scholarly journals Patterns to scientific internationalism: What can a comparative history of IAU and IUPAP teach us?

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (S349) ◽  
pp. 189-196
Author(s):  
Roberto Lalli

AbstractInternational scientific institutions are preferred settings to explore prominent topics in the transnational approaches to the recent history of science. These include: the dichotomy between universalism and contextualism in the historical evolution of exact sciences; the historical transformation of the ideals of scientific internationalism; the tensions between these historically changing ideals and scientists’ national allegiances; the balance between scientific and diplomatic activities of such institutions; and the issue of how the complex ideological, socio-political roles these institutions play affected the actual evolution of science.Inspired by these overreaching themes, the paper presents a conceptual framework for pursuing a comparative analysis of IAU and IUPAP. A bird’s-eye view of the parallel historical developments of these two unions shows that, in spite of their common origins in the highly politicized context of the post-WWI reconstruction of international cooperation, IAU and IUPAP followed diverging trajectories in many respects. It is argued that a deeper study of these differences might give important insights to properly understand the relevance of specific disciplines’ scientific needs in the way the ideals and practices of scientific internationalism were actualized through the 20th century.

Author(s):  
Delyash N. Muzraevа ◽  

Introduction. The written heritage of Kalmyk Buddhist priests, their daily practices, liturgical repertoire still remain a poorly studied page in the history of Buddhism among Mongolic peoples in the 20th century. The survived collections, clusters of religious texts prove instrumental in revealing most interesting aspects of their activities, efforts aimed at preservation of Buddhist teachings, their popularization and dissemination among believers. Goals. The paper examines two Oirat copies of the Precepts of the Omniscient [Manjushri] from N. D. Kichikov’s collection, transliterates and translates the original texts, provides a comparative analysis, and notes differences therein that had resulted from the scribe’s work, thereby introducing the narratives into scientific circulation. Materials. The article describes two Oirat manuscripts bound in the form of a notebook and contained in different bundles/collections of Buddhist religious texts stored at Ketchenery Museum of Local History and Lore. As is known, the collection is largely compiled from texts that belonged to the famous Kalmyk Buddhist monk Namka (N. D. Kichikov). Results. The analysis of the two Oirat texts with identical titles — Precepts of the Omniscient [Manjushri] — shows that their contents coincide generally but both the texts contain fragmented omissions (separate words, one or several sentences) that are present in the other. At the same time, when omitting fragments of the text addressed to the monastic community, the scribe was obviously guided by that those would be superfluous for the laity. Thus, our comparative analysis of the two manuscript copies demonstrates the sometimes dramatic role of the scribe in transmitting Buddhist teachings.


Philosophy ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 92 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bence Nanay

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to generalize a pair of concepts that are widely used in the history of science, in art history and in historical linguistics – the concept of internal and external history – and to replace the often very vague talk of ‘historical narratives’ with this conceptual framework of internal versus external history. I argue that this way of framing the problem allows us to see the possible alternatives more clearly – as a limited number of possible relations between internal and external history. Finally, I argue that while external history is metaphysically prior to internal history, when it comes to historical explanations, we need both.


Author(s):  
Ciro Tomazella Ferreira ◽  
Cibelle Celestino Silva

In this paper, we present an analysis of the evolution of the history of science as a discipline focusing on the role of the mathematization of nature as a historiographical perspective. Our study is centered in the mathematization thesis, which considers the rise of a mathematical approach of nature in the 17th century as being the most relevant event for scientific development. We begin discussing Edmund Husserl whose work, despite being mainly philosophical, is relevant for having affected the emergence of the narrative of the mathematization of nature and due to its influence on Alexandre Koyré. Next, we explore Koyré, Dijksterhuis, and Burtt’s works, the historians from the 20th century responsible for the elaboration of the main narratives about the Scientific Revolution that put the mathematization of science as the protagonist of the new science. Then, we examine the reframing of the mathematization thesis with the narrative of two traditions developed by Thomas S. Kuhn and Richard Westfall, in which the mathematization of nature shares space with other developments taken as equally relevant. We conclude presenting contemporary critical perspectives on the mathematization thesis and its capacity for synthesizing scientific development.


Author(s):  
Christian Fernández Chapman

<p><strong>Resumen</strong></p><p class="Pa8">El presente artículo pretende realizar un análisis sucinto sobre la trayectoria de la recuperación moderna del leonés, así como contribuir al campo de la sociolingüística a través de una valoración sobre las ideologías lingüísticas de las asociaciones involucradas en su protección, activas en la actualidad o en el pasado. Para ello, analizaremos las ideas y discursos que apoyan o refutan posturas hegemónicas y contrahegemónicas dentro del proceso de recuperación lingüística utilizando la teoría del sociolingüista gallego José del Valle mediante la contraposición que es­tablece entre las culturas de la monoglosia y de la heteroglosia, lo cual supone una novedad para entender el marco conceptual de la realidad lingüística leonesa dentro de esta disciplina.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p class="Pa8">The present article intends to elaborate on the history of the modern recovery of Leonese as well as contributing to the field of sociolinguistics through an analysis of the linguistic ideologies of the associations –cur­rently active or in the past– involved in its protection. To do so, after reviewing the style and language attitudes of the first writers in Leonese of the 20th century, we will focus on the ideas and rhetoric of associations that support or reject hegemonic or counterhegemonic stances within the process of language recovery using the theory of CUNY sociolinguist José del Valle, who establishes an opposition between the culture of monoglos­sia and the culture of heteroglossia. This new approach aims to provide a conceptual framework to understand the Leonese language situation within the field of sociolinguistics.<em> </em></p>


