Scientific Revolution

This paper discusses the topic of evaluating systems for health and entertainment when specifically targeting the older adult population. Building upon and extending on two previous studies that used a well-known discount usability evaluation method, heuristic evaluation, as well as a list of heuristics specifically created to evaluate smartphone apps that keep older adults' needs and characteristics in mind, this paper presents the assessment of the previous aggregated list of heuristics by ten experts after using it. Results show that the list of heuristics used in our previous studies does receive a positive assessment by the ten evaluators in terms of their appropriateness, completeness, usefulness, and clarity. Moreover, this paper reinforces that despite being a conventional and mature method, heuristic evaluation does offers valuable feedback regarding user interface flaws.

Images of the virtuous hero Hercules and the crowned King Atlas offered considerable potential for legitimising the new astronomy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The accomplishments of Hercules, a seeker after virtue, with his exceptional learning, his role as disseminator of knowledge, his significance as an example of ideal manhood and, in addition to all, his achievement of immortality, invited comparison with the endeavours of astronomers. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Hercules and Atlas appear as the spiritual authorities of the discipline, and each was called into use to symbolise both the old and the new astronomy. Both figures embodied qualities that were decisive in struggles for patronage: they were politicised, especially Hercules, and used to legitimise claims to power.

Over 40 years ago, I put forward a new philosophy of science based on the argument that physics, in only ever accepting unified theories, thereby makes a substantial metaphysical presupposition about the universe, to the effect it possesses an underlying unity.  I argued that a new conception of scientific method is required to subject this problematic presupposition to critical attention so that it may be improved as science proceeds.  This view has implications for the study of the metaphysics of science.  The view has however been ignored by recent contributions to the field.  I indicate broader implications of the view, and consider reasons why the view has been neglected.

Professor Mumford has contributed significantly to the information system (IS) field. Among her achievements and pioneering thinking is the development of an integrated methodology for systems implementation named Effective Technical and Human Implementation of Computer Systems (ETHICS) that incorporates job design as part of the systems planning and implementation effort. This study questions why ETHICS initially rose in popularity and then declined over the years. To answer this question, we apply Latour's (1999) five-loop framework to describe the formation of science. The findings reveal that Mumford held and aligned many heterogeneous actors and resources that together contributed to the shaping of ETHICS. As the content of ETHICS was shaped by the intertwining of many elements, when some of these elements later changed and undermined their previous alignment, the content of ETHICS was not reshaped, and hence it lost its status and declined. The paper ends by drawing more general lessons for IS research.

This essay reconstructs the story of hidden collaborations between the Amsterdam bookseller Johannes Janssonius and the Roman Inquisition in 1660. It provides evidence that the papacy tacitly permitted the circulation of an explicitly Copernican book at a surprisingly early date and that the Protestant publisher was eager to curry favor with the Holy Office by secretly submitting texts to Catholic censorship. Building on recent scholarship that depicts Catholic censors as mediators between the Church and Italian authors, the essay argues that, in the second half of the seventeenth century, they came to play a similar role in an international, multiconfessional context. Censorship should not be construed merely as an external force, impeding the creation and communication of knowledge; it was an integral component of the European in- formation order, shaping scholarship and how it moved. The Holy Office was a node in the Republic of Letters.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/702875
https://www.facebook.com/notes/isis-journal/interview-with-daniel-stolzenberg/2179868515453481/

This paper explores R. Jacob Emden's surprising quest for the knowledge of alchemy. This important eighteenth-century rabbinic leader searched for ancient books in the library of Göttingen University, sought living experts and read original alchemical works in German. His sustained interest in alchemy reflects an historical phenomenon far deeper than his personal curiosity. By delving into his forgotten 1736 Igeret bikoret, comparing it to his other writings, and then contextualizing it within contemporary European medical discourse, I wish to use the quarrel between competing medical world views, so typical of the early modern era, to understand R. Jacob Emden's alternative, esoteric path to modernity and the specific ties it reveals between theology, law and medical practice.

The scientific revolution saw a shift from the natural philosophy of music to the science of acoustics. Joseph Sauveur (1653–1716), an early pioneer in acoustics, determined that science as understood in the eighteenth century could not address the fundamental problems of music, particularly the problem of consonance. Building on Descartes, Mersenne, and Huygens especially, Sauveur drew a sharp divide between sound and music, recognizing the former as a physical phenomenon obeying mechanical and mathematical principles and the latter as an inescapably subjective and unquantifiable perception. While acoustics grew prominent in the Académie des sciences, music largely fell out of the scientific discourse, becoming primarily practiced art rather than natural philosophy. This study illuminates what was considered proper science at the dawn of the Enlightenment and why one particular branch of natural philosophy—music—did not make the cut.

This paper offers a novel way of reconstructing conceptual change in empirical theories. Changes occur in terms of the structure of the dimensions—that is to say, the conceptual spaces—underlying the conceptual framework within which a given theory is formulated. Five types of changes are identified: (1) addition or deletion of special laws, (2) change in scale or metric, (3) change in the importance of dimensions, (4) change in the separability of dimensions, and (5) addition or deletion of dimensions. Given this classification, the conceptual development of empirical theories becomes more gradual and rationalizable. Only the most extreme type—replacement of dimensions—comes close to a revolution. The five types are exemplified and applied in a case study on the development within physics from the original Newtonian mechanics to special relativity theory.

