Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte最新文献

In March 1911, Karl von Frisch visited the Zoological Station in Naples for the first time. During his stay, Frisch, who had just received his doctorate, was studying the color adaptation of marine fish. At the same time, as diary notes show, he also completed an extensive tourist program. Frisch was not alone in this; many scientists combined their time in Naples with excursions and other pleasures. Usually these activities are labelled—in Frisch's words—as „diversion“ and „relaxation“ from the activities in the laboratory. Expanding this point, I will examine the various relationships between labour, recreation, research, and tourism based on Frisch's notes during his stay in Naples. Finally, I will take a look at the financial side of Frisch's stay in Naples.

This special issue is situated at the intersection of a number of active discourses in the history and philosophy of science, including historical epistemology, the more recently emerged political epistemology, and the various versions and offspring of ‘science studies’ including STS, social epistemology, and social history of science overall. We seek in this special issue to tie together the turn towards the study of vernacular knowledge and the ambitions of historical epistemology. The studies presented here examine specific ‘forms of knowledge’, and seek to operationalize the concept of knowledge from below with theoretically informed historical case studies.

Pietro Daniel Omodeo’s essay on labor law and environmental management in the context of early modern Venetian fishermen opens the issue. He seeks to describe the way in which embedded, practical ichthyological knowledge was integrated into the environmental management of the Venice laguna, as an instance both of political epistemology (a study of the political context of knowledge-formation) and of knowledge from below (the official magistrature's decisions and bylaws for managing resources, diverting waters, etc. were explicitly taken in light of these practices and local expertise).

A similar dual application of political epistemology and knowledge from below, but focusing on subcontinental mathematical traditions, is at work in Senthil Babu’s essay “Texts, Practice and Practitioners: Computational Cultures at Work in Early Modern South India,” focusing on accounting practices in early modern India as part of routine work of practitioners performing their caste occupations; the examination of such practices provides us with a spectrum of computational activities, which controlled and regulated the lives of people in the past.

Ana Simões explores the observation by four groups of scientists of the solar eclipse of 29 May 1919, which confirmed the light bending prediction by Albert Einstein, one of the three astronomical predictions put forward by general relativity theory. She demonstrates how the experience of war and pacifist commitments of the lesser-known scientists documenting the eclipse influenced their practices of recording and verifying data. In this case study as well, the author explores the historically changing political conditions which enable one to understand what becomes accepted as genuine knowledge, taking seriously the entanglement of politics and (scientific) knowledge, and showing that all (scientific) knowledge is political, because it rises asymmetries, creates power imbalances, and legitimizes some at the exclusion of others.

In his essay, Gerardo Ienna shows how contemporary debates within the history of science diplomacy privileged a ‘from above’ perspective while largely neglecting the study of the diplomatic contribution that self-organized social actors such as social movements (interpreted as ‘from be

This paper addresses the legendary total solar eclipse of 29 May 1919. Two British teams confirmed the light bending prediction by Albert Einstein: Charles R. Davidson and Andrew C. C. Crommelin in Sobral, Brazil and Arthur S. Eddington and Edwin T. Cottingham on the African island of Príncipe, then part of the Portuguese empire.

By jointly analyzing the two astronomical expeditions supported by written and visual sources, I show how, despite extensive scholarship on this famous historical episode and the historiographical emphasis on the plural dimensions of knowledge construction, many human and non-human actors have been kept in the shadow of the eclipse. I do so by focusing on what I call knowledge from the periphery together with knowledge from below, grounded literally on how localities (sites) affect choices and events, and growing outward to encompass a wide range of participants. I show how the geopolitical status of the two nations where the observational sites were located, and specifically Portugal's condition of colonial power, affected main decisions and events, while highlighting the active role of participants, ranging from experts from the peripheries and those involved in the travels to local elites and anonymous peoples, some of whom contributed to the observation of totality.

This essay looks at early-modern Venice hydroculture as a case of episteme from below. The forms of water knowledge it developed were multilayered and collective in their essence and solidly rested on a social experiential basis that was rooted in labour (especially fishing) and practices (especially water surveying and engineering). In accordance with the city's republican esprit (and correspondent political values), its episteme emerged as the encounter and negotiation between various institutions and groups: the fishermen of San Niccolò in Venice, the practitioners of the water magistrature and political authorities. This essay explores the institutional settings of this water culture, seen as an instance of bottom-up epistemic construction. It especially addresses three historical instances: firstly, a seventeenth century program to map public waters in order to block their alienation for private fish farming; secondly, water officers’ interviews with fishermen aimed to assess the state of the lagoon hydromorphology and, thirdly, fishing regulations. Venice communitarian and circular forms of knowledge production are here contrasted to an opposite paradigm, which was embodied by the Galileian mathematician and Rome courtier, Benedetto Castelli. His interactions with the Republic of Venice on water management and his approach to hydraulic problems are revealing of an elitist and abstract understanding of scientific knowledge that guided political decisions from above without taking in any consideration the opinions of the ‘vulgar’. While his science was the expression of a top-down political epistemology, Venetian water knowledge was more egalitarian. It left room for exchange, inclusiveness and bottom-up codification; it valued the gathering of different experiences (including the fishermen's practical knowledge of their waters) and rested on a concrete and systemic (organicist) understanding of natural-anthropic processes.

