Physis; rivista internazionale di storia della scienza最新文献

In 1798, the German physician and anatomist Franz Joseph Gall, after his transfer to Vienna, published a pioneer paper that gave rise to the Schädellehre (skull-doctrine): a new discipline (today better known under the spurious name of phrenology) aimed at the study of the functional relations between mental faculties, cerebral areas, and skull bumps. During that same period (1796-1798), several Kantian texts began to circulate, in which--polemicizing with J.C. Lavater, and S.Th. Soemmerring--some anthropological and psychological issues, present also in Gall's paper (e.g., "the inner and outer side of man," "skull morphology," "the organ of the soul," etc.) were dealt with, but in an independent way. Kant will come to know of the Schädellehre only in the last years of his life, showing an unexpected interest in the subject. Proof of this may be found not only in the testimony of his Tischgenossen (table friends), but also in some posthumous notes (AA XV/2, AA XXI: 1802-1803), which are the object of a still controversial interpretation. In 1804, upon the death of the philosopher--on the background of the striking contemporaneous occurrence of the so-called "skull hunt" (Schädeljagd), raging at that time in the Austro-German area--also Kant's skull, like those of other prominent figures, became the object of a phrenological investigation, as Gall had for a long time been hoping.

The first part of the article deals with a recent book on the history of Italian psychology, analyzing especially the historiographical choices made by the editors. This analysis then evolves into an original approach, which aims to place the particular 'history' analyzed within a broader context in which some specific historical reconstructions are taken as 'objects' of the historical discourse, giving rise to a comparison in various respects. In this perspective, the contribution is particularly concerned with the different periodization of the history of psychology in Italy. It also addresses the question, not merely nominalistic, of the adjectives (experimental, physiological) that at certain stages were thought indicated to accompany the noun 'psychology,' prior to being subsequently abandoned; and also the theme of applications, recalling the origins, highlighting the different meanings, and following the developments in the course of time.

From Plato to the beginnings of the last century, mathematics provided philosophers with methods of exposition, procedures of demonstration, and instruments of analysis. The unprecedented development of mathematics on the one hand, and the mathematicians' appropriation of Logic from the philosophers on the other hand, have given rise to two problems with which the philosophers have to contend: (1) Is there still a place for the philosophy of mathematics? and (2) To what extent is a philosophy of mathematics still possible? This article offers some reflections on these questions, which have preoccupied a good many philosophers and continue to do so.

This article offers a new reading of the well-known diary kept by the Florentine apothecary Luca Landucci between 1450 and 1516, examining its accounts of prodigies and other "monstrous" occurrences from a modern scientific point of view. Particular consideration is given to descriptions of a variety of birth defects observed in various Italian cities at the time, providing explanations for each case based on the latest medical theories. A detailed analysis is provided for a case of cranioschisis recorded in Volterra in 1474, a case of Opitz syndrome occurring in Venice in 1489, the birth of conjoined twins in Padua in the same year, conjoined triplets born to a 60-year-old woman in Venice, the well-publicized account of the 1512 Ravenna monster and, finally, the thoraco-acephalus tetramelus adolescent that Landucci personally observed in Florence in 1513.

The "Galileo case" is still open: John Paul II's 1979 initiative to "recognize wrongs from whatever side they come" was carried out in an unsatisfactory manner. The task would have been easy had the Pontifical Study Commission created for that purpose concentrated on the 1616 decree alone and declared it not in line with the hermeneutical guidelines of the Council of Trent, in agreement with Galileo and not with Saint Robert Bellarmine. A possible avenue to closing the "Galileo case" on the part of the Church of Rome could, thus, be to change its current defensive attitude and declare itself no longer what it was in 1616, since another such "case" is, hopefully, no longer conceivable.

In the late nineteenth century, Joseph John Thomson moved away from Maxwell's specific theoretical models of matter and energy, even though he continued to rely on the general framework of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory. In his 1893 book, he accomplished the conceptual drift towards a discrete model for matter, electricity, and fields. In Thomson's model, energy was linked to tubes of force, in particular to the aether contained in them and surrounding them: the energy was the kinetic energy of aether, of both a rotational and translational kind. Starting from Maxwell's electromagnetic fields, namely stresses propagating through a continuous solid medium, Thomson arrived at a representation of fields as a sea of discrete units carrying energy and momentum. He tried to transform Maxwell's theory into a unified picture in which atomic models of matter stood beside atomic models of fields. In 1904 his interpretation of X-rays was based on the integration between two complementary features of electromagnetic radiation, the continuity and the discreteness, and on some kind of fibrous aether. In recent secondary literature, the problematic conceptual link between J. J. Thomson's theory and contemporary theories on electromagnetic radiation has been underestimated. On the contrary, in the first half of the twentieth century, some physicists inquired into that link, and a widespread debate emerged, misunderstandings included.