This article pursues the question of the origin of the left-Hegelian concept of immanent transcendence that emerged in the 19 th-century. Whereas some contemporary critical theorists apparently understand the concept as deriving from a religious origin, evolutionary and historical considerations would seem to indicate that more might be involved. Evolutionarily, the origin of the concept can be traced to the civilisation-founding cognitive achievement that marks the emergence of the current version of the human species and the concomitant cultural explosion during the Palaeolithic period. In this context, the cultural consolidation of the newly acquired metarepresentational capacity by language and visual symbolisation or art preceded religion by a considerable elapse of time. As one among a number of sociocultural practices, it could only have made a partial contribution to the conditions for the emergence of the concept. Historically, the thought of the key 19 th-century left-Hegelians Marx and Peirce was fundamentally shaped, not by religion, but rather by the core modern innovation of the 17 th and 18 th century – the new mathematical-scientific-philosophical understanding of infinity as real – which gained primacy by significantly impacting on relevant late 18th-and 19th-century intellectual developments, including laying down the parameters of classical social thought in general and left-Hegelianism in particular. Since the competing religious understanding of infinity, despite having left traces on modern validity concepts such as truth, justice and truthfulness, remained shrouded in indefinite incomprehensibility, it could at best continue to play only the role of an identity-securing, identity-cultivating and motivational source for some, not all. As such, it did not contribute to the 19 th-century left-Hegelian concept. Introduction An important outcome of certain contributions by Jürgen Habermas (1992, 1999a, 2002) and Axel Honneth (2007) in the late 1980s and 1990s was the insight that immanent transcendence is the key meta-theoretical concept of the left-Hegelian tradition. 1 This understanding was reinforced by the debate between Nancy Fraser and Honneth (2003) in the early years of the 21st century. A major step in grasping the key status of the concept is the appreciation that it stands for the metaproblematic of left-Hegelianism insofar as it provides the overall framework for its principle of practically available accumulated rational potential. Relevant in the present context is that the concept in general reflects the basic conceptual parameters that shaped the context in which classical sociology emerged. In a nutshell, it refers to a process with two moments in which historical-constructive activities and their products are given form by structures that had been generated previously by such activities and have become stabilised for the time being, leaving open the possibility of tension and conflict between the two moments which need to be practically worked through. Despite the fact that the relation between immanent transcendence and left-Hegelianism was discussed at some length in the course of the Fraser-Honneth debate, however, much remains to be clarified if this concept and its significance are to be adequately understood.

Paradigms and revolutions are popular concepts in science studies and beyond, yet their meaning is notoriously vague and their existence is widely disputed. Drawing on recent developments in agent-based modeling and scientometric data this paper offers a precise conceptualization of paradigms and their dynamics, as well as a number of hypotheses that could in principle be used to test for the existence of scientific revolutions in scientometric data.

Although several of Descartes’s disciples established occasionalism as the natural outcome of Cartesianism, Pierre-Sylvain Régis forcefully resisted this conclusion by developing an account of secondary causes in which God does not immediately intervene in the natural world. In order to understand this view, it has been argued that Régis melds Aquinas’s concurrentism with the new, mechanist natural philosophy defended in Cartesian physics. In this paper, I contend that such a reading of Régis’s position is misleading for our understanding of both his account of secondary causality and the relationship between medieval debates and seventeenth century natural philosophy. I show that Régis’s account of secondary causality denies two fundamental features at the core of the account proposed by Aquinas, namely that God acts immediately in nature and that secondary causes are per se causes. I contend that Régis’s view more closely resembles a specific account of artificial instrumental causality developed by Duns Scotus. The comparison with Scotus shows that Régis is still dealing with conceptual tools that can be traced back to the scholastic tradition. Yet, Régis implements these tools to establish an account of causation that is fundamentally irreconcilable with scholastic natural philosophy.

Alexandre Koyre´ was one of the most prominent historians of science of the twentieth century. The standard interpretation of Koyre´ is that he falls squarely within the internalist camp of historians of science—that he focuses on the history of the ideas themselves, eschewing cultural and sociological interpretations regarding the influence of ideologies and institutions on the development of science. When we read
what Koyre´ has to say about his historical studies (and most of what others have said about them), we find him embracing and championing this Platonic view of his work. Ultimately I think this interpretation of Koyre´’s history of science is lopsided and in need of correction. I claim, rather, that a careful reading of Koyre´’s work suggests that a tension exists between internal and external methodological considerations. The external considerations stem from Koyre´’s commitment to the unity of human thought and the influence he admits that the ‘transscientifiques’ (philosophy, metaphysics, religion) have on the development of science. I suggest in conclusion then, that if we are to put a philosophical label on his work, rather than ‘Platonist’, as has been the custom, ‘Hegelian’ makes a better fit.

Almost 25 years have passed since Shechtman discovered quasicrystals, and 15 years since the Commission on Aperiodic Crystals of the International Union of Crystallography put forth a provisional definition of the term crystal to mean “any solid having an essentially discrete diffraction diagram.” Have we learned enough about crystallinity in the last 25 years, or do we need more time to explore additional physical systems? There is much confusion and contradiction in the literature in using the term crystal. Are we ready now to propose a permanent definition for crystal to be used by all? I argue that time has come to put a sense of order in all the confusion.

This article outlines how conceptual spaces theory applies to modeling changes of scientific frameworks when these are treated as spatial structures rather than as linguistic entities. The theory is briefly introduced and five types of changes are presented. It is then contrasted with Michael Friedman’s neo-Kantian account that seeks to render Kuhn’s “paradigm shift” as a communicatively rational historical event of conceptual development in the sciences. Like Friedman, we refer to the transition from Newtonian to relativistic mechanics as an example of “deep conceptual change.” But we take the communicative rationality of radical conceptual change to be available prior to the philosophical meta-paradigms that Friedman deems indispensable for this purpose.

