spectator
in the third Ptolemaic projection (Regiomontanus, Annotationes, c.Q Vr, 1474). Donnus Nicolaus
Germanus, in the drawing of the planisphere in the Dedication to Borso d'Este that opened his
manuscripts codes of the Geography, explained that he had chosen Ptolemy's second map
projection for "artistic reasons" (Dedication to Duke Borso d'Este: Illustrissimo
principi ac domino Borsio, duci Mutine ac regii, Marchioni Estensi Rodigque
comiti Donnus Nicholaus Germanus, ca. 1460). The 1525 Strasbourg edition of the Geography with Drer's woodcut provides a
most interesting case of reception of Ptolemy's theory of projections: the
image of the cartographic grid inside the ringed globe, with its Western and
Eastern borders shrinking to the edges in perfect accord with the rules of
perspective, is the clearest example of an interpretation of the third
Ptolemaic map projection in harmony with the theory of perspective. Therefore,
S. Edgerton was probably misguided in his claim that Brunelleschi's great
achievement in architecture and Alberti's in the theory of painting were that
they [...] could apply [Ptolemy's] grid metaphorically and aesthetically in
their art." From reading Regiomontanus's Annotationes and Niccolaus Germanus' Dedication, and gazing at Drer's woodcut it
is possible to argue the opposite: that during the Renaissance Ptolemaic
projections (especially the third) could be mainly understood through the
symbolic form of perspective.
Elizabeth Mary Cavicchi, Dibner Institute
(elizabeth_cavicchi@post.harvard.edu)
Saturday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Cambridge
Finding the Body in the Circuit: Historical and
Reconstructive Experiments with a Spiraled Conductor
Human bodies are
always part of the experiments done in science, although the body's inclusion -
and its risk -- may not be explicitly apparent to the experimenter, or others
who may be affected. Standard lab
practice today includes safety precautions -- which sometimes fail. It was different in the nineteenth
century; an experimenter's body could be both detector, and subject, in
research. For Harvard medical
student Charles Grafton Page in 1836, the shocks he took from one hand, through
his body to the other, were a way of sensing the high tension electricity that
arose in his homemade spiraled conductor. He felt shocked only when battery current stopped
flowing in the spiral. Page's
experimenting went further: he put
the battery's connectors and his body across different spans of the spiral,
independent of each other. This
showed something startling: the
shock's sudden electricity extended into parts of spiral that were beyond where
the battery's direct current went.
The spiral filled with an electricity that could feel painful; Page
viewed this as a prospective medical treatment. Reproducing his novel historical effect takes a different
form under today's lab practices.
The oscilloscope substitutes for the body as a detector; flashlight
batteries replace the acid cells.
Even so, high voltages arise within the winds of my hand-wound spiral -
and are recorded by the oscilloscope.
However I did not observe some voltage increases that Page
described. This raised the
question about whether the body might be operative in affecting the
circuit. To check this out, I
added an electrical analogue to the human body, into the circuit. It changed the shape of the voltage
signals. The body's interactive
role in experiment, inferred here, portends something further: new evidence about past practices may
emerge when the methods used in replicating historical experiments differ from
those employed in the original case.
Kevin Chang, Academia Sinica (kchang@sinica.edu.tw)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Haym
Saloman
Legitimacy and Social Order: Johann Franz Buddeus'
Dissertation on Toleration and Alchemy
Should alchemy be
tolerated by the republic? That was the title and the central question of a
dissertation (1702) supervised by the Pietist philosopher and theologian Johann
Franz Buddeus (1667-1729). The author of the dissertation approached his
question by reconstructing a history of alchemy, offering an epistemological
investigation on the truth of metallic transmutation, and making a political
argument on how alchemical imposters should be punished with a view to
maintaining social order. Though deeming the art of gold-making potentially
dangerous and its practitioners often deceptive, the author nevertheless
accommodated a space for good alchemy. This paper will contextualize Buddeus'
dissertation and examine its historical, epistemological and social analysis of
the legitimacy of alchemical practice.
