bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ultán the scribe
Authors: Nees Lawrence
Published: September 2008

According to Aediluulf's poem De abbatibus, written in the early ninth century, the Irish priest Ultán was ‘a man called by a famous name’ (preclaro nomine dictus), who ‘could ornament books with fair marking’ (comptis qui potuit notis ornare libellos). Active during the first half of the eighth century in Aediluulf's otherwise unknown monastery located most probably in the area of what is today southern Scotland or northern England, Ultán has also won growing renown in modern art-historical writing, on the basis of Aediluulf's text, our only source for his life and work. Several of the older general reference works for artists include his name, Thieme-Becker terming him ‘Kalligraph und Miniator’, Bénézit ‘enlumineur et calligraphe’ and Bradley more cautiously ‘calligrapher’ while repeating the statement of the sixteenth-century antiquary John Leland, that Ultán was scriptor et pictor librorum optimus. In other words, these early sources agree in making Ultán not only a scribe but also a painter or illuminator.
A smith's hoard from Tattershall Thorpe, Lincolnshire: a synopsis
Authors: Hinton David A. , White Robert
Published: September 2008

During 1981, excavation of a large sand and gravel pit in Tattershall Thorpe, Lincolnshire, revealed many traces of Neolithic occupation and three Roman pits (fig. 8). In the southwestern part of the site, a sub-rectangular feature, aligned approximately east-west (pl. IIa), was found to contain a large number of iron tools and other objects, including Roman coins and glass which initially caused the material to be reported as Romano-British. Subsequently, however, a few objects were identified as post-Roman, and they are enough to show that the material was buried in the seventh century or possibly a little later. Because the soil in the area is very acid, conditions for the survival of organic material were poor, but a few fragments of human bone were recovered nevertheless, and it is therefore assumed that the feature was a grave with an inhumation. The objects had been deposited in two discrete assemblages, at each end of the grave.
A lost cartulary of St Albans Abbey
Authors: Keynes Simon
Published: September 2008

It would be a truism among Anglo-Saxonists to say that we depend for our knowledge of a fair proportion of pre-Conquest literary and historical texts on the labours of scholars active in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Among the many important texts which were casualties, for example, of the Cotton fire on 23 October 1731, and for which we now depend on early modern transcripts and printed editions, one thinks immediately of Asser's Life of King Alfred and of the poem on the battle of Maldon (in Cotton Otho A. xii), of manuscript G of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (in Cotton Otho B. xi), and of Ealdorman Æthelweard's Chronicle (in Cotton Otho A. x). Should one choose to venture into the realm of Anglo-Saxon charters, the importance of antiquarian transcripts of manuscripts now lost becomes ever more apparent. The most spectacular addition to the corpus of charters made since the publication of Professor Sawyer's catalogue in 1968 arose from the examination of a sixteenth-century cartulary of Ilford Hospital preserved at Hatfield House, which proved to contain the texts of eleven pre-Conquest charters derived ultimately from the archives of Barking abbey in Essex; of course this manuscript is an ‘original’ cartulary, as opposed to an antiquarian transcript, but it serves here as a salutary reminder of the treasures which may lurk as yet unidentified in libraries and archives throughout the country. Other ‘discoveries’ include a seventeenth-century copy of a charter by which King Edgar granted an estate at Ballidon, in Derbyshire, to his thegn Æthelferth, Sir Henry Spelman's extracts from a lost cartulary of Abbotsbury abbey, and notes made by the jurist John Selden from a charter-roll formerly preserved in the archives of St Paul's Cathedral in London.
Old Latin Intervention in the Old English Heptateuch
Authors: Marsden Richard
Published: September 2008

The Old Testament translations in the compilation known as the Old English Hexateuch or Heptateuch are based on good Vulgate exemplars. That is to say, where variation can be demonstrated between the version associated with Jerome's late fourth-century revision and the pre-Hieronymian ‘Old Latin’ versions, the Old English translations can be shown to derive from exemplars carrying the former. The opening of Genesis–‘On angynne gesceop God heofonan 7 eorðan. seo eorðe soðlice was idel 7 æmti’–illustrates this general rule. Behind it is the Vulgate ‘in principio creauit Deus caelum et terram. terra autem erat inanis et uacua”, not a version with the characteristic ‘old’ readings, such as fecit for creauit and inuisibilis et inconpositas for inani et vacua. Indeed, much of the Old English translation, especially in Genesis, is sufficiently full and faithful for the identification of specific Vulgate variants in the exemplar text to be made with some confidence and for the influence on it of the important Carolingian revisions asssociated with Orléans and Tours to be demonstrated. There is, however, a small number of Old English readings throughout the Heptateuch for which Latin parallels in the thirty or so collated Vulgate manuscripts are unknown or hardly known. Instead, they appear to derive from models available in pre-Hieronymian texts. Uncertainty often surrounds their identification, owing to the complexities both of the translation process and the history of the Latin Bible. Understanding their origins involves consideration of the influence of patristic literature and the liturgy, as well as the availability of ‘contaminated’ exemplar texts.
More pre-Conquest manuscripts from Glastonbury Abbey
Authors: Carley James P.
Published: September 2008