The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century not only revolutionized the English world view, it also brought about profound changes on the level of discourse. Through a process of grammatical metaphorization (Halliday and Martin 1993), primary experience was linguistically reconstrued to create a picture of a static objective universe from which all subjectivity was effectively removed. The Catholic cultures of Continental Europe were initially resistant to the scientific worldview, remaining loyal for political and religious reasons to the earlier humanistic model (Bennett 2007a, 2007b). Nevertheless, by the late 20th century, with the pressures of globalization, most had developed a scientific discourse of their own, essentially calqued from the English model. The fact that this discourse was borrowed however, rather than resulting from an internal process of evolution, has led to certain grammatical and rhetorical inconsistencies, which raise problems for translation. This paper discusses some of the technical issues besetting the English translator of Portuguese scientific texts, including difficulties related to nominalizations, impersonal verb structures and the intrusion of features from the traditional discourse. It also considers ethical and epistemological questions resulting from the process of linguistic colonization (Phillipson 1992, Pennycook 1994).

Incommensurability was Kuhn’s worst mistake.  If it is to be found anywhere in science, it would be in physics.  But revolutions in theoretical physics all embody theoretical unification.  Far from obliterating the idea that there is a persisting theoretical idea in physics, revolutions do just the opposite: they all actually exemplify the persisting idea of underlying unity.  Furthermore, persistent acceptance of unifying theories in physics when empirically more successful disunified rivals can always be concocted means that physics makes a persistent implicit assumption concerning unity.  To put it in Kuhnian terms, underlying unity is a paradigm for paradigms.  We need a conception of science which represents problematic assumptions concerning the physical comprehensibility and knowability of the universe in the form of a hierarchy, these assumptions becoming less and less substantial and more and more such that their truth is required for science, or the pursuit of knowledge, to be possible at all, as one goes up the hierarchy.  This hierarchical conception of science has important Kuhnian features, but also differs dramatically from the view Kuhn expounds in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
In this paper, I compare and contrast these two views in a much more detailed way than has been done hitherto.  I show how the hierarchical view can be construed to emerge from Kuhn’s view as it is modified to overcome objections.  I argue that the hierarchical conception of science is to be preferred to Kuhn’s view.

Galileo's fateful confrontation with the Holy Office in 1633 is often taken to mark the start of the Scientific Revolution, the moment when a whole new approach to knowledge began to take over the western world. Among the many repercussions of this great epistemological shift was the development of a new “transparent” type of discourse, felt to reflect reality more directly than the elaborate verbal edifices of the Scholastics. Today, the “authoritative plain style”, as Lawrence Venuti calls it, is so prevalent in English academic and factual writing that knowledge configured otherwise is rarely allowed past the cultural gatekeepers. There are countries, however, where, for historical and cultural reasons, the Scientific Revolution never really took place. In Spain and Portugal, for example, the anthropocentric paradigm favoured by the Christian humanist tradition has persisted well into the twenty-first century, and as a result many of the academic texts produced in these countries operate according to an entirely different philosophy of language. This paper discusses some of the linguistic and ideological problems of translating such scholarship into a form that is publishable in English.

This book seeks to understand the effects of the current information revolution on universities by examining the effects of two previous information revolutions: Gutenberg’s invention of printing in 1450 and the Scientific Revolution from the mid fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. The book reviews significant changes since the early modern period in universities’ students, libraries, curriculum, pedagogy, lectures,
assessment, research, and the dissemination of these changes across the globe. It argues that significant changes in the transmission and dissemination of disciplinary knowledge are shaped by the interaction of three factors: financial, technological, and physical resources; the nature, structure and level of knowledge; and the methods available for
managing knowledge.

According to Enactivism, cognition should be understood as an organism's interaction with its environment. Radical Enactivism adds that basic minds do not entertain representations and hence that cognition should not be cashed out in representational terms. Some claim, getting rid of representations amounts to a  revolutionary alternative to standard ways of thinking about cognition. To emphasize the impact, proponents claim that this 'radicalization' may be applied to all enactivist friendly views, including predictive processing. In this paper, we will show that this is not the case. After introducing the problem (section 1), we will argue (section 2) that radicalizing predictive processing does not add value to this view. After this (section 3), we will analyze whether or not radical Enactivism can count as a revolution within cognitive science and conclude that it cannot. Finally, in section 4 we will claim that cognitive science is better off when embracing heterogeneity.

From 1900 onwards, scientists and novelists have explored the contours of a future society based on the use of ‘‘anthropotechnologies’’ (techniques applicable to human beings for the purpose of performance enhancement ranging from training and education to genome-based biotechnologies). Gradually but steadily, the technologies involved migrated from (science) fiction into scholarly publications, and from ‘‘utopia’’ (or ‘‘dystopia’’) into science. Building on seminal ideas borrowed from Nietzsche, Peter Sloterdijk has outlined the challenges inherent in this development. Since time immemorial, and at least since the days of Plato’s Academy, human beings have been interested in possibilities for (physical or mental) performance enhancement. We are constantly trying to improve ourselves, both collectively and individually, for better or for worse. At present, however, new genomics-based technologies are opening up new avenues for self-amelioration. Developments in research facilities using animal models may to a certain extent be seen as expeditions into our own future. Are we able to address the bioethical and biopolitical issues awaiting us? After analyzing and assessing Sloterdijk’s views, attention will shift to a concrete domain of application, namely sport genomics. For various reasons, top athletes are likely to play the role of genomics pioneers by using personalized genomics information to adjust diet, life-style, training schedules and doping intake to the strengths and weaknesses of their personalized genome information. Thus, sport genomics may be regarded as a test bed where the contours of genomics-based self-management are tried out.

