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AbstractThis essay addresses the revival of culturalist assumptions in historical archival studies and suggests an alternative framework. Rather than provenance, it privileges textual circulation; rather than civilizational divides between supposedly distinct "European" and "Islamic" archivalities, it highlights mutability and commensurability as defining elements of a broadly shared, if inherently dynamic, internally complex, and transactionally defined early modern archivality. We first show how the historiography on early modern archives has inadvertently perpetuated a myopic Eurocentric view of the centralized archive as a key aspect of European archivality. We analyze how the construct "Islamic archivality," when proffered as a comparative counterpoint to such European archivality, not only promotes an outdated understanding of "Islam" (and, indeed "Europe") as a discrete, transhistorical phenomenon, but rests on a limited set of mostly pre-Ottoman, medieval examples. By positing "Islam" as fundamentally premodern, this historiography sidesteps significant shared late antique genealogies of textual practices and mobilities across a vast early modern region that traverses modern continental/civilizational configurations. In lieu of the prevalent comparative mode, which juxtaposes civilizational blocs and then selectively contrasts specific archival institutions and practices, we suggest concentrating on intersections and circulations of documents and practices across ethnolinguistic, territorial, and juridical boundaries. Drawing on examples from our research in Ottoman diplomatic archives, we challenge scholars of early modern archivality to move beyond fixed notions of "European," and "non-European," "centralized" and "decentralized" archives, and "original" and "copy," as primary indices of comparison, and attend to the social life of documents and their mutability through circulation.

The Greek concept of history was intimately connected with their conception of nature. Their common denominator was the concept of immortality. At the beginning of the modern world, natural sci & history parted company when historical sci's clung to the ancient & medieval sci'fic & philosophical standards. The latest developments in the natural sci's have shown that again, nature & history have much in common. In the modern age their common denominator lies in the concept of process. This intimacy of nature & history is evident when it is seen that man is as capable of `making', or at least starting new natural processes as he is of `making' history. IPSA.

Abstract
What kind of history is the history of science? To what extent does the academic research labeled as such delineate a homogeneous field? What are the current challenges that it faces? The recent translation of Simon Schaffer's works into French, along with the publication of his 2014 Marc Bloch Lecture in the Annales, provides the framework for this article's historiographical reflection on the profound changes that have taken place within the discipline over the last thirty years, particularly within a French context. The analysis is twofold. First, it aims to trace how new approaches to the sociology and anthropology of science have reconfigured the boundaries of the discipline. Second, it considers the effect of the abandonment of one of its major historiographical paradigms by most of the scholars currently working on early modern science: the scientific revolution as the rise of scientific modernity, underpinned by a Eurocentric vision of the production of knowledge. Although most research on the early modern period now strives to distance itself from this narrative, it must also face new challenges and questions—in particular the role of science in the processes of globalization and the multiplicity of sites and social configurations that participate in this change of scale. These challenges point towards new methods and styles in the history of science and, more broadly, the social sciences.

In the early 1920s, a type of postmodernism can be found in Pablo Picasso's & Arnold Schonberg's neoclassical works. Theodor W. Adorno's various attempts to cope with this phenomenon are discussed (eg, Aesthetic Theory, London, 1984). Although some elements of a postmodernist critique of modernism can be found in Adorno, he does not draw conclusions from his critique of modern composers for their infatuation with the material & lack of expression. Three different interpretations of the concept of postmodernism are proposed: (1) the antimodern interpretation that turns the waning of modernism into a pledge for a neoconservative academism; (2) the pluralistic interpretation that sees insight into the availability of different stocks of material as an indifferent eclecticism; & (3) a dialectical continuation of modernism, heir of aestheticist formalism & of the avant-garde protest against it, that pledges a resemanticization of art. Modified AA