Aimé Civiale's attempt at a complete photographic coverage of the High Alps seems to be a peculiar project at first sight. Carried out between 1859 and 1868, this was the earliest systematic attempt to introduce photography as a medium for studying the earth sciences. But as precise and determined as Civiale's approach appears, it was still quite unclear at the time how exactly photography could be useful in geology. This paper asks where the great confidence in the new medium in regard to mountain representations came from. The answer is not an easy one, as sources on Civiale's project are scarce. To make things even more difficult, the confidence in photography in the earth sciences during that time seems to have been based more on hope than on actual results. It is difficult to extract hope from written sources, let alone from images. I argue that this confidence was not so much based on photography's classic attributes of exactness or objectivity, but on its promise to produce unexpected results. Therefore this argument will inevitably have speculative elements. Thus, this paper can also be understood as an attempt to deal with a specific historiographical problem that regularly occurs when writing about images.

Had anybody told me at the beginning of my university studies that I would end up as a historian of science, I would not only have shaken my head in disbelief, I would in all probability not even have understood the prophecy. When I left high school, my interests ranged from literary writing to the life sciences. After an initial attempt to study biochemistry, which I aborted after a year, my early university education was in philosophy, with an emphasis on continental philosophy, from Descartes to Spinoza, from Kant to Hegel, from Nietzsche to Heidegger, pretty much the curriculum that would dominate the vast majority of the philosophical institutes in German universities in the mid-1960s. Having moved from Tübingen to Berlin, in addition I absorbed early on, as part of a group of students around Jacob Taubes, what came to be subsumed under the label of structuralism and post-structuralism: linguistics and semiotics from the Prague School through Noam Chomsky to Julien Greimas, grammatology from Ignace Gelb to Jacques Derrida, historical epistemology in its latest, Canguilhemian and Foucauldian versions, literary theory as practiced by Roland Barthes, to mention just a few names that formed the horizon of our student reading circles.

In writing the history of science, the fluctuations between two meanings of the concept of style are of special interest: a simple or direct meaning of this concept referring to a means of expression and of presentation, and a philosophical interpretation of this term referring to “a world of objective spiritual order.” The last two chapters of this paper consider the perspective of the simple meaning of the concept, the first two chapters take the philosophical meaning as their starting point.

The concept of style in its general epistemological meaning emerges within a conceptual space that becomes effective as a totality at the end of the eighteenth century and which is built up of further notions such as: individual, genius, expression, symbol, education, creativity, and others.

The individual and, as believed, the nevertheless infinitely creative subject has taken the place that the concept of god had occupied within rationalism. But it is not only the subject as construction and will, but also the subject who reflected in a new way about the objective foundations of his conscience and tried to bring the object and the means of knowledge into a new relation.

Franco's fascist regime in Spain (1939-1975) offers the possibility of exploring the complex relationship between media communication practices and the processes of production, circulation, and management of knowledge. The regime persistently used film, and later on television, as indoctrination and disciplining devices. These media thus served to shape the regime's representation, which largely relied on the generation of positive attitudes of adherence to the rulers through people's submission and obedience to experts. This article examines the changing nature of modernization discourses and practices, as a fundamental element of the regime's propaganda strategies, and as portrayed in documentaries produced under its rule. The rhetoric of modernization involved an explicit deficit model of knowledge management, which aimed at legitimating the regime's deeds and policies in its first decades, as we shall see regarding colonial-medical documentaries produced for the official newsreel in the 1940s. However, the focus of such rhetoric, despite its enduring political aims, had to somehow open up as the relationship between experts and non-experts changed, both in epistemological and practical terms, such as in wildlife documentary films produced for television in the 1970s, the regime's last decade.

In spring 1888, an anonymous critic raised severe doubts about Ernst Mach's and Peter Salcher's studies, published one year before, on the processes in the air caused by very rapid projectiles. Paraphrasing the experiments for the French popular science magazine La Nature, the critic insinuated that the photographs upon which Mach and Salcher's argument were ostensibly based must have been of such low quality that they did not allow any well-founded conclusion. The critic did not deny the phenomena Mach and Salcher had presented in their article; he denied that the photographs taken in the course of the experiments could permit any observation of the phenomena. I take the resulting quarrel as a window into the actors’ ideas on the requirements of “good observations” and the role of technical devices in this case. In particular I enquire how the various arguments relate to Lorraine Daston's and Peter Galison's framing of photography as an emblem of “mechanical objectivity.” We will see that in the case under debate, actors considered naked-eye observation, observation by telescope and photography mainly with regard to the challenges of the particular research object.