In the early, more mathematical, phase of the Scientific Revolution (up to about 1610, before forces, experiments ...) a crucial role was played by diagrams, both on paper and in the imagination. Medieval culture had made full use of diagrams - family trees, wheels of fortune, machine diagrams, memory theatres ... That gave training in the kind of thought experiments that allowed Galileo to make his breakthroughs in the science of motion. From 1600, philosophy too moved "inside", with the Cartesian emphasis on the inner point of view.

of Col,owrs is rightly considered a la¡rdmark in the history of analytical chemistry. In that work, Boyle described a number of simple but elegant experiments which ultimately gave chemists a powerful tool for determining the composition of compounds. He found, for example, that the common acids turned the blue syrup of violets red, and that alkalis turned it green. Subsequent experiments with other vegetable juices, including privet berries (Ligustrwm tulgare), buckthorn berries, (Rhamnus cathørticø), cornflowers (Centauris cyønis), and turnsole (Crozoþhora. tinctoria), revealed similar colour changes when treated with acids and alkalis.l Although some of these reactions had been noticed earlier, Boyle was the first to recognize the signiûcance of these substances as chemical reagents, for he alone observed that al,l acids turned such blue vegetable juices red, and lhat øIl alkalis turned them green. Furthermore, he noticed that some substances caused no colour change; these Boyle classified as neutral, neither acid nor alkaline, and thus "effectively disposed of the theory that all substances were one or the other".2 Recent scholarship has shown that an extensive literature on the analysis of aqueous solutions existed prior to Boyle's work, notably in the writings of physicians on the medicinal virtues of spa waters. Professor Allen Debus, for example, pointed out that Edward Jorden (r569-t6gz), an English physician trained at Padua, observed that bases turned scarlet cloth blue, while acids turned it red again; the colour change of tincture of violets and of rose leaves in the presence of oil of vitriol was also noticed in the early seventeenth century.8 Curiously, these writings are not mentioned by Boyle, and as Debus suggests,

Academic and corporate research departments alike face a crucial dilemma: to exploit known frameworks or to explore new ones; to specialize or to innovate? Here I show that these two conflicting epistemic desiderata are sufficient to explain pluralistic ignorance and its boom-and-bust-like dynamics. The robustness of this result suggests that pluralistic ignorance is an inherent feature rather than a threat to the rationality of epistemic communities.

This volume raises essential epistemological questions in a text poised to make a lasting contribution to the scholarly community. Fisch develops the opposing insights of philosophers Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. Fisch probes the question of how scientific theories change to develop a more complete theory of science as a rational endeavor. Ultimately, Fisch follows more in the footsteps of Kuhn, grounding his analysis on the understanding that in philosophy, questioning is the piety of thought. In considering how scienti??c theories evolve, Fisch further asks such questions as these: What is the role of ambiguity and indecision in this change process? How does the praxis of science depend on scientific frameworks? How can one decide when and how to reasonably replace one theory with another? How can a scientist be persuaded to accept a new paradigm? What role does outside criticism play in the process of perspective shifts leading to transformative self-criticism? Overall, this is a remarkable book on critical thinking and the philosophy and history of science. Highly recommended. (David B. Levy, Choice) Deeply informed by the history of science and argued with philosophical rigor, this tour de force demonstrates the surprising yet essential role played in scientific revolutions by dithering. (Paul Franks, Yale University) Scientific thought always takes place in the context of framework assumptions that determine what constitutes rationality. But if reason itself is local to a framework, how can such frameworks evolve and change in a rational way? Drawing on the recent work in the theory of action, Menachem Fisch shows how external criticism can lead to an internal destabilization of a scientist's deepest convictions, and eventually to reasoned change. This book will destabilize the way we have thought about this problem for the last half century and more, and lead us to a new understanding of scientific rationality. (Daniel Garber, Princeton University) Creatively Undecided, as all great philosophical works, is both theoretically impeccable and meaningful for critically facing present-day ethical and political dilemmas. Fisch answers apparently abstract and cold questions pertaining to the philosophy of science and the history of mathematics, but-as a matter of fact-has something crucially important to say about one of the most pressing issues in our globalized and politically-torn world: how to self-criticize 'from within' our normative frameworks when challenged by competing cultures who confront us 'from without.' Fisch ends the book by testing his philosophical theses concerning agency and rational deliberation with a historical case: a masterful narrative of the contested reception of George Peacock's "symbolical algebra" in early ninteeth century England. (Niccolò Guicciardini, University of Bergamo) According to Fisch's argument in this book, scientists are critical and as such require a detached attitude towards their intellectual productions; however, scientists are also attached to their intellectual productions as integral to their self-identity, and hence suspend criticism for commitment. Fisch's own approach to the historiography and philosophy of science is binocularseeing the world of science through both poles of the detached-attached spectrum; or bi-cognitiveinterpreting the world of science with the two dimensions of detached/attached axes for Fisch's intellectual coordinate system for the intellectual biographies of scientists in their specific scientific communities. (Sheldon Richmond, Transversal) Creatively Undecided is an innovative work that can breathe new life into the literature concerned with the nature of scientific change. (Chris Dragos, Metascience)

Amongst the many narrative strategies in the recent " global turn " in the history of science, one commonly finds attempts to complement the single European story by multiplying histories of knowledge-making in as many different regional and cultural contexts as possible. Other strategies include attempts to generalize the " Needham Question " of why the Scientific Revolution occurred only in early-modern Europe to the exclusion of other parts of the world, or to challenge the diffusionist vision of the spread of modern science from Europe by attempting to show that non-European scientific traditions already had an understanding of recent European discoveries. These latter strategies seek simply to pluralize the Scientific Revolution without actually unpacking the latter concept itself. This article seeks firstly to show that the " Scientific Revolution " was in fact a Cold War invention intended to bring the freshly decolonized world into the ambit of the West by limiting the conception of modern science to Europe-specific activities and thus delegitimizing other knowledge domains and using the term as a spatially circumscribed chronological marker. Using a broader understanding of scientific activity in the early modern period, and mobilizing relational methodologies, such as circulatory and connected historiographies, the paper then reexamines a well-known history of the Hortus Malabaricus, one of the most celebrated seventeenth-century botanical works, to show the short-and long-range knowledge circulations, intercultural interactions and connections involved in its making to bring out the global nature of scientific activity of the period and illustrate relational approaches to global history.