Although St Dunstan's earliest biographer gave the impression that there was a major collection of books at Glastonbury Abbey before 956 and although it seems that St Dunstan imported books from abroad while abbot and that he himself was actively involved in correcting and illuminating, there is remarkably little hard evidence concerning surviving pre-Conquest books from the monastery. Indeed, the only book which can be said with certainty to have been produced there — Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 30 (S. C. 4076) — subsequently followed Dunstan to Worcester. Several years ago I was able to show that two pre-Conquest books written elsewhere were later imported to Glastonbury; in this article I shall add two more examples.
TheMetrical Epilogueto the AlfredianPastoral Care: a postscript from Junius
Authors: Lucas Peter J.
Published: September 2008

When Old English studies were in their infancy in the seventeenth century, scholars such as Franciscus junius (1591–1677) had very little to study in print. With no grammar and no dictionary (until Somner's in 1659) they had to teach themselves the language from original sources. Junius, whose interest in Germanic studies became active in the early 1650s, was so proficient, not only at Old English, but also at the cognate languages that he became virtually the founding-father of Germanic philology. Over the years Junius made transcripts in his own distinctive imitation-Anglo-Saxon minuscule script of many Old English texts, transcripts that have subsequently proved invaluable, especially where the original manuscripts have been damaged or lost.
A unique Old English formula for excommunication from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 303
Authors: Treharne E. M.
Published: September 2008

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 303 (hereafter CCCC 303) is an extensive mid-twelfth-century vernacular manuscript produced at Rochester from a variety of Old English source materials. According to the medieval foliation, forty-four leaves are missing at the beginning of the codex and an indeterminate number at the end. As extant, CCCC 303 comprises seventy-three texts which are arranged according to the Temporale and Sanctorale for the church year (the first complete homily is for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany), thus showing that an initial plan of the contents was decided upon by a compiler. Godden distinguishes five groups of texts in all, the last such group being relevant here. This final portion of the manuscript (pp. 290–362, from the middle of quire 19 to the end of the final quire 23) contains twelve texts designated by Godden as ‘Miscellaneous items, mainly by Ælfric’. The first nine of these ‘miscellaneous items’, however, seem to be linked by their suitability for the Lenten period and their emphasis on sin, repentance and prayer. It is within this part of the codex, at pp. 338–9 (between the Ælfric textsDe oratione Moysi in media QuadragesimaandQuomodo Acitofel 7 multi alii laqueo se suspenderunt), that the Latin formula for excommunication and a unique Old English parallel text are copied as the eighth item in this particular group.
Cyninges fedesl: the king's feeding in Æthelberht, ch. 12
Authors: Oliver Lisi
Published: September 2008

The twelfth-century Textus Roffensis contains a collection of early English laws, of which the first is attributed to Æthelberht of Kent, who reigned c. 580–616. Although these laws remain to us only in a copy made some six centuries later, there are strong linguistic grounds, first proposed by Sievers and Liebermann, and recently elaborated on and expanded by myself, to assume that the text as we have it genuinely reflects a copy of an early original, albeit much changed by generations of scribal modernization. Yet problems of interpretation often arise, among them the difficulty in the definition of hapax legomena: words which occur in the corpus of Old English only in this text. One such term is contained in Æthelberht, ch. 12, which states: ‘Cyninges fedesl XX scillinga forgelde.’ This is presumably formulated along the lines of Æthelberht, ch. 8, which reads: ‘Cyninges mundbyrd L scillinga.’

There is basic agreement among scholars as to the meaning, if not the precise interpretation, of mundbyrd: most would agree with Bosworth's definition of ‘protection, patronage’. Along these lines, the clause can be interpreted as: ‘[For violating] the king's protection: 50 (of) shillings.’ Using this as a template, one might translate iEthelberht, ch. 12, as: ‘[For violating] the king's fedesl: let [the perpetrator pay] 20 (of) shillings.’
The transmission of the ‘Digby’ corpus of bilingual glosses to Aldhelm'sProsa de virginitate
Authors: Gwara Scott
Published: September 2008

