人文科学最新文献

This article examines the role of the logician Francesco Storella (active ca. 1550-1575) in contributing to the intellectual and social legitimation of alchemy in mid sixteenth-century Naples. Storella achieved this by leveraging the tradition of the "Hermetic Aristotle," focusing on his 1555 edition and commentary of the Secretum secretorum. The study first analyses Storella's philological strategies, including the historicisation of the text and the use of the Tabula smaragdina, to firmly link Aristotle's authority to the Hermetic foundation of alchemy. Second, it demonstrates how Storella mobilised his philosophical logic to defend the ars alchemica as a rational and demonstrable discipline, compatible with a physico-astrological framework (Albertine tradition) necessary for achieving genuine metallic transmutation. Finally, the study reconstructs the Neapolitan intellectual network linking Storella with the philologist Domenico Pizzimenti and the young naturalist Giambattista della Porta. This confluence, unified by a commitment to the rational justification of singularia and an Albertine-influenced physics, highlights Naples as an exceptional point of convergence where academic theory, philological rigour, and experimental practice merged. This robust synthesis conferred a decisive epistemological and social status upon alchemy within Renaissance Aristotelianism, providing the essential cosmological and rational justification for the transmutation of metals.

Substantial minorities of the population report a low degree of trust in science, or endorse conspiracy theories that violate basic scientific knowledge. This might indicate a wholesale rejection of science. In four studies, we asked 782 US participants questions about trust in science, conspiracy beliefs, and basic science (e.g. the relative size of electrons and atoms). Participants were provided with the scientifically consensual answer to the basic science questions, and asked whether they accept it. Acceptance of the scientific consensus was very high in the sample as a whole (95.1%), but also in every sub-sample (e.g. no trust in science: 87.3%; complete endorsement of flat Earth theory: 87.2%). This quasi-universal acceptance of basic science suggests that people are motivated to reject specific scientific beliefs, and not science as a whole. This could be leveraged in science communication.

This study used a survey (n = 1897) of United States- and Canada-based scientists in six scientific fields to explore correlates of perceived (a) public engagement goal importance and (b) personal goal prioritization. Building on the Integrated Behavioral Model, the results suggest that scientists' beliefs about the societal benefits of a goal (i.e. attitudes) are the most consistent predictors of goal importance ratings and personal goal prioritization. Other beliefs are also associated with personal goal prioritization, including beliefs about personal benefits, agency (i.e. self-efficacy), and to a lesser extent, social norms. The data further suggests that basic scientists have similar goals to applied scientists who were in the sample, and that there are few differences across the six fields studied. The conclusion is that proponents of specific behavioral goals may wish to focus on communicating the benefits of goals to scientists, more so than norms or efficacy.

Mounting socio-environmental crises have prompted calls for post-normal sustainability science, emphasising complexity, uncertainty, and epistemic pluralism, and framing science communication as dialogical and reflexive. However, previous research has identified a gap between these ideals and actual practices, where conventional norms of objectivity and expert authority often prevail. Drawing on Irwin's (2021) framework of socio-technical orders of thinking, we analyse interviews with 12 leading Danish sustainability scientists. Our thematic analysis shows that scientists pragmatically navigate between first-order (expert-led), second-order (inclusive), and third-order (reflexive and power-aware) modes of thinking. While third-order thinking emerges as integral to sustainability science, traditional assumptions about authority and neutrality continue to shape scientists' communication practices. These findings invite science communication scholars to view sustainability science as a fertile ground for developing and testing pluralistic, reflexive, and power-aware communication models, while also learning from the situated practices of scientists who already navigate these complexities in context.

This paper investigates the Chinese American Chemical Society (CACS) as an organisation of the scientific diaspora at the end of the Cold War. Established in 1981 by mostly first-generation immigrants, the CACS adopted a non-political stance to boost the career of its members in the United States, China, and Taiwan. Tracing this non-political sensitivity to its founder, Jesse Hwa (1924-2008), the paper begins with Hwa's career as an immigrant scientist and his experience with China at the beginning of its economic reforms of the 1970s. It then studies the CACS's ambition to overcome the Cold War divide in the 1980s and reach out to Taiwan and China simultaneously. However, with limited success in technology transfer and facing issues in expanding the membership, the CACS faced a further crisis in the June Fourth Incident of 1989. As the officers tried to maintain the non-political stance amid varying responses from its members, the CACS increasingly turned attention to forging an identity for Chinese American chemists. By analysing the strategies of the CACS in building a community within the scientific diaspora, the paper enriches current scholarship on the history of twentieth-century chemistry and science diplomacy during the final days of the Cold War.

The article studies the strategies that late-medieval scribes used to present alchemical texts to their audience. Investigating two late fifteenth-century alchemical codices - Trinity College, Cambridge, MSS O.5.31 and R.14.37, both almost exclusively written in English - we demonstrate that the copyists took considerable pains to present reader-friendly texts. They provided neatly separated textual units, furnishing them with headings, manicules (pointing hands), and even a table of contents. This organisation is supported by the use of various ink colours, letter sizes, and framing devices. The appearance suggests significant pre-planning, perhaps even in a commercial context. We argue that these manuscripts highlight how readers engaged with alchemical texts and, by extension, that they reveal the importance afforded to texts and the vernacular as a vehicle for disseminating alchemical knowledge. In other words, it is not only the number of surviving manuscripts and their alchemical contents that are good indicators of late-medieval valuations of alchemy. Our study underscores how the visual materiality of extant textual artefacts also constitutes crucial evidence for our understanding of how practitioners used alchemical texts. It also exposes the place of alchemical texts in the text production industry of the time and illustrates the status of fifteenth-century alchemy more widely.

We describe a focus group study of public perceptions of "deepfake" technology, that is, digitally manipulated videos that show people saying or doing things they never really did. The study was designed to explore the relationship between degree of closeness to or familiarity with technology and attitudes toward it. We find that in this case, publics that are closer have more positive and nuanced attitudes. In such cases, at least, it appears that distance does not lend enchantment. We suggest why this may be the case and propose further related research designed to test the conclusions reached here.

Historians suggesting an early phase of globalisation in the decades before the First World War have pointed to new specialist learned societies as among the agents in the process. This paper explores the international dimensions of national chemical societies in this era of empires. During the nineteenth century, national chemical societies were established in many countries. Four of the earliest and largest - the [British] Chemical Society (founded 1841), the Société Chimique de France (1857), the Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft (1867), and the American Chemical Society (1876) - recruited numerous members living abroad, so that, by the early twentieth century, such "extra-national" members - members, that is, who lived outside the state in which the society was based  - constituted a substantial share of their memberships. Our paper examines this phenomenon. It argues that an analysis of extra-national members can help us chart the spread of chemistry around the globe. It considers whether the extra-national memberships of these chemical societies can be seen as constituting early, overlapping global networks of individuals, based on their common membership of leading societies.