Kropotkin's commitment to a concept of evolution has often been viewed as a problematic aspect of his political thought, and the adoption of the evolutionary metaphor has led to the marginalisation of his historical works. Mainstream readings suggest that he adhered to a fatalist position, seeing anarchism as an inevitable future state, revealed by a careful reading of the historical record. It is argued here that Kropotkin's use of evolution is more subtle. A closer analysis of his historical writing reveals that he did not adopt a straightforward notion of progression, and that reaction played a central role in his analysis of history. Thus, for Kropotkin, anarchism was not the inevitable culmination of the historical process, and active revolutionary activity remained essential. Moreover, Kropotkin did not see anarchism as representing an end to history. As a potential mode of future organisation Kropotkin's image of anarchism enshrined a principle of flux, concomitant with an anarchist emphasis on maximising freedom. Far from conflicting with his anarchist politics, Kropotkin's approach to history reflects its central principles.

The image of the mythological shape-changing sea-god Proteus was used in several contexts relating to natural philosophy in early modern Britain. These uses derived from different ancient sources, including Homer, Plato, and Diodorus Siculus. Proteus's use as an image of nature itself, most common among writers on alchemy and natural philosophy, disproves the common idea that images of nature were always female. Coercive relations between the natural philosopher and nature were not dependent on gendering nature as female, but were also expressed through the metaphor of the "binding of Proteus." Proteus was treated by mythographers as representing the investigator of nature, and by antioccultists as an image of the magician making false claims to natural knowledge. The use of the image of Proteus in relation to natural philosophy declined in the late seventeenth century with the rise of mechanical philosophy. IDEAS ABOUT NATURE IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD were often expressed through metaphor. This article discusses the varied uses of one classical image, that of sea-god Proteus, in relation to natural philosophy in early modern Britain, roughly from the late Elizabethan era to the Restoration. Proteus came into writing about natural philosophy and natural knowledge from a number of sources, including mythographies, alchemical writings, and antioccultist polemic. Not as well known as the mother figure Natura, or the clockwork universe of the mechanical philosophers, Proteus was a surprisingly common image, revealing the importance of the humanistic and classical vocabulary in natural-philosophical writing. Examining the uses of Proteus, both by natural philosophers and by writers who were not natural philosophers themselves but connected Proteus with natural philosophy also reveals that the assertion of much recent, feminist-inspired scholarship that personifications of nature are always female is greatly exaggerated.' Proteus, who despite his shape-changing ability was never considered a sexually ambiguous deity, was used as a symbol for nature, showing that nature was not necessarily gendered 1"From ancient to modern times, nature-the object of scientific study-has been conceived as unquestionably female"

This paper argues that Samuel Clarke's account of agent causation (i) provides a philosophical basis for moderate voluntarism, and (ii) both leads to and benefits from the acceptance of partial occasionalism as a model of causation for material beings. Clarke's account of agent causation entails that for an agent to be properly called an agent (i.e. causally efficacious), it is essential that the agent is free to choose whether to act or not. This freedom is compatible with the existence of conceptually necessary connections. Hence, Clarke can harmonize God's freedom of choosing with the existence of eternal and necessary relations among things. Moreover, in Clarke's account, only intelligent entities can be properly understood as efficacious causes. Beings deprived of intelligence are not agents or efficacious causes at all and their effects are thus the result of the immediate action of some intelligent being operating upon them.

T N 1792, wRrrrNG nl r¡re Eucycr,opÉorn MÉrnoorqun, the French polymath I Nicolas Masson de Morvilliers posed a question that, for better or for worse, framed the historiography of Spanish science for nearly two centuries. "What do we owe to Spain?" Masson asked in a voice brimming with sarcasm and contempt. "In two centuries, in four, or even in six, what has she done for Europe?"l Ostensibly, Masson's subject was not the history of science but the geography arrd population of Spain, themes that gave his polemic a pronounced racist character. For, according to Masson, the source ofSpain's defrciency was the character of its people, who, in spite of their admirable virtues of patience and resolve, were ignorant,lazy, and superstitious. Moreover, according to Masson, Spain's futile government, bigoted clergy, and tyralnical Inquisition conspired to condemn the country to remain hopelessly backwa¡d. Particularly with regard to science, he concluded, Spain had become "the most ignorant nation in Europe". To Masson, Spain was the country that typifred everything against which the philosophes were struggling.

