Suchergebnisse

In recent years explicitly utopian visions have reappeared across the political spectrum. To a surprising degree these visions have drawn on histories and science and technology. What should scholars of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) make of these developments? The concept of utopia has often been treated with considerable distrust in these fields, as an indication of closed end-directed blueprints, or as an indication of fantasies of limitless technological improvement and purification of categories. Alongside this uneasiness, however, HPS and STS scholars have also projected transformative ambitions, seeking to recover from the past different ways of knowing and relating to the human and non-human world. By engaging with critiques of utopia from thinkers including Karl Popper, Otto Neurath, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway, and exploring some of the utopian strands which have recurred in studies of science and technology—including the longing for integration, the association of science with planning, and the ways in which feminist scholars have envisaged alternative forms of science—we can understand the ongoing, and often unrecognised, utopian dimensions of HPS and STS.

This paper derives from a presentation given in Oslo, at the Science Museum, on October 23 2013, in a workshop organised by Vidar Ennebak, as a critical stance against the exhibit "Sultans of Science" presented at the time in this museum. It's aim is to set the exhibit "Sultans of Science" and the opposition it has met as much in the far-right as among professional historians of science, in a wider context, by observing how Hindu nationalists have also made claims in history of science. The text is still in a draft form especially in the end, and has benefited from the critical remarks of S. Brentjes. All comments are welcome. ; Ce texte dérive d'une présentation faite au Musée des Sciences et Techniques d'Oslo le 23 Octobre 2013, dans le cadre d'un séminaire organisé par Vidar Ennebak dont l'objectif était de poser un regard critique sur l'exposition "Sultans des Sciences" présenté au musée. Mon objectif est de situer l'exposition, ces critiques d'extrême droite comme ceux d'historiens des sciences proffessionnels dans un cadre plus vaste en observant la manière dont les nationalistes hindous ont eux aussi réclamé l'histoire des sciences. Ce texte est encore inachevé, surtout sur la fin. Il a bénéficié des remarques critiques sur mon exposé oral de S. Brentjes. Vos réactions sont les bien venues.

This paper derives from a presentation given in Oslo, at the Science Museum, on October 23 2013, in a workshop organised by Vidar Ennebak, as a critical stance against the exhibit "Sultans of Science" presented at the time in this museum. It's aim is to set the exhibit "Sultans of Science" and the opposition it has met as much in the far-right as among professional historians of science, in a wider context, by observing how Hindu nationalists have also made claims in history of science. The text is still in a draft form especially in the end, and has benefited from the critical remarks of S. Brentjes. All comments are welcome. ; Ce texte dérive d'une présentation faite au Musée des Sciences et Techniques d'Oslo le 23 Octobre 2013, dans le cadre d'un séminaire organisé par Vidar Ennebak dont l'objectif était de poser un regard critique sur l'exposition "Sultans des Sciences" présenté au musée. Mon objectif est de situer l'exposition, ces critiques d'extrême droite comme ceux d'historiens des sciences proffessionnels dans un cadre plus vaste en observant la manière dont les nationalistes hindous ont eux aussi réclamé l'histoire des sciences. Ce texte est encore inachevé, surtout sur la fin. Il a bénéficié des remarques critiques sur mon exposé oral de S. Brentjes. Vos réactions sont les bien venues.

This paper derives from a presentation given in Oslo, at the Science Museum, on October 23 2013, in a workshop organised by Vidar Ennebak, as a critical stance against the exhibit "Sultans of Science" presented at the time in this museum. It's aim is to set the exhibit "Sultans of Science" and the opposition it has met as much in the far-right as among professional historians of science, in a wider context, by observing how Hindu nationalists have also made claims in history of science. The text is still in a draft form especially in the end, and has benefited from the critical remarks of S. Brentjes. All comments are welcome. ; Ce texte dérive d'une présentation faite au Musée des Sciences et Techniques d'Oslo le 23 Octobre 2013, dans le cadre d'un séminaire organisé par Vidar Ennebak dont l'objectif était de poser un regard critique sur l'exposition "Sultans des Sciences" présenté au musée. Mon objectif est de situer l'exposition, ces critiques d'extrême droite comme ceux d'historiens des sciences proffessionnels dans un cadre plus vaste en observant la manière dont les nationalistes hindous ont eux aussi réclamé l'histoire des sciences. Ce texte est encore inachevé, surtout sur la fin. Il a bénéficié des remarques critiques sur mon exposé oral de S. Brentjes. Vos réactions sont les bien venues.

