Suchergebnisse

This volume is a study of the many dimensions of the early reception of Cartesianism in German-speaking Europe during the seventeenth century based on the case of the University of Frankfurt an der Oder. It investigates the broad context of that discussion, which was at once scientific, cultural, political and socio-institutional. Chapter by chapter, the book sheds light on the most relevant aspects of the environment of the time. It is aimed at historians of science and philosophy, as well as scholars investigating German-speaking Europe of the 17th century.

As Pietro Daniel Omodeo observes in this review, "environmental politics cannot be separated from political decision-making." Using the example of the Senegal delta, as explored in Maura Benegiamo's La terra dentro il capitale, Omodeo shows that the neocolonial "Great Expropriation of the global commons" is underway in the Global South, with grim ecological and social consequences for those living in the delta.

Vesa Oittinen's essay on the political and epistemological controversy that burst out between Bogdanov and Lenin at the beginning of the twentieth century, and culminated in the latter's Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1909), has the merit to draw our attention to a context, from which we can still derive important philosophical lessons, especially relative to the ontology of the sciences, social epistemology and the politics of truth.

This contribution interprets the intertwined issues of science, epistemology, society, and politics in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks as a culturalist approach to science that does not renounce objectivity. Gramsci particularly criticized the scientist positions taken by the Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin in Historical Materialism (1921) and the conference communication he delivered at the International Congress of History of Science and Technology in London in 1931. Gramsci did not avoid, at least implicitly, engaging with the theses of Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1909). Gramsci's reception of these Russian positions was twofold: on the one hand, he agreed with the centrality of praxis (and politics) for a correct assessment of the meaning of epistemological positions; on the other hand, he disagreed with the reduction of the problem of epistemology to the dichotomy of materialism and idealism at the expense of any consideration of the ideological dimension of science.

This book is an investigation of the ideological dimensions of the disciplinary discourses on science in line with the scholarly tradition of historical epistemology. It offers a programmatic treatment of the political-epistemological problematic along three entangled lines of inquiry: socio-historical, epistemological and historiographical. The book aims for a meta-level integration of the existing scholarship on the social and cultural history of science in order to consider the ways in which struggles for hegemony have constantly informed scientific discourses. This problematic is of primary relevance for scholars in Science Studies, philosophers, historians and sociologists of science, but would also be relevant for anybody interested in scientific culture and political theory.

How does a cultural-political understanding of science integrate socio-economic treatments? How can a historiography that takes subjectivity into account avoid the pitfall of post-modern relativism? The history of mechanics is a paradigmatic field to use in answering these questions and, in fact, it has always been at the center of much political-epistemological skirmish. This chapter first recounts the main motives and features of early twentieth-century social accounts of science. Further, it deals with the issue of how the need for a non-reductionist treatment of intellectual history (neither economicist nor monocausal) calls for an integration of the economic context and the political element for a more appropriate understanding of scientific development.

AbstractDie grundlegende Verschiedenheit von Körper und Geist, der sogenannte psychophysische Dualismus, zählt zu den Hauptpostulaten cartesianischer Philosophie. Trotz der damit einhergehenden Unmöglichkeit eines Wissens über den Körper findet sich sowohl bei Descartes als auch bei den deutschen Cartesianern des 17. Jahrhunderts ein umfangreicher psychophysiologischer Diskurs. Mein Beitrag rekonstruiert diese praktische Aneignung des psychophysischen Dualismus anhand dreier medizinischer Disputationen sowie einer dä- monologischen Abhandlung aus dem Umfeld der Universität Frankfurt/Oder. Hierdurch soll aufgezeigt werden, dass der cartesianische Dualismus eine Untersuchung der psychophysischen Einheit des Menschen, ein Wissen über den Körper, nicht verhindert, sondern eher neue Körpertheorien und -praktiken hervorbringt.

This paper deals with Ágnes Heller's suggestion, in A Theory of Modernity (1999), to ascribe to science a central role in the ongoing development of modernity. As we shall argue, this is not merely a historical issue but, rather, a historical-philosophical one that entails the problem of defining modernity, science and technology and their mutual interconnections. As for modernity, according to Heller, it is a free developmental project without any foundations other than freedom itself. In particular, the evolution of science and technology is one of its main developmental tendencies. Science, she argues, has become the dominant world explanation while technological thought is the corresponding dominant (but not unique) imaginary institution. Her attempt to isolate the essential cultural features of science-technology owes much to Habermas's analyses of the 1960s on the technocratic developments of contemporary societies legitimized through an ideological employment of science. Like Habermas, Heller embraces an instrumental and problem-solving conception of technology and 'normal' science which appears questionable, however, in the light of conclusions on the intrinsic creativity of the science-technology interface deriving from historical epistemology and an externalist history of science. Considerations and examples derived from the recent agenda of historical epistemology could integrate Heller's philosophical and cultural analysis of the role of science in modernity while challenging some of her assumptions.

The Marriage to the Sea is the annual ritual through which the "Maritime Republic" of Venice (F. C. Lane) represented its particular position in the Mediterranean Sea. For hundreds of years, until the end of the Republic as an independent state in 1797, at the threshold of the summer of every year, precisely in the day of the Ascension of Christ, the doge, the head of state, left the Ducal Palace in his golden vessel, the Bucintoro, to reach the place of the Two Fortresses where the lagoon confines to the open Adriatic Sea, accompanied by the most prominent political and religious authorities, and a long procession of ships. There, he threw a golden ring into the water to sanction the unique relation of the city with the aquatic element, uttering the propitiating words in Latin: "Desponsamus te Mare, in signum veri perpetuique domini", that is, "We marry you, o sea, as a sign of true and perpetual dominion" .

This thematic issue responds to the growing demand for 'more history' on the part of the earth sciences and environmental politics. The impending climate crisis—the iconic images of which range from the melting poles to the drowning water-city of Venice and the burning of Brazilian and Australian forests—creates a broad, heavily debated and politically explosive field of science in action. Current studies at the crossroads of the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities, which run under the label of 'Anthropocene', reflect on the origins of the human induced environmental disaster we live in. The term is a neologism coined by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer; it stems from geology and originally referred to a possible new geological epoch, after the Holocene, in which humankind has become a major geological force that is transforming the planet in visible and fundamental ways.

Pietro Daniel Omodeo and Charles T. Wolfe discuss the latter's book Lire le matérialisme (Lyon: ENS éditions, 2020, 292 p., ISBN 9791036202377 et 9791036202391, http://doi.org/10.4000/books.enseditions.15838) and the prospects of a cosmological and politico-epistemological, and above all, intelligent materialism.