Aldhelm of Malmesbury'sProsa de virginitate(hereafterPdv) can be called one of the most enduring works of Anglo-Saxon scholarship. Immensely influential in Aldhelm's lifetime, the text continued to be popular in England and on the Continent until Viking invasions put an end to native learning in the last half of the ninth century. Yet by the 920s interest in Aldhelm's prose treatise had revived, inaugurating a new movement in ‘hermeneutic’ Latin that lasted, in some centres, beyond the turn of the twelfth century. Fourteen English manuscripts ofPdvdocument the renewed interest in Aldhelm's work. Most of these manuscripts are heavily glossed, and, indeed, some preserve about 25,000 bilingual annotations ranging from single letters or symbols to entire paragraphs copied verbatim from Isidore'sEtymologiae. The density of glossing is astounding, when contrasted with the length ofPdv, about 20,000 words.
Body and law in late Anglo-Saxon England
Authors: O'Keeffe Katherine O'Brien
Published: September 2008

This article explores some textual dimensions of what I argue is a crucial moment in the history of the Anglo-Saxon subject. For purposes of temporal triangulation, I would locate this moment between roughly 970 and 1035, though these dates function merely as crude, if potent, signposts: the years 970×973 mark the adoption of theRegularis concordia, the ecclesiastical agreement on the practice of a reformed (and markedly continental) monasticism, and 1035 marks the death of Cnut, the Danish king of England, whose laws encode a change in the understanding of the individual before the law. These dates bracket a rich and chaotic time in England: the apex of the project of reform, a flourishing monastic culture, efflorescence of both Latin and vernacular literatures, remarkable manuscript production, but also the renewal of the Viking wars that seemed at times to be signs of the apocalypse and that ultimately would put a Dane on the throne of England. These dates point to two powerful and continuing sets of interests in late Anglo-Saxon England, ecclesiastical and secular, monastic and royal, whose relationships were never simple. This exploration of the subject in Anglo-Saxon England as it is illuminated by the law draws on texts associated with each of these interests and argues their interconnection. Its point of departure will be the body – the way it is configured, regarded, regulated and read in late Anglo-Saxon England. It focuses in particular on the use to which the body is put in juridical discourse: both the increasing role of the body in schemes of inquiry and of punishment and the ways in which the body comes to be used to know and control the subject.
Two runic notes
Authors: Page R. I.
Published: September 2008

A runic text that has, as far as I know, attracted little attention lurks at the bottom right-hand corner of Tabella III of part 3 of Hickes's Thesaurus. It has thirteen graphs, labelled ' e Cod. Cottoniano, Otho C. 5.p. 41‘. The graphs are the Anglo-Saxon runes:

Transliterated: ‗conslruieius‘, followed by what appears to be the bindrune ‘, that is, the late additional rune calc bound with ur. The sigel-Tune ‘s’ is a comparatively rare form found occasionally in manuscripts, on coins and in inscriptions. The other runes are common English types.
The Space of the Ethical Practice of Emergency Medicine
Authors: Kelly Michael , Sanchez Ricardo
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Emergency medicine, a new medical specialty in the United States, is an ethical practice that has developed through its interaction with the spaces in which it is situated. We discuss this claim in two steps followed by a demonstration. First we examine the historical evolution of the hospital, to provide the background for a lengthier account of the historical transformation of the emergency room. We then introduce Foucault's approach to ethics, to explain the sense in which emergency medicine is an ethical practice constituted, in part, by its space(s) of operation. The preliminaries of the application of our historico-ethical framework to emergency medicine, are presented, focusing on cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Our intention is to provide a framework for the newest clinical specialty as an ethical practice in order to understand how to individuate its emerging ethical problems. The emphasis on space throughout enables us to integrate the historical development of emergency medicine with its present concrete setting, and to establish a basis for analyzing emergency medicine that does not rely uncritically on either a preferred ethical perspective or the perspective of its practitioners.
Andy Warhol's “Factory”: The Production Site, Its Context and Its Impact on the Work of Art
Authors: Jones Caroline A.
Published: September 2008

The Argument

It is often observed by historians of postwar American art that painters and sculptors of the 1960s sought a more mechanized “look” for their art. I argue that the changes reflected in the art have their source in a deeper shift – a shift at the level of production, expressed in new studio practices as well as in the space of the artworks themselves.

In the period immediately before, during, and after World War II, the dominant topos of the American artist was that of a solitary (male) genius, alone in his studio, sole witness to the miraculous creation of his art. I demonstrate that artists of the 1960s, against this backdrop of heroic modernism, engaged in a different rhetoric and practice, one based on the models of industry and business. The studio of Andy Warhol, named the “Factory,” is viewed as apodictic of this great change, with its rudimentary assembly line and highly social mode of production.