"Sites of Exposure is one of the best works in phenomenology to cross my desk in years. In this philosophically sophisticated and yet reader-friendly book, Russon examines what it is like to exist as a person. His central thesis is that our experience of ourselves, i. e., our sense of selfhood, is always constituted in being exposed to an outside, and he explores in rich detail how we seek a home for ourselves along with a sense of personal meaning in our encounter with the world—in our personal relationships, art, and politics. Russon is a consummate phenomenologist, and I recommend his book with great enthusiasm!" --Robert Stolorow

"Thoughtful, insightful, interdisciplinary, multifaceted, wide-ranging, and culturally engaging, this book casts a wide net. Russon (philosophy, Univ. of Guelph, Canada) deploys art, literature, and religious traditions to show that philosophy is relevant to living because it raises important fundamental questions about matters that endow life with purpose—matters such as freedom, meaning, cultural diversity, being at home in the world, and the stakes of political life (bios politikos). The author provides a unifed vision of a philosophy of art, history, and culture, and he avoids academic jargon in a successful attempt to make the book accessible to all in different but relevant practical ways. Articulating a philosophy for living life via experience, Russon argues for being at home in the world through family, community, and language to experience freedom: each person—in his or her own social, cultural, political, and geographic context—can experience expanded consciousness navigating life and avoid the risks of indifference, nihilism, and apathy. This is a book for those interested in philosophy and cultural criticism." --Choice

“John Russon draws from a broad range of art and literature to show how philosophy speaks to the most basic and important questions in our everyday lives.  In Sites of Exposure, Russon grapples with personal experiences such as growing up and encountering death and with broader issues such as political oppression, economic exploitation, and the destruction of the natural environment to investigate how to make life meaningful.  His is cutting-edge philosophical work, illuminated by original and rigorous thinking that relies on cross-cultural communication and engagement with the richness of human cultural history.  These probing interpretations of the nature of phenomenology, the philosophy of art, history, and politics, are appropriate for students and scholars of philosophy at all levels.”  --back cover

This article is the penultimate version (thus uncorrected preprint) of my forthcoming article in the volume celebrating the tricentennial of Newton’s General Scholium. It appears in the Working Paper series of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, at: http://www.fmsh.fr/fr/diffusion-des-savoirs/28103
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The article pursues two objectives through a close reading of Newton’s 1713 General Scholium. First, it examines his relationship to the canonical mechanical philosophy, including his response to criticism of his own theory that that canonical philosophy’s require- ments motivated. Second, it presents an interpretation of Newton’s own mechanical philosophy, glimpsed in draft material for the General Scholium: he takes the natural world to be a machine operating by causal prin- ciples that arise only within systems and that require mathematical methods because they fundamentally involve interdependent and thus co-varying quantities. Newton’s realism about impressed forces links the two objectives examined.
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Le Scholium General de Newton et la philosophie méchanique
Résumé
Une lecture attentive du Scholium General de Newton permet de préciser deux points. En premier lieu, il est possible de préciser le rapport de Newton avec la philosophie mécanique canonique, y compris la réponse qu’il a donnée à ceux qui critiquaient sa théorie. En deuxième lieu, il est possible de comprendre ce qu’était la philosophie mécanique de Newton lui-même. D’après un manuscrit du Scholium Generale, il considérait que le monde naturel était une machine fonctionnant grâce à des principes causaux qui se présentent uniquement dans des systèmes et qui exigent des méthodes mathématiques car ils concernent des quantités interdépendantes et co-variantes. Le lien entre ces deux points est un réalisme quant aux forces imprimées.

Germano Maifreda, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
Renaissance Europe witnessed a surge of interest in new scientific ideas and theories. Whilst the study of this 'Scientific Revolution' has dramatically shifted our appreciation of many facets of the early-modern world, remarkably little attention has been paid to its influence upon one key area; that of economics. Through an interrogation of the relationship between economic and scientific developments in early-modern Western Europe, this book demonstrates how a new economic epistemology appeared that was to have profound consequences both at the time, and for subsequent generations.

Dr Maifreda argues that the new attention shown by astronomers, physicians, aristocrats, men of letters, travellers and merchants for the functioning of economic life and markets, laid the ground for a radically new discourse that envisioned 'economics' as an independent field of scientific knowledge. By researching the historical context surrounding this new field of knowledge, he identifies three key factors that contributed to the cultural construction of economics. Firstly, Italian Humanism and Renaissance, which promoted new subjects, methods and quantitative analysis. Secondly, European overseas expansion, which revealed the existence of economic cultures previously unknown to Europeans. Thirdly factor identified is the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century crisis of traditional epistemologies, which increasingly valued empirical scientific knowledge over long-held beliefs.

Based on a wide range of published and archival sources, the book illuminates new economic sensibilities within a range of established and more novel scientific disciplines (including astronomy, physics, ethnography, geology, and chemistry/alchemy). By tracing these developments within the wider social and cultural fields of everyday commercial life, the study offers a fascinating insight into the relationship between economic knowledge and science during the early-modern period.
Contents: Introduction; Exchange of value: value of exchange; Genealogies of value; Talking, looking, portraying the marketplace; Demanding and offering; Work, the yardstick of value; The economic system; A systemic view of nature; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.

The last 50 years in the history of life sciences are remarkable for a new important feature that looks as a great threat for their future. A profound specialization dominating in quickly developing fields of science causes a crisis of the scientific method. The essence of the method is a unity of two elements, the experimental data and the theory that explains them. To us, "fathers" of science, classically, were the creators of new ideas and theories. They were the true experts of their own theories. It is only they who have the right to say: "I am the theory". In other words, they were carriers of theories, of the theoretical knowledge. The fathers provided the necessary logical integrity to their theories, since theories in biology have still to be based on strict mathematical proofs. It is not true for sons. As a result of massive specialization, modern experts operate in very confined close spaces. They formulate particular rules far from the level of theory. The main theories of science are known to them only at the textbook level. Nowadays, nobody can say: "I am the theory". With whom, then is it possible to discuss today on a broader theoretical level? How can a classical theory--for example, the membrane one--be changed or even disproved under these conditions? How can the "sons" with their narrow education catch sight of membrane theory defects? As a result, "global" theories have few critics and control. Due to specialization, we have lost the ability to work at the experimental level of biology within the correct or appropriate theoretical context. The scientific method in its classic form is now being rapidly eroded. A good case can be made for "Membrane Theory", to which we will largely refer throughout this article.