Alex Checkovich, University of Pennsylvania
(acheckov@hotmail.com)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Molly
Pitcher
Mapping as a Land Use: Geographical Knowledge and the
Development of the United States, 1900-1933
The nineteenth
century with its heroic explorers is often regarded as the golden age of
American cartography. Yet after
people like Fremont and Powell had sketched the nation's basic physical and
topographic characteristics, those contours still had to be filled in. There were some 3,000,000 square miles
of country in the United States, but at the turn of the century their specific
forest, soil, and geographic contents were very nearly blank. This paper explains how a related
family of applied field scientists advanced their own disciplines and careers
by filling in those gaps. It does
so by adopting a broadly geographical perspective. The family emerged just as Turner's frontier of western
settlement dissolved. Now the
order of the day became intensive settlement, a form of land use that required
equally intensive knowledge of the land.
Field scientists who worked in new bureaus (the Forest Service and the
Soil Survey) and in new academic departments (geography and land economics)
provided that knowledge by mapping the land with unprecedented precision and
detail. In the first three decades
of the twentieth century they pioneered a host of special-purpose maps, many of
which remain familiar: forest and soil type maps, land valuation and recreation
site maps, land-use maps and regional classifications. The geographical knowledge embodied in
their maps facilitated the on-going settlement and exploitation - the
development - of American lands.
Intensive mapping itself thus emerged as a land-use strategy for applied
field scientists, one they found particularly appropriate for the historical
geographical conditions of a developing, post-frontier nation.
Tobias Cheung, REHSEIS, Universit Paris VII
(tobias@paris7.jussieu.fr)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Crispus
Attucks
The 'Mechanisator' and its Environment: Functional
Order in Jakob von Uexkll's Protoplasmic Theory
Jakob von Uexklls Theoretical
Biology (1909), as well as Hans Drieschs Philosophy of the Organic (1908),
belongs to the so called neo-vitalism in the first half of the 20th century.
Recently, Uexklls experimental settings to prove organismic subjectivity have
been discussed in biosemiotics (Kulevi 1998) and as an example for holistic
biological theories that foreshadow the Nazi period (Harrington 1996). However,
much less has been said about Uexklls protoplasmic theory and its relation to
the functional order of organisms. Uexklls concept of functional order covers
all levels of the living world: from the cell activity to the activity of the
organism as a whole, and from the individual world (or the Umwelt) of a
single organism to the interorganismic world of many. The functional orders of
each level result basically from the relation between impulse series and a
vital factor in the protoplasm. The vital factor is a property of the
nucleus. It is responsible for the edification (Erbauung), the management
(Betriebsleitung) and the re-establishment (Wiederherstellung) of the cell.
Uexkll calls this factor Mechanisator. From cells to their environments,
Uexkll tries to demonstrate how the operational mode of the Mechanisator is
initiated through specific impulse series that result from the dynamic
interaction between receptors and effectors. Uexklls Umwelten are thus
inside and outside of the organism. They depend on the physiological
differentiation of functional circles. Beginning with the protoplasm, I will
reconstruct the different levels of this differentiation.
Stephen Clucas, Birkbeck College, University of
London (s.clucas@english.bbk.ac.uk)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm President's
Ballroom B
'Full Satisfaction for your Ease': Natural Philosophy,
Patronage and the Service Ethos in the Northumberland Circle
In this paper I examine the patronage structures of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century natural philosophy through a single test case - the intellectual circle surrounding Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland (1564-1631), which included the mathematicians and natural philosophers Thomas Hariot, Walter Warner, Nathaniel Torporley and Robert Hues. Through an examination of a series of 'patronage events' between 1600 and 1619 (involving the presentations of manuscipt work on atomism, mechanics and hydrostatics) I suggest that the natural philosophers in Percy's circle present their work in ways which closely relate to the service ethos of patronage and household employment, with a particular emphasis on face-to-face interactions and the conveying of information 'viva voce'. Although the traditional historiography of the period has tended to overlook these more informal interactions - looking instead for evidence of 'proto-institutions' or 'formal circles' - I argue that the idea of a client's 'satisfaction' of his