The change in practice instantiated in Warhol's Factory is significant in and of itself, but I argue further that it expressed itself in the “place of knowledge” – the space within (or in front of) Warhol's paintings and objects, and the newly social space in which they signify. The context for that signification thus becomes crucial to our understanding of the “Warhol phenomenon” celebrated in popular and arthistorical texts. The ambivalencies embedded in Warhol's Factory, where the artist's role oscillated between manager and proletarian worker, are seen as a function of their context. Conflicting signals are also broadcast by the works of art, which speak in the dialect of mass production with the accent of the irreplaceably unique.
Critique Without Critics?
Authors: Dascal Marcelo
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Two dominant models of criticism are identified and analyzed. One is selfconsciously normative. It conceives of criticism as subject to strict logical rules. The other views itself as essentially descriptive and accounts for the critical activity in terms of social factors. In spite of their different origins and purposes, it is argued that both models share a reductionistic thrust, which minimizes the role of the critic qua agent. It is further agreed that neither provides an adequate account of critical activity and its role in science.
A Few Steps Toward an Anthropology of the Iconoclastic Gesture
Authors: Latour Bruno
Published: September 2008

The Argument

A large part of our critical acumen depends on a clear distinction between what is real and what is constructed, what is out there in the nature of things and what is in there in the representation we make of them. Something has been lost however for the sake of this clarity and a heavy price has been paid for this dichotomy between ontological questions on the one hand and the epistemological questions on the other: it has become impossible to understand the simplest features of action. What the critical gesture smashes into pieces is precisely the very possibility of hearing as synonyms the two sentences, “I have fabricated it well, thus it is autonomous.” The paper tries to find a way to avoid the critical gesture and link again together facts and fetishes, producing this rather strange hybrid: factishes.
Marx's Critique of Economic Reason
Authors: Freudenthal Gideon
Published: September 2008

The Argument

In this paper I argue first that Marx's Critique of Political Economy employs “critique” in the Kantian meaning of the term—i.e., determining the domain of legitimate application of the categories involved and maintaining that outside these borders understanding is led into error and entangled in metaphysics.

According to Marx, his predecessors in political economy transgressed these boundaries of application, and therefore conceived of all different modes of production as being essentially similar to commodity production, and thus implied that commodity production and the bourgeois form of life corresponding to it are “natural” not historical and transitory. In Marx's conception there are no super-historical economic categories or laws.

I argue moreover that Marx's methodology of reconstructing the “development” of socioeconomic entities and categories from their “germ” or “cell” also serves his critical intention. Whereas social theorists of the time referred with organic metaphors to human collectives (“family,” “community,” etc.), Marx referred with such metaphors to economic entities only (“commodity,”“money,” etc.). The difference is crucial, since the first carries deterministic consequences for the development of society while the latter does not: Social form and historical development in Marx are contingent and not necessary, historical and not natural, transitory and not eternal.

I also stress that Marx's procedure of critique is internal. He uses only such assumptions, observations, and arguments as could in principle also be used by the scholars criticized. Nevertheless the outcome of the critique is not merely a new theory but an entirely different one — i.e., a historical conception of the discipline of political economy and of its laws.
The Intuition of Time Between Science and Art History in the Early Twentieth Century
Authors: Motzkin Gabriel
Published: September 2008

The Argument

This article compares the corresponding effects in science and art of a change in the intuition of time at the beginning of this century. McTaggart's distinction between linear time and tense time is applied to the question of whether linear perspective requires a notion of time as succession. It is argued that the problem of self-representation is a basic problem for this kind of uniform space-time because of the contradiction between this model's need for a privileged point of view and its simultaneous denial of such a possibility.
Knowledge and Salvation in Jesuit Culture
Authors: Feldhay Rivka
Published: September 2008

The Argument

In this paper, I argue that the most significant contribution of the Jesuits to early modern science (via Galileo) consists in the introduction of a new “image of knowledge.”

In contradistinction to traditional Scholasticism, this image of knowledge allows for the possibility of a science (i. e. certain knowledge) of hypothetical entities.

This problem became crucial in two specific areas. In astronomy, knowledge of mathematical entities of unclear ontological status (like epicycles and eccentrics) was nevertheless proclaimed certain. In theology, God's knowledge of the future acts of man, logically considered as future contingents, was also proclaimed certain. In both cases the concept of certain knowledge of hypothetical entities was problematic and challenged a central premise of the accepted canons of logic, i.e., that the objects of true knowledge (“scientia”) must be real objects.

