Physis; rivista internazionale di storia della scienza最新文献

The concept of "chemical machine" is currently very much in use in studies of the physiology of living bodies especially at the level of their intimate structure. Its appearance, however, has a long history that begins as early as the sixteenth century, when it became apparent that the living body was the abode of complex and fundamental chemical processes. When this awareness met the equally widespread idea that living bodies could be described as "machinery", the problem emerged of reconciling the two approaches, which gave origin to the concept of "chemical machine."

During the 17th century, between the second half of the 1630s and the years of the 1640s, the town of Leyden became an important center for the experimentation, discussion, and dissemination related to the discovery of blood circulation and the emerging doctrine of digestion. People such as Jean de Walaeus, Franz de le Boë (Sylvius), and Thomas Bartholinus worked there. No less passionate, in this circle, was the activity of the two printers Jean Maire and Franciscus Hackius. In this context, between 1640 and 1643, also René Descartes sojourned in Leyden, living first in the city and then in the castle of Engeest. Two of Descartes' letters to Henricus Regius, and one to Marin Mersenne, date back tothis period. In each letter, the philosopher, solicited by his intelocutors, responds to issues regarding digestion and tied to the discovery of the venae lacteae (lacteal vessels) on thepart of Gaspare Aselli. Referring with all probability to these letters (and to La description du corps humain). Louis De La Forge, in his commentary on L'Home (1664), is the first to mention the assent of Descartes to the discovery of Aselli and the next one of Jean Pecquet (receptaculum chyli). Prompted by La Forge's commentary, the article examines the three letters mentioned above. Proceeding with the examination of Lespassions de l'âme (a work about whose writing it formulates its own hypothesis) and of La description du corps humain, it reaches the conclusion that in Descartes the doctrine of digestion, while playing an important role in his physiology, nevertheless remains on the margin of the discoveries and of the contemporary debate.

The transition from a "craftsman-like" to an "industrial-like" organization of the scientific research marked the scientific biography of the Italian physicist Franco Rasetti. He was one of Fermi's privileged interlocutors on both experimental and theoretical issues: from spectroscopy and quantum statistics to the implications of Raman radiation studies on nuclear structure. This last contribution paved the way to a new nuclear model and to the nuclear physics development by the Fermi group since the early thirties. Rasetti was active in Italy also after Fermi's departure to the USA in 1938, until he decided to leave to Canada in 1939. By then, Rasetti's individualistic trends were emphasized by the study of cosmic rays in alternative to neutron-induced radioactivity: "cosmic rays were free and everywhere," he said besides. Rasetti also refused to take part in both the Manhattan Project and the joint Anglo-Canadian Project. Endowed with an eclectic and egocentric personality, he arrived at declaring that he would dedicate himself no longer to physics, but to biology and geology, which he considered as freer and more pacific sciences. Though Rasetti afterwards partially returned to physical research, which he definitively left only in 1959, he remained reluctant to transform the scientific work into an industrial, managerial, and strongly competitive activity.

By means of the analysis of three works (Dell'anima de' bruti [Of the soul of beasts], Sofilo Molossio, and Sofilo senza maschera [Sofilo without a mask]) of Alessandro Pascoli (1669-1757), the psysician and philosopher from Perugia, the article reconstructs his fluctuating thought with regard to the problem of sensation in animals, indicated as the problem of the "soul of beasts." Regarding this question, Pascoli oscillates between, on the one hand, the Cartesian theory, which considered animals similar to mechanical automatons, devoid of the capacity to experience sensations (that is say, devoid of "sensitivity"); and, on the other hand, the Church's scholastic-peripatetic doctrine that attributed to animals the capacity to feel, thus affirming the presence in them of a "sensitive soul," considered -as compared with the human one -imperfect, material, and mortal. In expounding the reasons and argumentations of the Cartesians, on the one hand, and of the ecclesiastic teachings, on the other, Pascoli manifests a substantial convergence with the former, but also the need, inasmuch as Catholic professor of medicine at the Sapienza University of Rome, to not deny the possibility of the latter. In this tormented and contorted alternation of opinions, between the thesis of the animal-machine and that of the animal gifted with a sensitive soul, he introduces conceptual elements that, further developed, will end up by conducting to the ideas of "vital property" and of "vital principle" typical of the vitalistic thought of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The study of the subjective experience of time constitutes a classical research program of experimental psychology developed in many European laboratories during the first half of the twentieth century. Investigations of this kind were conducted also in Italy with research developed during the twenties in the psychological laboratory of the Institute of Higher Studies in Florence. In this context Enzo Bonaventura made an original contribution that was recognized and discussed also on an international level. The present paper would like to illustrate the theoretical methodological approach elaborated, and the results achieved, by this Italian researcher, with particular reference to the experimental techniques and instruments that he designed and created for this purpose. The experimental methodology in the study of the experience of time required the use of particularly precise instruments, by means of which it would be possible to arrive at the measurement and acquisition of quantitative data. In his study of the temporal experience, the Italian psychologist concentrated his attention especially on the presenting in succession of visual or auditory stimuli - all comprised in different comprehensive brief temporal intervals - and on the measure of the perceived temporal experience of time which the subject referred with an introspective act. The tachistoscope was the prince of instruments in this type of research, since it offered the possibility of presenting a visual stimulus for a very brief and measurable time. From the comparison between the classical tachistoscope, widespread in the European laboratories since the time of Wundt, and that modified by Bonaventura, there emerge substantial differences, not only and not so much on account of their diverse capabilities of performance, but especially because of the differences in the theoretical models and investigative objectives underlying such instruments.

