Endeavour最新文献

Women seeking to work in horticulture in the early twentieth century were the beneficiaries of developments put in motion by the late nineteenth-century women’s rights movement. From the 1860s, feminists and social reformers in Europe and America promoted the opening of higher education to women. After success on this front, by 1900, women’s advocates pushed for expanding work opportunities suitable for middle-class women, including in horticulture. This article contributes to the historiography of women and gender in horticulture and agriculture by tracing the opening of horticultural and agricultural schools and employment opportunities for women in Germany and Austria. The analysis shows that while the new schools were modeled on earlier examples in Britain, the programs’ curricula were based on that of the German and Austrian agricultural colleges. This European expansion of science-based horticultural education provided middle-class women with occupational prospects that proved more fruitful than university degrees until the rise of anti-Semitism in the years leading up to World War II.

Xenobot, the world’s first biological robot, puts numerous philosophical riddles before us. One among them pertains to the cognitive status of these entities. Are these biological robots cognitive? To evaluate the cognitive status of xenobots and to resolve the puzzle of a single mind emerging from smaller sub-units, in this article, I juxtapose the cognitive capacities of xenobots with that of two other minimal models of cognition, i.e., basal cognition and nonliving active matter cognition. Further, the article underlines the essential cognitive capabilities that xenobots need to achieve to enter what I call stage 1 of xenobotic cognition. Stage 1 is characterized by numerous cognitive mechanisms, which are integral for the survival and cognition of basal organisms. Finally, I suggest that developing xenobots that can reach Stage 1 can help us achieve sophistication in the areas of evolution of the human mind, robotics, biology and medicine, and artificial intelligence (AI).

The Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India (AHSI), founded in 1820, remains the most important producer of English-language knowledge regarding the cultivation of plants in colonial India. Members included missionaries, colonial officials, tea and indigo planters, merchants and bankers, as well as the Bengali bhadralok elites of Calcutta and some Indian princes. The writings it produced were highly gendered. Often they focus on how “improving” the political economy and agricultural productivity would create masculine identities, such as gentlemen landowners and industrious peasant husbandman. Yet I also argue that women’s agricultural work was fundamental in imagining this path towards “improvement.” Using descriptions of Indian farming and labor practices from the Society’s meeting minutes and published transactions, as well as additional writings by its members and missionary founders, I show how many European members of the Society viewed women working outside of domestic pursuits as a sign of Indian inferiority. At the same time, many argued for the benefits of women’s work, which they viewed as fundamental in making Indian households more productive. Women and their labor were a lynchpin in creating the idea of the effeminate Indian man as well as the solution for improving him. It was this intersection of race with gender which helped to define agriculture as a discipline much closer to practical knowledge than abstract science. While some European women were able to participate in the Society’s production of scientific knowledge because of agriculture’s practical nature, Indian knowledge (whether from men or women) tended to be openly dismissed as tradition or habit rather than truly practical. The overlap of gender with race consequently helped to create a hierarchy between practical knowledge and tradition.

This paper deals with agricultural training for Jewish women settlers in Palestine, and focuses on the first school established by the Jewish botanist and settler Hannah Meisel in 1911. The school was modeled after European schools for horticulture, but grew to serve the settler community and students’ need to overcome financial challenges as well as the gendered structure of the labor force. As they pursued agricultural work, proximity to the land, and native status, the women taking part in the training program ultimately combined ideas about scientific progress and European theoretical foundations with Palestinian indigenous knowledge and practices. By appropriating Palestinian agricultural techniques and adopting vegetables as the main sphere of work and production, women settlers both struggled to shift gendered social hierarchies and became deeply involved in the settler-colonial project.

According to the Dutch chemist Gerrit Jan Mulder (1802–1880), the principal aim of university education was character building and moral edification. Professional training was of secondary importance. Mulder’s ideas about the vocation and moral mission of the university professor can serve as a historical counterpart to later Weberian, Mertonian, and contemporary ideas on the ethos of science. I argue that a revaluation of the moral precepts that Mulder saw as defining the life of an academic is helpful in dealing with the problems of late modern science, such as the replication crisis and research misconduct. Addressing such problems must start in the university classrooms. To empower students to internalize the principles of responsible conduct of research, we need an updated version of Mulder’s idea of the university professor as a moral agent.

Can love affect knowledge and knowledge affect love? John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor-Mill, Max and Marianne Weber, and Bertrand and Dora Russell had a definite vocation: they wanted to change the world. They questioned traditional gender arrangements through publications on equality, marriage, and education. They were liberal thinkers, advocating individual freedom and autonomy, vis à vis the constraints of state and society. Their partnership inspired their work, a living experiment conducted through their own unconventional relationship. Over time, their increasingly radical, avant-garde ideas on marriage complicated the ongoing negotiation over power and intimacy which typified their marriages. Building on the historiography of social science couples, and by means of an analysis of the micro-social dynamics of marriage as documented in the life writings of the Mills, the Webers, and the Russells, I analyse the connections between gender, intimacy, and creativity. These couples’ experiences highlight the non-rational dimension of a most rational endeavour.