The main argument of this paper is that the practical orientation of the Jesuit cultural milieu enabled Jesuit scientists and theologians to ignore accepted logical considerations and to modify traditional Thomist images of knowledge. Nevertheless, this modification was not so radical as to change the contemporary organization of knowledge. This was due to the peculiar status of the Jesuits within the church establishment, which exposed them to harsh criticism and created a deep need for legitimation. Thus, the limitations of Jesuit scientific culture are accounted for in institutional, rather than in logical terms.
On Pierre Duhem
Authors: Livesey Steven J.
Published: September 2008

The publication of this volume appears to be the most recent in a group of works whose appearance marks renewed interest in Duhem. Over the past ten years, attention has been focused on Duhem's life (Jaki 1984), his physics (Jaki 1984; Nye 1986, 208–23), his philosophy of science (Jaki 1984, chap. 9; Paul 1979, chap. 5; Ariew 1984),' and his history of science (Jaki 1984, chap. 10; Martin 1976). But the significance of this translation is that - leaving asideTo Save the Phenomena– for the first time we have a partial translation into English of one of the two great historical works that revitalized the study of medieval science.
Model Builders and Instrument Makers
Authors: Hughes Thomas P.
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Many inventors, engineers, and scientists think in verbal images. Elmer Sperry (1860–1930), a noted American inventor, was able to “operate” in his mind's eye the machines he was developing. For inventors, engineers, and experimental scientists, visualization is often followed by construction of a physical model of the invention, which can be an experimental apparatus. The model, or apparatus, is then tested in increasingly complex environments and changes are made in the physical artifact until it is ready to be used. Examples of this process of development are Sperry's development of a ship stabilizer for the U.S. Navy and a revolving mirror to be used by Albert Michelson in the determination of the speed of light. Thomas Edison called experimentation his development of an invention through the building and testing of a series of models. So, both scientists and inventors experiment. They are not discovering the “secrets of nature”: they are observing how artifacts – their physical creations – behave. These physical models of thought reflect the characteristics of the tools with which they were made. They are socially constructed, as well.
Mediating Machines
Authors: Wise M. Norton
Published: September 2008

The Argument

The societal context within which science is pursued generally acts as a productive force in the generation of knowledge. To analyze this action it is helpful to consider particular modes of mediation through which societal concerns are projected into the very local and esoteric concerns of a particular domain of research. One such mode of mediation occurs through material systems. Here I treat two such systems – the steam engine and the electric telegraph – in the natural philosophy of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin).

The steam engine illustratesconceptualmediation. It simultaneously instantiates “labor value” in political economy and “work” in engineering mechanics, thereby identifying the two concepts in the region of their common reference. The partial identification carries with it a structural analogy between a network of concepts from political economy and a similar network in natural philosophy, providing a potent heuristic for the reformulation and further development of dynamics.

The electric telegraph illustratesmethodologicalmediation. It projects the interests of engineering and industry into the interests of electromagnetic theory and vice versa, thereby establishing, in Thomson's view, a Baconian unity of truth and utility. As the common reference of theory and practice, the telegraph locates the truth of theoretical knowledge in its utility and the utility of practical knowledge in its truth.

These particular cases of conceptual and methodological mediation indicate how the local practices, concepts, and interests of a research specialty, or subculture, draw on and are adapted to those of the larger culture within which they develop. Thus the analysis of mediation leads to an ecological model of the social construction of scientific knowledge.
Models of Science: Fictions or Idealizations?
Authors: Ben-Menahem Yemima
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Idealizations and approximations are an indispensable tool for the scientist. This paper argues that idealizations and approximations are equally indispensable for the philosopher of science. In particular, it is shown that the deductive model of scientific theories is an idealization in precisely the same sense that frictionless motion is an idealization in mechanics. By its very nature, an idealization cannot be criticized as not being absolutely true to the facts, for it need not be. Thus, the usual type of criticism levelled against the deductive model is shown to be irrelevant. The main step in the argument consists in using a logic of approximation to clarify the notions of approximate implication and approximate entailment, which are usually rejected as hopelessly vague. More generally, the conception underlying the paper is that the desiderata of science should be formulated in such a way that complying with them could be a matter of degree, and that pragmatic considerations could be taken into account. This conception is motivated by the wish to introduce some quantitative concepts in the philosophy of science, thereby bringing the philosopher's perspective closer to that of the scientist.
Experiment as a Second-Order Concept
Authors: Elkana Yehuda
Published: September 2008

The Argument

When we actually perform an experiment, we do many different things simultaneously – some belonging to the realm of theory, some to the realms of methodology and technique; however, a great deal of what happens is expressible in terms of socially determined images of knowledge or in terms of concepts of reflectivity – second-order concepts – namely thoughts about thoughts.

The emergence of experiment as a second-order concept in late antiquity exemplifies the historical development of second-order concepts; it is shown to be rooted in the Sophists' cunning reason (Greek metis) and is followed up in the work of Ptolemy, Copernicus and Galileo.

Then, by way of epistemological explication, the three levels of representation of an experiment are shown to be analogous to Baxandall's three levels of representation of a picture.