Historian Richard Hofstadter's observations about American cold-war politics are used to contextualize Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and argue that substantive claims about the nature of scientific knowledge and scientific change found in Structure were adopted from this cold-war political culture. Las observaciones del historiador Richard Hofstadter sobre la política americana en la Guerra Fría se utilizan para contextualizar La estructura de las revoluciones científicas de Thomas Kuhn y sostener que algunas afirmaciones fundamentales sobre la naturaleza del conocimiento científico y el cambio científico que se pueden hallar en La estructura fueron adoptadas de esta cultura política de la Guerra Fría.

It is well known that technological change causes social change, and vice versa. Using system and historical perspectives, this article examines that truth at a finer level of specificity, namely, that social perceptions of interconnectedness influence the progress of science and technology, and that conversely, as 21st-century technology makes us in fact more connected, society's anxieties shift. From the science/technology side, we look at interdisciplinary research, system and complexity theory, quantum tech, and the Internet, exploring how these interact and cause changes in social attitudes-fears, conspiracy theories, political polarization, and even entertainment trends-some of which are surprising, and some dangerous. The article's systems view helps make sense of current environmental, political, and psychological crises. It combines original ideas with those of several prominent thinkers, to suggest constructive actions.

This article aims to reflect on the place of history in the history of science from the perspective of Brazilian historiography of science, mainly according to the thought of the Brazilian physicist and historian of science, Carlos Alvarez Maia. Since the 1990s, Maia (2013) began to question why the history of science became (and still largely remains) a "history of absent historians" in the face of the predominance of history of science in the Natural Science Departments and the absence in History Departments. The dynamic and changing historiography of science itself reaffirms the lack of historical analyses using history's methodological and conceptual apparatus. Thus, epistemological aspects appear interrelated to political-institutional issues. Consequently, one has a political-epistemological perspective for discussing the place – or non-place – of history in the history of science. The thought of Maia (2013) acts as an essential starting point for reflection. It constitutes a possible opening in constructing a consolidation of discussions about the impacts (of the absence and the presence of the conceptual apparatus of history) in developing new historiography of science conceptually historical.

This paper aims to revisit the intellectual tension in the River Plate region surrounding a dispute between the Hungarian philosopher Desiderio Papp and the Argentine-Uruguayan physicist Félix Cernuschi when they were contenders for the Chair of Scientific Thought at the School of Humanities and Sciences of the Universidad de la República in Uruguay. Their disagreement was personal, political, and philosophical and divided the waters among the emerging community of physicists in the region and a group of actors who, for some time, had been devoted to the History of Science in the universities of the region. The History of Science constituted the battleground out of which it would emerge how science should be understood in a Uruguayan university that, historically speaking, had been remiss in providing an appropriate space for its development. In revisiting this event, this paper seeks to throw light on the present situation of an almost non-existent History of Science in Uruguay.

This spotlight issue encourages reflection on the current COVID-19 pandemic, not simply through comparisons with previous epidemics, but also by illustrating that epidemics deserve study within their broader cultural, political, scientific, and geographic contexts. Epidemics are not solely a function of pathogens; they are also a function of how society is structured, how political power is wielded in the name of public health, how quantitative data is collected, how diseases are categorised and modelled, and how histories of disease are narrated. Each of these activities has its own history. As historians of science and medicine have long pointed out, even the most basic methodologies that underpin scientific research—observation, trust in numbers, the use of models, even the experimental method itself—have a history. They should not be taken as a given, but understood as processes, or even strategies, that were negotiated, argued for and against, and developed within particular historical contexts and explanatory schemes. Knowing the history of something—whether of numbers, narratives, or disease—enables us to see a broader range of trajectories available to us. These varied histories also remind us that we are currently in the midst of a chaotic drama of uncertainty, within our own unstable and unfolding narrative.