Tres razones de la metamorfosis de las ciencias sociales en el siglo XXI Three reasons for social sciences metamorphosis in the 21st century Abstract This paper explains the process of complexification of the social sciences during the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, while it provides three reasons why this has happened. The paper claims that the human and social sciences must undergo a radical metamorphosis if they want to keep alive at all. Even though, nothing obliges that these sciences must go on existing. At the end, as an open-ended conclusion, it is pointed out how, because of the changes that express a deep crisis, how a brand-new science of the impossible has emerged. Resumen Este artículo explica la complejización de las ciencias sociales en el curso del siglo XXI, y aporta tres razones por las que este proceso ha tenido lugar. La tesis que se defiende aquí es que las ciencias sociales sufren una metamorfosis radical que deben asumir si quieren seguir existiendo. Aunque nada obliga a que tengan que seguir existiendo. Al final, en unas concusiones abiertas, se señala cómo, como consecuencia de las transformaciones en crisis, emerge una ciencia de lo imposible. Palabras clave: ciencias sociales, historia de la ciencia, epistemología, complejidad, imposibilidad. Introducción Es suficientemente sabido: las ciencias sociales nacen como el proyecto de una clase social triunfante que necesitaba explicarse y comprenderse a sí misma, y a lo diferente y lo otro con respecto a si misma. Análogamente, por ejemplo, a la novela, un invento del siglo XVIII-XIX. Este texto se divide en dos partes. De un lado, el estudio, breve, de cómo el destino de las ciencias sociales se está jugado. Y con él, pareciera, también el destino de una buena parte del mundo. A la manera de los mejores mitos, el nacimiento de las ciencias sociales marcó su destino. Hasta que se hizo posible una metamorfosis de las mismas. De otra parte, la sección principal, se trata de entender las razones de las metamorfosis de las ciencias sociales. De esta suerte, aquella parte es el pretexto para entender esta otra, pero sirve al mismo tiempo como su condición. Este texto defiende una tesis, a saber, las ciencias sociales deben metamorfosearse si quieren seguir existiendo. En efecto, lo que más ha habido en la historia de la ciencia y la cultura es una enorme mortandad de conceptos, ciencias y disciplinas. La lista sería larga e incluye al flogisto, la alquimia, el éter,

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 - 1543) - Revolutionär wider Willen
Ausstellung vom 22. Juli bis 19. Oktober 1994 im Zeiss-Großplanetarium in Berlin. Diese Ausstellung wurde konzipiert anläßlich des 450. Todestages von Copernicus und seines vor 450 Jahren in Nürnberg veröffentlichten Hauptwerks De revolutionibus. Interaktive Medien, Bücher, Bilder und astronomische Instrumente illustrieren Leben und Werk von Copernicus und den Wandel im Weltbild.

Inhalt
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 - 1543) - Revolutionär wider Willen
Inhalt - 1. Teil: Aufsätze
Gudrun WolfschmidtDer Weg zum modernen Weltbild
Einleitung 7
1. Das Weltbild der Antike 9
1.1 Geozentrisches System 9
1.2 Heliozentrische Ideen der Antike 11
2. Weltbild des Mittelalters 13
2.1 Scholastische Kosmologie 13
2.2 Kritik an Aristoteles und Ptolemaios 14
2.3 Instrumente 17
3. Zeitalter des Umbruchs 18
3.1 Erforschung neuer Welten 18
3.2 Neue Ideen und Erfindungen 19
3.3 Von der Astromedizin zur modernen Medizin 21
4. Leben und Werk des Nicolaus Copernicus 22
4.1 Studium und Reisen
4.2 Vielseitige Tätigkeit
5. Copernicus als Astronom
5.1 Instrumente und Beobachtungen
5.2 Heliozentrisches Weltbild
5.3 Interesse an der neuen Theorie
6. Wirkung des Copernicus
6.1 Tycho Brahe - Meister der Beobachtung
6.2 Johannes Keplers neue Astronomie
6.3 Galileo Galilei - Und sie bewegt sich doch
6.4 Newtons Physikalisierung der Astronomie
6.5 "Beweise" für das heliozentrische System
7. Sieben Fragen nach Copernicus
1. Warum bemerken wir nichts von der Rotationsbewegung der Erde?
2. Wie bewegen sich die Gestirne?
3. Warum bewegen sich die Gestirne?
4. Ist der Kosmos endlich oder unendlich?
5. Gibt es andere Planetensysteme mit Leben?
6. Wie ist die Stellung des Menschen im Weltall?
7. Wie ist die Welt entstanden?
Ausblick

Inhalt - 1. Teil: Aufsätze

Antikes und mittelalterliches Weltbild
Liba Taub (Chicago)
(Das Weltbild des Ptolemaios)

Heribert Nobis (München)
Die Vorbereitung der copernicanischen Wende im Mittelalter


Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
Fritz Krafft (Marburg)
(Andreas Osiander und die copernicanische Lehre/ antikes Weltbild)

Felix Schmeidler (München)
450 Jahre heliozentrische Lehre des Nicolaus Copernicus

Andreas Kühne (München)
Die Korrespondenz von Nicolaus Copernicus

Menso Folkerts (München)
(Copernicus als Mathematiker)