Finally it is shown that such an interpretation only makes sense in terms of two-tier thinking: realism, inside a conceptual framework which is chosen or arrived at, relativistically.
History, Philosophy, and the Central Metaphor
Authors: Galison Peter
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Behind the dispute over the relative priority of theory and experiment lie conflicting philosophical images of the nature of scientific inquiry. One crucial image arose in the 1920s, when the logical positivists agitated for a “unity of science” that would ground all meaningful scientific activity on an observational foundation. Their goals and rhetoric dovetailed with the larger movements of architectural, literary, and philosophical modernism. Historians of science followed the positivists by tracking experimental science as the basis for scientific progress. After World War II, historians and philosophers of science created an antipositivist movement, inverting the positivist idea that observation had epistemic (and historical) priority. But this counter-movement retained the modernist aspiration to unity, now chaining observation to theory. Once again historians of science, following their philosophical colleagues, illustrated the new modernism with historical instances of observation dominated by theory.

Either reductionist scheme, by privileging one activity over the other, dictates an overly constrictive periodization. We need a wider class of periodization models (“central metaphors”) that will allow instrumentation, experimentation, and theory a partial autonomy without granting any one the sole legitimate narrative standpoint. Such a heterogeneous representation of historical traditions may, surprisingly, make better sense of the perceived coherence of activity across theoretical transitions than the monolithic modernist representation of science it displaces.
Some Specific Features of the Serological Way of Thinking: A Methodological Study
Authors: Fleck Ludwik
Published: September 2008

Those who criticize the theory of thought-styles do admit their existence, but would rather see them as an obstacle to an “objective” perception, a kind of malum necessarium to be eliminated. Through an analysis of the example of serology it is, however, possible to demonstrate that the specific sociological structure of the community of serologists and the history of this discipline are intrinsically connected with a particular serological thought-style, and that the very content of scientific knowledge in this discipline stems from its thought-style. It is impossible even to imagine a styleless scientific knowledge.
Transposing the Merton Thesis: Apostolic Spirituality and the Establishment of the Jesuit Scientific Tradition
Authors: Harris Steven J.
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Despite more than fifty years of debate on the Merton thesis, there have been few attempts to substantiate Merton's argument through empirically based comparative studies. This study of the Jesuit scientific tradition is intended to serve as a test of some of Merton's central claims.

Jesuit science is remarkable for its scope and longevity, and is distinguished by its markedly empirical and utilitarian orientation. In this paper I examine the ideological structure of the Society of Jesus and find at its core an “apostolic spirituality” that explains the legitimation of these forms of science within the Society. The values of apostolic spirituality (diligence, practicality, learning, etc.) strongly encouraged an activist mentality among Jesuits, which in turn led to the formation of apostolates in education, at court, and in the overseas missions. The values associated with apostolic spirituality led to the initial acceptance of active-empirical sciences within the Society, which became established as traditions because they were useful in fulfilling the goals of the Society's apostolates.

This study, by providing a qualified confirmation of Merton's central claims, suggests the importance of a supra-confessional sanctification of labor and learning in the growth of active-empirical sciences.
Further Thoughts on Merton in Context
Authors: Struik Dirk
Published: September 2008

Robert Merton may not remember it, but in the 1930s we met in Cambridge and took one or more walks together – 1 think they were along Trapelo Road in Waltham, then a rural lane. Our conversation must have been interesting, since I remember the episode, but I can only guess at the subject. Since Merton was working on the sociology of science in Newton's day and I had a long standing interest in the relations between mathematics and society, especially at the dawn of capitalism, it is very likely that we discussed the Hessen paper of 1931, published inScience at the Cross Roads. The paper had impressed me, as it had impressed several British scientists of the younger generation, including J. D. Bernal and Joseph Needham; Merton's dissertation, when it appeared, showed that Hessen's “provocative essay” had made its impression on his work as well. It also showed that he was aware of some of the oversimplifications of the Hessen lecture, as was G. N. Clark (see Clark 1937a; Clark 1937b, chap. 3). The almost total omission of the religious factor was one of them.
The Other Merton Thesis
Authors: Zuckerman Harriet
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Written as one book, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England has become two. One book, treating Puritanism and science, has since become “The Merton Thesis.” The other, treating shifts of interest among the sciences and problem choice within the sciences, has been less consequential. This paper proposes that neglect of one part of the monograph has skewed readers' understanding of the whole. Society and culture contributed to institutionalization of science and the directions it took, neither one exclusively. Four aspects of the neglected chapters are examined: (1) their theoretical underpinnings, the conceptions providing foundations for this part specifically and for the monograph as a whole; (2) their comparative neglect, attributed partly to the absence of a cognitive constituency for their claims; (3) the problem of problem choice in science in Merton's work; and (4) the Merton monograph and later social constructionism:their differences and affinities.
Chinese Intellectuals and Science A History of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)
Authors: Yao Shuping
Published: September 2008

The Argument

The Chinese Academy of Sciences, founded in 1949 – the same year as the People's Republic of China – has attempted to use science to speed up technological, economic, and defense-related development, as well as the entire process of modernization. At' the same time, political structures on the development of science have hampered scientific output and kept it to a level that was far below what might have been expected from the creative potential of China's scientists.