Argument

In this paper I offer some reflections on the thirty-second proposition of Book I of Euclid’s Elements, the assertion that the three interior angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, reflections relating to the character of the theorem and the reasoning involved in it, and especially on its historical background. I reject a common view according to which there was at some time a petitio principii in the theory of parallels and argue that certain kinds of skepticism about Proclus’ historical reports are excessive. The evidence we have makes it reasonable to suppose that the so-called common notions were made explicit in the earlier fourth century BCE and the postulates, including the parallel postulate, somewhat later than that. On the other hand, it seems clear that some proof of I,32 was available by the mid-fifth century. I attempt to describe what such a proof would have been like and reflect on its significance for our understanding of early Greek geometry.

Agent-based social simulations have historically been evaluated using two criteria: verification and validation. This article questions the adequacy of this dual evaluation scheme. It claims that the scheme does not conform to everyday practices of evaluation, and has, over time, fostered a theory-practice gap in the assessment of social simulations. This gap originates because the dual evaluation scheme, inherited from computer science and software engineering, on one hand, overemphasizes the technical and formal aspects of the implementation process and, on the other hand, misrepresents the connection between the conceptual and the computational model. The mismatch between evaluation theory and practice, it is suggested, might be overcome if practitioners of agent-based social simulation adopt a single criterion evaluation scheme in which: i) the technical/formal issues of the implementation process are tackled as a matter of debugging or instrument calibration, and ii) the epistemological issues surrounding the connection between conceptual and computational models are addressed as a matter of validation.

Talk of “reason” and “rationality” has been perennial in the philosophy and sciences of the European, Latin tradition since antiquity. But the use of these terms in the early-modern period has left especial marks on the specialties and disciplines that emerged as components of “science” in the modern world. By examining discussions by seventeenth-century philosophers, including natural philosophers such as Descartes, Pascal, and Hobbes, the practical meanings of, specifically, inferential reasoning can be seen as reducing, for most, to intellectual processes deriving from foundations that required intuitional insight that was owing to God. Mechanical reasoning, or artificial intelligence, was a contradiction in terms for such as Pascal, whose views of his own arithmetical machine illustrate the issue well. Hobbes’ analysis of reason, however, replaced the ineffable authority of God with the authority of the civil power, to reveal the social reality of “reason” as nothing other than authorized judgment.

In the following pages I will outline the main biographical data and the intellectual activity of two of the major protagonists of the debate on the mechanistisches Weltbild within the Frankfurt “Institut fur Sozialforschung” in the thirties. I have included a selected bibliography of Grossmann's and Borkenau's works, and refer to titles with abbreviations [H.G.…] and [F.B.…].

This issue of Science in Context presents a collection of historical studies on various aspects of science and its practice as developed in Latin-American contexts. Relatively few scholars working in the history of science, and even in the more general field of “science studies,” have devoted their research to this field. Likewise, relatively little research has been done by scholars of Latin American studies on the cultural, political, and social impact of science, a field that is usually considered to be one of the central, defining aspects of modern, Western civilization.

The present paper argues that the metaphysical doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths constituted a philosophical response to what Descartes considered to be the overly close relationship between philosophy and theology.

The paper examines Descartes' “metaphysical turn,” focusing on the radical doubt and the creation of the eternal truths. The radical doubt, it is argued, was most important not as a device for defeating skepticism or attaining certainty, but as a means to practice the proper use of the intellectual faculty. God and the soul were the first objects of this practice, but the ultimate aim was contemplation of pure extension, the essence of matter. The doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths provided a metaphysical context within which Descartes could claim that the human mind completely comprehends the essences of natural things without thereby having to adopt either a scholastic Aristotelian or a Neoplatonic conception of such comprehension, both of which tended toward the theologically objectionable position that in grasping the essences of created things, the human mind comprehends God (either his absolute power or ideas in his mind).