Recent debates in the history of science aimed at reconstructing the history of scientific diplomacy have privileged the analysis of forms of diplomacy coming from above. Instead, the objective of this paper is to raise awareness of these debates by looking at attempts at scientific diplomacy from below. Such a shift in perspective might allow us to observe the impact of marginalized social agents on the construction of international diplomatic choices. This article particularly focuses attention on how the legacy of Bernalism has fostered the emergence of two different types of science diplomacy. On the one hand, Bernalism has influenced the goals of organizations such as UNESCO and the World Peace Council, which are forms of science diplomacy I would term from above. On the other hand, Bernalism has also been at the origin of radical scientific movements that I propose to interpret as forms of scientific diplomacy from below. These have, in fact, played a cardinal role not only in raising public awareness of the social and political roles of science, but also in the more direct participation of scientists in defining the political objectives of their research activity. From this point of view, I analyze how an association like the World Federation of Scientific Workers proposed (at least in the beginning) greater democratic participation than the top-down structures of other forms of scientific internationalism.

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger constructed his historical epistemology of epistemic things by analyzing experimental practices in molecular biology during the 1970s and 80s. With genetic sequencing and multi-omics approaches, data has become a new resource in the life sciences, questioning the applicability of his concept of experimental system. By historicizing Rheinberger's epistemology, the paper focuses on its relatedness to Ludwik Fleck's notion of an aviso of resistance and points to a gradual shift in Rheinberger's emphasis, moving from an initial focus on writing and its differentiality to work on materials, preparations, and representations. By anchoring visualization in these material practices, Rheinberger also sheds new light on the changing conditions of experimentation in the life sciences due to big data, where visualization emphasizes patterns and correlations rather than substrates.

In this paper, I ask about the broader context of the history and philosophy of biology in the German-speaking world as the place in which Hans-Jörg Rheinberger began his work. Three German philosophical traditions—neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and Lebensphilosophie—were interested in the developments and conceptual challenges of the life sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their reflections were taken up by life scientists under the terms theoretische Biologie (theoretical biology) and allgemeine Biologie (general biology), i. e., for theoretical and methodological reflections. They used historical and philosophical perspectives to develop vitalistic, organicist, or holistic approaches to life. In my paper, I argue that the resulting discourse did not come to an end in 1945. Increasingly detached from biological research, it formed an important context for the formation of the field of history and philosophy of biology. In Rheinberger's work, we can see the “Spalten” and “Fugen”—the continuities and discontinuities—that this tradition left there.

This contribution draws attention to the circulation of materialities and persons as a central feature in the constitution of experimental cultures. The protein and ribosome research at the Max Planck Society (MPG)—with a main focus on the research conducted by Brigitte Wittmann-Liebold at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics—serves as an example to highlight some of the central conditions that determined the material circulation in molecular biology: the very organizational framework of gender and economics. In doing so, this contribution argues for a historical narrative that stresses the conditions facilitating the circulation of technologies, materials, and personnel. Histories of this kind contribute to an integrated view of the scientific, technological, social, political, economic, and cultural specificities of experimental cultures.

In the writings of the polymath and experimental scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) one sometimes comes across startlingly modern observations on the phenomenology of scientific activity, for example on the relationship between experiment and hypothesis, on the role of contingence in scientific discoveries, or on the dialectic between the invention of the new and the arrangement of accumulated knowledge. In a record of his private notebooks, known as Sudelbücher (“Waste Books”), he casually notes what constitutes a pure demonstration experiment:

Now that we know nature, even a child understands that an experiment is nothing more than a compliment paid to it. It is a mere ceremony. We know its answers beforehand. We ask nature for its consensus as the great lords ask the estates.¹

Demonstration experiments were common around the eighteenth century, not only for didactic purposes, but also in the many forms of spectacularization of science, which concerned in particular a then new and mysterious field of knowledge: electricity. The aforementioned definition, however, also brings with it an implicit distinction between a demonstration experiment and a proper experiment: in the former, phenomena we already know are just confirmed and displayed; in the second, something new, which we haven't discovered yet, comes forth. It was precisely this dialectic of expectability and surprise, typical of scientific activity, that engrossed Ludwik Fleck in the twentieth century. According to Fleck, valuable experiments are always “unclear, unfinished, unique”;² as soon as they become clear and arbitrarily reproducible, they are at best suited for demonstration purposes, but no longer useful for research purposes, for “the richer the unknown, the newer the field of research, the less clear the experiments are.”³ Hans-Jörg Rheinberger later took this tension further and reformulated it as a relationship between “epistemic things” and “technical objects.”

In his epochal book Toward a History of Epistemic Things (1997), Rheinberger defines experimental systems as “the smallest integral working units of research,” which “give unknown answers to questions that the experimenters themselves are not yet able clearly to ask.”⁴ Quoting François Jacob, he also calls them “machines for making the future.”⁵ Experimental systems consist of two components: epistemic things and technical objects. The research object is defined as an epistemic thing, which means “material entities or processes—physical structures, chemical reactions, biological functions—that constitute the objects of inquiry.” These objects “present themselves in a characteristic, irreducible vagueness,” which is indispensable, because “paradoxically, epistemic things embody what one does not yet know.”⁶ Rheinberger explicitly follows Bruno Latour's idea of the indefinability of the new research obje