Gundolf Keil (Würzburg))
(Copernicus als Mediziner)

Karin Figala, Uli Petzold (München, TU)
(Copernicus, pharmaziegeschichtlich betrachtet)

P. Czartoryski (Warschau)
Die Münzschriften des Copernicus

Günther Meinhardt (Göttingen)
Nicolaus Copernicus als Währungspolitiker

Wirkungsgeschichte des Copernicus
Wolfgang Neuser (Heidelberg)
Infinitas infinitatis et finitas finitatis. Zur Logik der Argumentation im Werk Giordano Brunos (1548-1600)

Jürgen Teichmann (München)
(Galilei und das Fernrohr, Beweis der copernicanischen Lehre)

Michael Segre (München)
(Wirkung des Copernicus in Italien, insbesondere bei Galilei)

Eberhard Knobloch (Berlin)
Jesuitenastronomie im Zeitalter des Copernicus

Volker Bialas (München)
Kepler als Vollender der copernicanischen AstronomieNachfolger des Copernicus

Ivo Schneider (München)
(Newton und die Physikalisierung der copernicanischen Astronomie)

Rainer Baasner (Bonn)
(Copernicus-Rezeption in der deutschen Aufklärung
bei Chr. Wolff, J. Chr. Gottsched, G. Chr. Lichtenberg und I. Kant)

Karl Märker (München)
Moderne astronomische Weltmodelle des 20. Jahrhunderts

Inhalt - 2. Teil: Ausstellungskatlog

Gudrun WolfschmidtKatalog zur Copernicus-Ausstellungim Bayerischen Hauptstaatsarchiv
1. Das Weltbild der Antike
2. Weltbild des Mittelalters
3. Zeitalter des Umbruchs
4. Leben und Werk des Copernicus
5. Copernicus als Astronom
6. Wirkung des Copernicus

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Quellen- und Literaturverzeichnis
Bildnachweis
Namensregister
Ortsregister

The carried out analyses show the inadequacy of a widespread thesis, due to the works of John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White, on the resulting from the nature ofthese two fields conflict between science and religion. The above thesis is contradicted
by the role in the Christian theism doctrine of scientific revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries.
In the article, I present by what means in modern European cuIture the influence of the dominance of the Christian theism on the concept of science was expressed and the
relationship between science and religion as adopted by the forerunners ofmodern science. I point out that the Christian doctrine of creation was primarily a source of basic
assumptions about the existence of the natural order and the faith in the possibility of
recognizing it by men. A reference to the concept of a supernatural Creator- Lawmaker served as an explanation ofthe general characteristics ofnature. The analysis ofthe nature and attributes ofGod was also included into the scope ofthe natural philosophy. Apart from that, the Christian theism was used to justify the desirability of research, the choice
of a particular methodology, the decisions among competing theories and was a source of detailed explanations of events and features of naturaI objects. The natural theology
drew on arguments proving the existence of the Creator from natural studies. The above presented image of science in the 16th_17th centuries and the role of Christian theism at its contemporary stage of development aIIows for arguing that the
thesis on the "innate" conf1ict between science and religion, aIIegedly resulting for the nature of these two fields, is incorrect.

The seventeenth century saw radical changes to theories of vision, light, color, matter, and knowledge about animal bodies. Understanding vision in the sixteenth century is essential to grasp these changes, but here many lacunae exist. Histories of vision have focused on mathematical optics and neglected color in natural philosophy and medicine. Historians of medicine have not sufficiently analyzed works on vision and color by physicians. Finally, historians of philosophy have produced few analyses of color theory from antiquity until 1600.

My dissertation analyzes two highly important works on vision that have yet to be examined in detail by modern scholars: the natural philosopher Jacopo Zabarella's De visu, first published in his natural philosophy textbook De rebus naturalibus in 1590, and the physician and anatomist Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente's De visione, first published in 1600. Both taught at the University of Padua, at the time Europe's most prestigious medical school, and their stature and influence was considerable.

Chapter 1 provides the history of one widely held theory of what color is and how it arises, which I dub the condensation theory of the origin of color. This theory arises from the Aristotelian commentary tradition with significant influences from astronomy, optics, and anatomy. This theory of color was closely intertwined with an Aristotelian cosmology, and is found in fully developed form in Averroës. Chapter 2 analyzes book 1 of Zabarella's De visu, where we find the most rigorous and complete explication of this theory in its history. Chapter 3 is an analysis of Fabricius's De visione, which combines anatomy, natural philosophy, and mathematical optics. Chapter 4 examines the shared, novel theory of vision held by Zabarella and Fabricius, and argues that they interacted across disciplinary lines in forming it. Chapter 5 demonstrates Zabarella’s and Fabricius’s influence on highly important figures for seventeenth-century optics and visual theory, such as Johannes Kepler, François Aguilón, and Christoph Scheiner; it argues for a revision to current narratives about the reception of the retinal theory of vision; and it addresses some major misconceptions about transformations to theories of vision and sensation in the seventeenth century.

The mathematical sciences of the early modern period comprised many fields of knowledge, and those such as astronomy, geography, optics, music, practical geometry, acoustics, architecture and arithmetic were often deliberately oriented towards practical applications. Between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, practitioners of the mathematical sciences and garden and landscape designers shared the conviction that nature could be controlled and manipulated, and the methods used and the knowledge acquired in the mathematical sciences opened up new ways to do this. These potentialities affected the realm of landscape design and gardening in various formative ways that reached directly into the political sphere by offering new possibilities for political representation, of which there are numerous noteworthy examples, including the gardens of Versailles, perhaps the most magnificent representational gardens in seventeenth-century Europe.