The experiences that in 1758 led John Dollond to create the first achromatic telescope highlighted the serious difficulties related to the production of lenses with a correction for chromatic aberration. These difficulties were due to the lack of suitable tools for measuring the refraction index and for verifying the curvatures of the lenses of such optical instruments. To this was added what was perhaps the greatest difficulty: i.e., that of acquiring the kinds of glass, the so-called "common" (crown) glass and "lead" (flint) glass, of which the lenses had to be made. If the theoretical works of Alexis Clairaut, of Samuel Klingenstierna, and of Ruggiero Boscovich furnished the theoretical basis for producing such lenses, and subsequently--after Boscovich's discovery of the role of the eyepieces--for creating also achromatic eyepieces, the greatest challenge from the practical point of view was that of the availability of the flint glass. In this first part of the article there is then a study of the numerous attempts and directions pursued by Clairaut and his valid collaborators--Anthéaulme, George father and son, Charles François de l'Etang, and Claude Siméon Passemant--in order to find common glass and lead glass, and to produce the first achromatic lenses and binoculars in France. An analysis follows of the experiences conducted by Boscovich, first in Vienna, and then in Milan and Venice-Murano, addressed to the production of flint glass.

Raffaello Caverni (1837-1900), a Catholic priest, was a truly lay and anti-establishment intellectual in his opinions both on Darwin and on Galileo. He opposed the mythicization of Galileo, as a rule common in Italy after the unification, even though he considered Galileo a great scientist. As a consequence the scientific community of that time, under the influence of Antonio Favaro, bitterly censured his work Storia del metodo sperimentale in Italia (History of the experimental method in Italy). In this way, Caverni's book was removed from the scientific debate in Italy for at least forty years.

The concept of mechanical work is inherited from the concepts of potentia absoluta and men's work, both implemented in the section IX of Daniel Bernoulli's Hydrodynamica in 1738. Nonetheless, Bernoulli did not confuse these two entities: he defined a link from gender to species between the former, which is general, and the latter, which is organic. In addition, Bernoulli clearly distinguished between vis viva and potentia absoluta (or work). Their reciprocal conversions are rarely mentioned explicitly in this book, except once, in the section X of his work, from vis viva to work, and subordinated to the mediation of a machine, in a driving forces substitution problem. His attitude evolved significantly in a text in 1753, in which work and vis viva were unambiguously connected, while the concept of potentia absoluta was reduced to that of human work, and the expression itself was abandoned. It was then accepted that work can be converted into vis viva, but the opposite is true in only one case, the intra-organic one. It is the concept of fatigue, seen as an expenditure of animal spirits themselves conceived of as little tensed springs releasing vis viva, that allowed the conversion, never quantified and listed simply as a model, from vis viva to work. Thus, work may have ultimately appeared as a transitional state between two kinds of vis viva, of which the first is non-quantifiable. At the same time, the natural elements were discredited from any hint of profitable production. Only men and animals were able to work in the strict sense of the word. Nature, left to itself, does not work, according to Bernoulli. In spite of his wish to bring together rational mechanics and practical mechanics, one perceived in the work of Bernoulli the subsistence of a rarely crossed disjunction between practical and theoretical fields.

The spreading of Mendelism in Italy produced a sort of "Mendelization" of already existing studies and research on the subject of heredity, which received a new impetus. This was the origin of genetics. There followed a "Morganization" process of the field, when the mere formal-genealogical analysis became substituted by laboratory research. The first phase began with the rediscovery of Mendel's laws, and its strong point ever since the beginning was in agrarian research. The second phase began after 1925, following upon the conclusion of a heated pre-war debate on the subject of nuclear cytology. Various Italian scholars raised strong objections against the so-called Sutton-Boveri hypothesis, of which the successive Morgan et al. chromosomal theory of inheritance was initially understood, or misunderstood, to be a specious extension. The resulting controversy is that which most characterized the history of genetics in Italy during the first part of the twentieth century, and conditioned its development.