This spotlight issue encourages reflection on the current COVID-19 pandemic not simply through comparisons with previous epidemics, but also by illustrating that epidemics deserve study within their broader cultural, political, scientific, and geographic contexts. Epidemics are not solely a function of pathogens; they are also a function of how society is structured, how political power is wielded in the name of public health, how quantitative data is collected, how diseases are categorised and modelled, and how histories of disease are narrated. Each of these activities has its own history. As historians of science and medicine have long pointed out, even the most basic methodologies that underpin scientific research – observation, trust in numbers, the use of models, even the experimental method itself – have a history. They should not be taken as a given, but understood as processes, or even strategies, that were negotiated, argued for and against, and developed within particular historical contexts and explanatory schemes. Knowing the history of something – whether of numbers, narratives, or disease – enables us to see a broader range of trajectories available to us. These varied histories also remind us that we are currently in the midst of a chaotic drama of uncertainty, within our own unstable and unfolding narrative.

Abstract In this article we reflect on the development of an educational fieldwork conducted along the Ipiranga River, in which we bring the debates concerning History of Science and Environmental Education closer together, by problematizing the social and environmental issues in the city of São Paulo in a contextualized and critical way. To that end, we established the limits for the hydrographic basin by highlighting the headwaters of the Ipiranga River and the changes it has undergone, as well as the political, sanitary and environmental meanings throughout the 20th Century. We associated the environmental issues with the history of two important institutions located along the river: The Botanical Garden and the Museu Paulista's [São Paulo Museum] arboretum. We highlighted the practices, techniques and scientific representations that were developed on the sites, by valuing them as cultural heritage of the Brazilian science.

History of science's spatial turn has focused on the horizontal dimension, leaving the role of the vertical mostly unexplored as both a condition and object of scientific knowledge production. This special issue seeks to contribute to a burgeoning discussion on the role of verticality in modern sciences, building upon a wider interdisciplinary debate about the importance of the vertical and the volumetric in the making of modern lifeworlds. In this essay and in the contributions that follow, verticality appears as a condition of knowledge production—a set of movements and mobilities, technical challenges, political negotiations, and bodily hardships—and an object of scientific inquiry, requiring new techniques of mapping and visualisation and generative of new insights into physical processes and temporal change. By foregrounding the vertical, historians of science can gain new insights and tell new stories about how science is done in the field, the observatory, and the laboratory, and about how those sciences have helped build a modern, three‐dimensional world.

In this piece I look at just one small corner of science history touching on biology, psychology and political science. I tend to agree with Paul Feyerabend's Against Method to the extent that if there is no algorithmic scientific method, then science is best understood through examples. The same is surely true of history of science: there is no template. In this article I discuss five books to illustrate three trends: a retreat from political neutrality; downplaying the truth (however assessed) of scientific claims as a reason for their acceptance; and the desire for a good story, preferably a capitalist plot.

This article describes a teaching experience at an year 8 classroom (students aged 12-13) in a state secondary school in London/U.K. that aimed at widening learning about Nature of Science (NOS) with the input from the field of Global History of Science (HOS), which looks at science as a product of material and cognitive exchanges, appropriations and collaborations. Teaching and learning plans (TLPs) informed by this historical framework were developed by the researcher and one science teacher to integrate NOS teaching into fours topics from the national science curriculum in England (Medicines, Magnetism, Evolution, and Earth's resources). These TLPs were taught by the participant teacher to his year 8 classroom (26 boys and girls of mixed-abilities) throughout one school year, and the researcher investigated the impact of the Global HOS framework on widening students' views about NOS. Data was collated with the help of students' NOS diaries, group mind maps, classroom observations, and an open-ended NOS questionnaire applied at the start and end of the school year, complemented by participant students' grades in their end-of-year exam. Main findings point to the widening of participant students' views about NOS and, more specifically, about underexplored relevant social-institutional aspects of scientific development, such as diversity and intercultural collaborations and exchanges, exploitation of natural resources, financial, ethical and political aspects around scientific work. Students were also generally successful in re-applying NOS ideas explored in one TLP to other TLPs and scientific contexts, hinting to the importance of employing overarching narratives (such those promoted by Global HOS), linking different scientific development, when planning the integration of NOS into the school science. Results also show that NOS was integrated into content teaching without negative effects in students' exam grades. ; CNPq: 232698/2014-7

Description based on: 1913. ; At head of title: Harvard University examinations. ; Cover title. ; Mode of access: Internet.