Author(s):  
Nataliia Voron

The paper provides an information and statistical analysis of the participation of Ukrainian émigré historians of Czechoslovakia in international congresses and conventions in the 20s and 30s of the 20th century both on the territory of the country of residence and abroad. According to the author’s estimates, Ukrainian scholars and historians from Czechoslovakia attended more than 25 various scientific congresses and conventions during that period. About nine of them were held in Prague. The issues of history and ethnography were heard at 10 conferences. Ukrainian émigré historians attended congresses of Slavic ethnographers and geographers in Prague, Poland (several cities), Belgrade, Sofia, and international congresses of historians in Warsaw and Zurich. The issue of the history of Ukraine was majorly discussed at the First and the Second Ukrainian Scientific Congress. Ukrainian scientific institutions were most often represented by scientists such as Dmytro Doroshenko and Vadym Shcherbakivskyi. Dmytro Antonovych, a professor of the Ukrainian Free University, the permanent chairman of the Ukrainian Historical and Philological Society was quite an active speaker at international forums. Most often, historians gave reports on the history of Ukraine of the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries, ethnography, folklore studies. The environment of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in Prague and its scientific and cultural life contributed to the preservation and development of the Ukrainian national idea, popularization of the research on the history of Ukraine and the history of Ukrainian culture in the European historical space. Scientists in Czechoslovakia were the representatives of the Ukrainian scientific forces in Europe. The émigré historians presented their interesting research on the history of Ukraine, reminding the European scientific community of the existence of the authentic Ukrainian people with their rich history and traditions, the ancestral desire for freedom and independence.


ENDOXA ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Kurt Plischke ◽  
Alfons Labisch

Contemporary philosophy of science sets the origins of the predominantattributes of the term “gene” in the year 1900 when Gregor Mendel’s work was rediscovered. Yet it was the speculative biology of the second half of the 19th century that opened up the epistemic sphere for a new conception of heredity: heredity as the transmission of particulate, hereditable material units with a tendency for self-preservation. The then young discipline of biology dissociated its terminology from the preconceptions of natural philosophy. In the early 20th century, the postulated hereditary particles were associated with the chromosome and, at least in the 1940s, with nucleic acid: which was being stable and, at the same time, mutable, as well as capable of self-reproduction, self-selectivity, and memory. DNA epitomizes the perfect biological principle. But the most recent conception of the gene is not free from anthropomorphisms.


2007 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 179-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Ladyman

According to logical positivism, so the story goes, metaphysical questions are meaningless, since they do not admit of empirical confirmation or refutation. However, the logical positivists did not in fact reject as meaningless all questions about for example, the structure of space and time. Rather, key figures such as Reichenbach and Schlick believed that scientific theories often presupposed a conceptual framework that was not itself empirically testable, but which was required for the theory as a whole to be empirically testable. For example, the theory of Special Relativity relies upon the simultaneity convention introduced by Einstein that assumes that the one-way speed of light is the same in all directions of space. Hence, the logical positivists accepted an a priori component to physical theories. However, they denied that this a priori component is necessarily true. Whereas for Kant, metaphysics is the a priori science of the necessary structure of rational thought about reality (rather than about things in themselves), the logical positivists were forced by the history of science to accept that the a priori structure of theories could change. Hence, they defended a notion of what Michael Friedman (1999) calls the ‘relativised’ or the ‘constitutive’ a priori. Carnap and Reichenbach held that such an a priori framework was conventional, whereas Schlick seems to have been more of a realist and held that the overall relative simplicity of different theories could count as evidence for their truth, notwithstanding the fact that some parts of them are not directly testable. All this is part of the story of how the verification principle came to be abandoned, and how logical positivism transmuted into logical empiricism.


2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (9) ◽  
pp. 1335-1359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Fleer

This article summarizes the findings of the contributions collected in the special issue “The Technology of Information, Communication, and Administration—An Entwined History” dedicated to the accelerated mechanization and the later digitization of administrative information processing in the 20th century. It develops a conceptual framework around the notions of administration, process, information, media, and power that allow for situating the contributions within the broad field of interaction spanned by the materiality of hybrid administrative processes and the ideological dynamics in society. It suggests promising lines of research for further studies in the history of administration and information.


Conatus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Athanasios Rinotas

Albertus Magnus’ alchemy is a subject that has attracted the attention of the scholars since the early decades of the 20th century. Yet, the research that has been conducted this far is characterised by its non philosophical character. As a matter of fact, the previous studies approached Albertus’ alchemy either in terms of history of science or of intellectual history. In this paper, I focus on Albertus’ definition of alchemical transmutation that is found in his De mineralibus and I analyze it in terms of his theory of creation and of his theory of matter. Therefore, I show whether a re-creation of a metal is in accordance with Albertus’ philosophy and congruently I bring forth the Aristotle Graecus and the Aristotle Latinus that are found as background in his alchemical theory of transmutation. Ultimately this paper aims to show that the aforementioned theory is not an arbitrary statement from Albertus’ part, but the result of a serious philosophical endeavour


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