This paper introduces the notion of plausibility as a decisive condition for the acceptance by groups in society of fundamental ideas concerning the nature of illness.

Plausibility, it is argued, helps to explain both transition from one system of fundamental ideas to another in history, and coexistence of different such systems in a single civilization. Hence this paper challenges an interpretation of medicine prevalent, especially in medical anthropology, since the 1940s, when Erwin Ackerknecht introduced the idea of medicine as an integrated aspect of a society's or community's culture.

Because early research focused on small-scale communities where a majority, if not all, of the members adhered to one world view and experienced one and the same existential environment, medicine came to be identified as a cultural system representative of entire communities and, later, societies. Hence we speak of Chinese medicine as if there were one system of therapeutic ideas and practices representative of China as a whole. The fact is that even though medicine is indeed a cultural system, it is representative only of the culture developed by people sharing identical environments and experiences. That is, if within one civilization different groups coexist in different existential realities entailing different notions of what causes crisis and how to maintain harmony, then these groups will believe in different systems of ideas concerning the generation, treatment, and prevention of illness. Such systems of ideas are therefore always metaphorical reflections of a real social environment or ideas are therefore always metaphorical reflections of a real social environment or of one aspired to.

It is not truth(Wahrheit) that leads to an acceptance of basic therapeutic ideas but plausibility (Wahrschein).

This paper discusses the theory of motion of the philosopher Honoré Fabri (1608–1688), a senior representative of early modern Jesuit scientists. It argues that the consensus prevailing among historians – according to which Fabri's theory of impetus is diametrically opposed to Galileo's or Descartes' concept of inertia – is false. It shows: that Fabri carefully constructed his concept of impetus in order to easily incorporate the principle of linear conservation of motion (designated here as “limited inertia”), by adopting formal (rather than efficient) causality between impetus and motion and by allowing impetus to act only along straight lines; that he explicitly deemed Aristotle's famous “inertial paradox” not as a paradox at all; and that linear conservation of motion was not limited to “counterfactual” circumstances but played a significant part in his discrete theory of free fall and constituted an integral component of his general physical (and even mathematical) philosophy. However, the paper also shows that Fabri's notion of inertia was restricted to one dimension only, and therefore should indeed be considered “limited.” In his analysis of horizontal projectiles, Fabri explicitly rejected Galileo's important principle of superposition, and thus revealed significant constraints to his “inertial” thinking.

The first section of this issue brings together four essays on “surfaces” – a subject matter which might seem conspicuous or, indeed, palpable enough. Just think of the sheets of paper, window panes, and haptic interfaces surrounding you: the world, evidently, is diffused with surfaces, membranes, and boundaries of all sorts. Some of these things have been salient, for obvious reasons in fields such as media studies, or implicit in notions such as “boundary object”: the retina, photographic plates, basilar membranes, the skin, or various forms of “displays” immediately come to mind. Not even mentioning their immense metaphoricity, surfaces are the entities that make things visible, inscribable, or knowable. But not all of them have been so salient. In fact, most surface-phenomena arguably – and, typically, for similarly obvious reasons – haven't received much scholarly notice at all: plastic wraps, lacquers, lubricants, coatings, silicon wavers, cell membranes, glass, plant leaves, the ozone layer.

This paper is concerned with the diversity of microscopic research in nineteenth-century life sciences. It examines how two researchers, Ernst Wilhelm Brücke and Heinrich Müller, investigated the structure and function of the retina. They did so in significantly different ways, thereby developing quite different accounts of this organ and its role in the process of vision. Both investigators were carrying out microscopic investigations, both were particularly concerned with interpreting their findings in terms of physiological function, and both employed the physical sciences in their microscopic research. Their approaches differed, however, with respect to the manner of handling and preparing the tissues, as well as with respect to the conceptual tools they applied to their findings.

The cases indicate that the common tendency to associate microscopic research mainly with morphological studies of organic material is not appropriate. To understand nineteenth-century microscopy and its place in the sciences of life, close attention should be paid to the manner in which microscopic investigations were performed. It is only then that the flexibility and versatility of microscopic research comes into view.