The author's presentation dwells upon two modern interpretations of the evolutionist theories: on the one hand, the recent research that tends to individuate finalistic processes in the development of human cultures; and, on the other hand, the confirmation of the random role of natural selection, even in the most recent modifications of Neo-Darwinism. The article concludes with a reference to the positions of the philosophers, heirs of the great European tradition and, above all, of the Germanic culture, in part mediators of the preceding contrast.

This article examines the relationship between psychology and philosophy, a complex issue that has for a long time affected the route towards the autonomy of the psychological disciplines. An issue that in Italy in particular has been the subject of intense debate, which lasted for several decades of the twentieth century. In this contribution a specific and rather unusual perspective has been chosen, that of the academic teaching of psychology, which in its subsequent transformations significantly reflected the developments in those debates. The specific object of the research reported here is a pioneering survey conducted in 1914 by Enzo Bonaventura on behalf of the Association of Psychological Studies, of Florence, with the aim of knowing the teaching conditions of psychology in many foreign countries. Following the detailed account of the author and proposing a series of comments, the article describes the situation both in the countries where at the time of comments, the article describes the situation both in the countries where at the time psychology took its first steps, and in those where its presence in the University was well established. An in-depth analysis is dedicated to the situation in Germany, where psychology is taught by chairs formally "entitled" to philosophy; a situation, this, that gives rise to controversies and contrasts, punctually and widely reported by Bonaventura. The article closes with the recovery of an intervention of Vittorio Benussi regarding the "place" of psychology among the recognized sciences, thus further testifying how long the debate in Italy has continued on both the epistemological plane and on that of academic teaching.

This work intends to focus on Galileo's study of what is now called "centrifugal force," within the framework of the Second Day of his Dialogo written in 1632, rather than on the previously published commentaries on the topic. Galileo proposes three geometrical demonstrations in order to prove that gravity will always overcome centrifugalforce, and that the potential rotation of the Earth, whatever its speed, cannot in any case project objects beyond it. Each of these demonstrations must consequently contain an error and it has seemed to us that the first one had not been understood up until now. Our analysis offers an opportunity to return to Galileo's geometrical representation of dynamical questions; actually, we get an insight into the sophistication of Galileo's practices more than into his mistakes. Our second point, concerning the historiography of the problem, shows an evolution from anachronic critics to more contextual considerations, in the course of the second half of the twentieth century.

This article reconstructs the figure of Lodovico Brunetti, the first Chair of Pathological Anatomy at the University of Padua, and Director of the homonymous Institute from 1869 to 1887. He was the inventor of a technique known as "tannization," for the conservation of animal tissue. In particular, we have reconstructed the episode related to a particularly choking anatomical preparation, created by Brunetti in 1863, called "The Punished Suicide." This composition, together with a series of 66 preparations, allowed him to win the "Gran prix" at the Universal Exposition of Paris in 1867.

This paper analyzes the algorithmic structure of geometrical problems in Egyptian papyri of the first half of the second millennium B.C. Processes of transformation of quantities from "false" values into actual values, and conversions from quantities expressed in the abstract system of numbers into metrological quantities, are known in Egyptian mathematics. Three further processes are identified in the present contribution: transformations of "false" dimensions of geometrical objects into true dimensions; transformations of geometrical objects into other geometrical objects; transformations of linear measures of monuments. These processes have relevant implications on the algorithmic structure of the problem texts, resulting in particular in the embedding of sub-algorithms and the creation of parallel structures. More in general, their wide employment in Egyptian mathematics has significant philosophic and cultural implications.