Early in this century, when modern science was brought to China by foreign missionaries and by scientists and students returning from abroad, only a few people in the country were engaged in scientific research. In 1928 and 1929, two state-run comprehensive research establishments were founded: the Academia Sinica, consisting mainly of scientists who had studied in the United States, and the Peking Academy, consisting mainly of European-trained scientists. Two decades later, a month after the proclamation of the People's Republic of China, a single national scientific research body was founded: the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). This article will review the contribution and status of the CAS, its successes and its failures in the ensuing forty years.
The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment
Authors: Daston Lorraine
Published: September 2008

The Argument

The Republic of Letters of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries teaches us two lessons about style in science. First, the bearer of style—individual, nation, institution, religious group, region, class—depends crucially on historical context. When the organization and values of intellectual life are self-consciously cosmopolitan, and when allegiances to other entities (e.g., Protestant versus Catholic, or urban versus rural) are culturally more compelling than those to the nation-state, distinctivelynationalstyles are far to seek. This was largely the case for the Republic of Letters, that immaterial (it lacked location, formal administration, and brick and mortar) but nonetheless real (it exercised dominion over thoughts and deeds) realm among the sovereign states of the Enlightenment. Second, that form of objectivity which made science seem so curiously detached from scientists, and therefore so apparently unmarked by style at any level, also has a history. The unremitting emphasis on impartial criticism and evaluation within the Republic of Letters encouraged its citizens to distance themselves first from friends and family, then from compatriots and contemporaries, and finally, in the early nineteenth century, from themselves as well. Although this psychological process of estrangement and ultimately of self-estrangement may seldom have been completely realized, the striving was genuine and constitutes part of the moral history of objectivity.
Interwar “German” Psychobiology: Between Nationalism and the Irrational
Authors: Harrington Anne
Published: September 2008

The Argument

This paper is concerned with “holism” as a German cultural “style” of doing psychobiology in Central Europe between the two world wars. The paper takes its starting point from a critical analysis of Forman's writings on nationalism versus internationalism in interwar German science, and the alleged “accommodation” of interwar German physics to an antiscientific, irrationalist culture. The paper argues that psychobiological holism was not just a reaction against nineteenth-century atomistic or mechanistic approaches to modeling life and mind; it also represented a domestically directed answer from within the German biomedical scientific community to broad religious and cultural “disenchantment.” As such, holistic psychobiology emerges as a phenomenon that challenges us with at least four levels of discourse: (1) experimental/clinical, (2) epistemological/philosophical, (3) existential/religious, and (4) ideological/political. The paper defends the methodological appropriateness of a collective case-study approach to the problem of holism as a multilevel discourse. It concludes by offering a preliminary contextualized analysis of the thought of three representative holistic leaders of the time: behavioral biologist and ethologist Jakob von Uexküll; clinical neurologist Constantin von Monakow; and neuropsychiatrist Kurt Goldstein.
Competition Among Scientific Disciplines in Cold Nuclear Fusion Research
Authors: McAllister James W.
Published: September 2008

The Argument

In the controversy in 1989 over the reported achievement of cold nuclear fusion, parts of the physics and chemistry communities were opposed in both a theoretic and a professional competition. Physicists saw the chemists' announcement as an incursion into territory allocated to their own discipline and strove to restore the interdisciplinary boundaries that had previously held. The events that followed throw light on the manner in which scientists' knowledge claims and metascientific beliefs are affected by their membership of disciplinary communities. In particular, the controversy offers evidence for a constructivist reinterpretation of the “division of nature into levels,” which is customarily held to underpin the division of science into disciplines.
Looking for Those Natural Numbers: Dimensionless Constants and the Idea of Natural Measurement
Authors: Mirowski Philip
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Many find it “notoriously difficult to see how societal context can affect in any essential way how someone solves a mathematical problem or makes a measurement.” That may be because it has been a habit of western scientists to assert their numerical schemes were untainted by any hint of anthropomorphism. Nevertheless, that Platonist penchant has always encountered obstacles in practice, primarily because the stability of any applied numerical scheme requires some alien or external warrant.