The argument developed herein, a countertheme to the Merton thesis, is that the ideal of science pursued by Galileo and his contemporaries in Italy would be unaffected by their Catholic faith if it could achieve apodictic proof in the subject of its investigations, in which case it would attain truth – the very goal sought by that faith. Unfortunately such proof was hard to come by in early seventeenth-century mechanics. A case study is proposed to show Galileo's difficulty demonstrating the tensile strength of columns in mathematical physics on the basis of improper suppositions, contrasting these with the suppositions of a contemporary, Giovanni de Guevara. The case study casts new light on the subject of Galileo's atomism and its relation to the Eucharist, refuting Redondi's claim that this was the real motive behind Galileo's trial in 1633. A further lesson relating to the Merton thesis can also be drawn, namely, that while challenges to science from religious orthodoxy may appear as temporary obstacles, in the long run they are an aid to science in its efforts to bring mankind closer to the truth.

The circulation of science across cultural boundaries involves the construction of various representations by the various actors, who each account for their involvement in the process. The historiography of the transmission of European science to China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has long been dominated by one particular narrative: that of the Jesuit missionaries who were the main go-betweens for these two centuries. This fact has contributed to shaping Western images of China's history and science up to the present day.

To retrieve the multifaceted history of this transmission, more than one discourse needs to be taken into account. Even within the Society of Jesus, representations changed with the evolution of patronage of the mission, and the concomitant building up of state-sponsored science in Europe. Chinese sources yield different pictures, accounting for the reception of Western learning — rather than “European science” — in terms of integration rather than of conversion, and legitimizing it first by the Jesuits' status as scholars, then by the idea that Western learning was of Chinese origin. This shift corresponded to the imperial appropriation of this learning.

Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), by the engineer Euclides da Cunha, is one of the most important books in Brazilian literature, with more than 50 local editions and translations in at least nine languages. Published in 1902 after four years of writing, it is a book about nationality in Brazil that sparked a debate regarding the subject of national consciousness and the connection between a nation's physical landscape, its people, and its culture. The book draws from a wide spectrum of knowledge that synthesizes science and art as the pinnacle of human thought. Cunha was a man of great culture and learning and in this work his professional activities and scientific writings merge to celebrate Brazilian culture in different realms of knowledge. The author worked as an engineer and had connections with the scientific community and the world of natural science. His explicit references to naturalists, travelers, geologists, and botanists reflect the historical moment of scientific knowledge in Brazil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and no less than that, Cunha's personal connections with the local scientific community.

Little has been written about religion vis à vis eugenics and, even less on Roman Catholicism and eugenics. A 1930 papal encyclical, Casti connubii, is usually held by historians to have been the official condemnatory view of the Catholic Church on eugenics, and the document is further supposed to have induced the only organized opposition to eugenic legislative efforts in several countries (especially France). In fact, the encyclical was not directly about eugenics but a general statement of the Catholic doctrine on marriage.

This article attempts to clarify the issue of a Catholic position on eugenics by re-examining the encyclical itself as well as its contemporaneous reception in Germany and France, where there was a strong Catholic presence. Casti connubii introduced a change in the prescribed hierarchy of the aims of marriage when, for the first time, relations between spouses took precedence over procreation. While condemning the means (abortion, sterilization, etc.), the encyclical did not condemn positive eugenics. In the broader context of the history of eugenics, the reception of the encyclical emphasizes the family as the third entity between the individual and society. Eugenics, as a “religious Utopia” of modernity, developed a hegemonic discourse over the family realm. As such it entered into competition with more traditional religious institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church.

In this paper three canonical studies of the scientific revolution are subjected to narratological analysis. Underlying this analysis is the assumption that in any single product of historical writing it is possible to distinguish, for analytical purposes, between three levels of reference: the object of the text — the events; the representation of the events — the narrative; and the text in which a story is represented by means of narrative. Through texts one learns about historical events (the object of the text), but also about the process of producing the texts (the narrative). Techniques of representation are means of production of texts that represent, in addition to the events, also the producer and his or her authority. The distinction made for any specific text allows the reader to play the two levels against each other in order to create a space within which historical writing should be criticized. Such criticism may draw attention to the difficulty of controlling the meaning of historical stories, and to the need to analyze narrative structures in order to appreciate the ideological changes of historical texts.