This paper surveys the history of measurement standards, physical dimensions and dimensionless constants as one instance of the quest to purge all anthropomorphic taint first in the metric system, then in the dimensions provided by the atom, then in physical constants intelligible to extraterrestrials, only then to end up back at overt anthropomorphism in the late 20th century. This suggests that the “naturalness” of natural numbers has always been conceptualized in locally contingent cultural terms.
Historicizing Mind Science: Discourse, Practice, Subjectivity
Authors: Ash Mitchell G.
Published: September 2008

It is no longer necessary to defend current historiography of psychology against the strictures aimed at its early text book incarnations in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, Robert Young (1966) and others denigrated then standard textbook histories of psychology for their amateurism and their justifications propaganda for specific standpoints in current psychology, disguised as history. Since then, at least some textbooks writers and working historians of psychology have made such criticisms their own (Leahey 1986; Furumoto 1989). The demand for textbook histories continues nonetheless. Psychology, at least in the United States, remains the only discipline that makes historical representations of itself in the form of “history and systems” courses an official part of its pedagogical canon, required, interestingly enough, for the license in clinical practice (see Ash 1983).1In the meantime, the professionalization of scholarship in history of psychology has proceeded apace. All of the trends visible in historical and social studies of other sciences, as well as in general cultural and intellectual history, are noe present in the historical study of psychology. Yet despite the visibility and social importance of psychology's various applications, and the prominence of certain schools of psychological thought such as behaviorism and psychoanalysis in contemporary cultural and political debate, the historiography of psychology has continued to hold a marginal position in history and social studies of science.
The Impossible project of Ivan Pavlov (and William James and sigmund Freud)
Authors: Joravsky David
Published: September 2008

The Argument

In different contexts, beginning with different concerns, Pavlov, James, and Freud tried to achieve a neurophysiological explanation of mind, and suffered defeat. James and Freud acknowledged the defeat and attempted, in radically different ways, to construct an interim psychology, hoping that neural explanation would be achieved in the future. Pavlov came to the effort in his fifties, after decades of research that took for granted a sharp separation between neurophysiology and psychology. He changed his mind as he noticed the descent of his discipline from study of whole-body and organ functions to concentration on the neuron and the molecule. Pavlov thought to save the discipline from chaos by providing laws of “higher nervous activity” to serve as an organizing framework. Hence his stubborn refusal to acknowledge the obvious errors in his supposed neural explanation of conditioned reflexes. The Russian context of ideological division and extreme social conflict reinforced the unwitting retreat of Pavlov and his school into a scientistic counterculture, while claiming to be developing the ultimate neural explanation of the mind. In countries of less extreme conflicts, classical conditioning continued to be a focal point of discord between psychologists who accept the inevitability of mentalist concepts and neuroscientists who insist that they must be avoided. In any context, neural explanation of mental phenomena has been a project that is impossible to avoid and impossible to accomplish.
The Project of an Experimental Social Psychology: Historical Perspectives
Authors: Danzier Kurt
Published: September 2008

The Argument

The notion that experimentation provides an appropriate means for acquiring valid knowledge about some aspects of social reality has always depended on certain presuppositions about the nature of social reality and about the role of expenment in knowledge acquisition. In this paper I examine historical changes in these presuppositions from the beginnings of social psychological experimentation to the period after World War II.

It was late nineteenth-century crowd psychology that provided the theoretical inspiration fo the first systematic steps in the application of expermental methods to the investigation of social psychological problems. The basic question addressed by these early experiments was derived from the individualistic social ontology of crowd psychology. It was this ontology that made the microcosm of the experimental situation appear relevant to social reality outside this situation.

In the 1940s experimental social psychology was briefly influenced by a nonindividualistic social ontology for which group phenomena were real. In the work of Kurt Lewin this was linked to an anti-inductivist conception of experimentation derived from Gestalt psychology and the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. However, this model proved to be utterly unassimilable by American social psychology which was dominated by an individualistic social ontology and an inductivist philosophy of experimentation that mutually supported each other.
Discovery in Cognitive Psychology: New Tools Inspire New Theories
Authors: Gigerenzer Gerd
Published: September 2008

The Argument

Scientific tools—measurement and calculation instruments, techniques of inference—straddle the line between the context of discovery and the context of justification. In discovery, new scientific tools suggest new theoretical metaphors and concepts; and in justification, these tool-derived theoretical metaphors and concepts are morelikely to be accepted by the scientific community if the tools are already entrenched in scientific practice.

Techniques of statistical inference and hypothesis testing entered American psychology first as tools in the 1940s and 1950s and then as cognitive theories in the 1960s and 1970s. Not only did psychologists resists statistical metaphors of mind prior to the institutionalization of inference techniques in their own practice; the cognitive theories they ultimately developed about “the mind as intuitive statistician” still bear the telltale marks of the practical laboratory context in which the tool was used.