Continental philosophies of science tend to exemplify holistic themes connecting order and contingency, questions and answers, writers and readers, speakers and hearers. Such philosophies of science also tend to feature a fundamental emphasis on the historical and cultural situatedness of discourse as significant; relevance of mutual attunement of speaker and hearer; necessity of pre-linguistic cognition based in human engagement with a common socio-cultural historical world; role of narrative and metaphor as explanatory; sustained emphasis on understanding questioning; truth seen as horizonal, (...) aletheic, or perspectival; and a tolerance for paradoxical and complex forms of expression. Continental philosophy of science is thus more comprehensive than philosophy of science in the analytic tradition, including (and as analytic philosophy of science does not tend to include) perspectives on the history of science as well as the social and practical dimensions of scientific discovery. Where analytic philosophy is about reducing or, indeed, eliminating the perennial problems of philosophy, Continental philosophy is all about thinking and that will mean, as both Heidegger and Nietzsche emphasize, making such problems more not less problematic. (shrink)

Continental philosophy of science has developed alongside mainstream analytic philosophy of science. But where continental approaches are inclusive, analytic philosophies of science are not–excluding not merely Nietzsche’s philosophy of science but Gödel’s philosophy of physics. As a radicalization of Kant, Nietzsche’s critical philosophy of science puts science in question and Nietzsche’s critique of the methodological foundations of classical philology bears on science, particularly evolution as well as style (in art and science). In addition to the critical (in Mach, Nietzsche, Heidegger (...) but also Husserl just to the extent that continental philosophy of science tends to depart from a reflection on the crisis of foundations), other continental philosophies of science include phenomenology (Husserl, Bachelard, Merleau‐Ponty, etc.) and hermeneutics (Heidegger, Gadamer, Heelan, etc.), especially incorporating history of science (Nietzsche, Mach, Duhem, Butterfield, Feyerabend, etc.). Examples are drawn from the philosophy of sciences (chemistry, geology, and biology) other than physics. (shrink)

Peerages and baronetages were successful commercial directories sold by a number of prominent London booksellers from the beginning of the 18th century. They provided an account of most titled families (peers as well as baronets). As serial publications, they were intended for a larger public in need of identification tools in a context of expanding urban sociability and of major recomposition within the elites. In these pocket books, there were no longer the elaborate tree diagrams that had ornamented most of (...) the visitation books of the College of Arms, and which still could be found among ancient family papers. This transition was required for technical, commercial, and also ideological reasons. The selling point for publishers was to provide an up-to-date account of the ‘modern’ families, which could be better achieved through alphabetical listings, biographical discourses, or tabular charts. However, this formal reconfiguration led to many criticisms. These family directories were accused of compromising the dignity of titled families. The idea of a lost Golden Age when ancient lineages had been exhibited on stone, wooden panels, or vellum regained some appeal among social commentators. After 1760, with the renewal of radicalism and the onset of the age of revolutions, tree thinking came to be rehabilitated, but was also reinvented to better defend and naturalise social hierarchies. In this context, trees were increasingly used as powerful national emblems and less as dynastic emblems. The changing fortunes of family trees in 18th-century British prints enable us to reflect on the ideological aspects of the visualisation of kinship. (shrink)

Dans un procès qui eut lieu à la fin du XVIIe siècle en Livonie (aujourd’hui Latvia) un homme surnommé « le vieux Thiess » avoua être un loup garou. Les anomalies qui marquent ses aveux ont été l’objet d’interprétations différentes, qui soulèvent le problème des ambitions, et des limites, de la comparaison. L’essai explore, à travers le cas du « vieux Thiess », la possibilité d’utiliser a) la notion d’anomalies conjonctives, inspirée par la critique textuelle, b) la notion de « (...) ressemblances de famille » proposée par Francis Galton, en tant qu’instruments de comparaison dans le domaine de l’histoire des religions. (shrink)

Christoph Meiners (1747—1810) was one of 18th-century Europe's most important readers of global travel literature, and he has been credited as a founder of the disciplines of ethnology and anthropology. This article examines a part of his final work, Untersuchungen über die Verschiedenheiten der Menschennaturen [Inquiries on the differences of human natures], published posthumously in the 1810s. Here Meiners developed an elaborate argument, based on empirical evidence, that the different races of men emerged indigenously at different times and in different (...) places in natural history. Specifically this article shows how a sedentary scholar who never left Europe constructed a narrative of human origins and migrations on the basis of (1) French theory from the 1750s (Charles de Brosses and Simon Pelloutier) and (2) data gathered by explorers as reported in travel literature (J. R. Forster, Pérouse, Cook, Marsden). (shrink)

La note qui suit cherche à revenir sur la méthode singulière pratiquée avec bonheur par Carlo Ginzburg, qui consiste en la mise en tension des pratiques anonymes et des procédures savantes, souvent inspirées de la philologie. Deux études récentes de Carlo Ginzburg sont plus particulièrement analysées.

Philology haunts the humanities, through both its defendants and its detractors. This article examines the construction of philology as the premier science of the long nineteenth century in Europe. It aims to bring the history of philology up to date by taking it seriously as a science and giving it the kind of treatment that has dominated the history of science for the last generation: to reveal how practices, instruments, and cooperation create visions of timeless knowledge. This historical inquiry therefore (...) asks how one modality of textual interpretation could morph into an integrated system of knowledge production, which ostensibly explained the whole human world. Ultimately, it advances a central argument: philology operated as a relational network, one that concealed diversity and disunity, projected unity and stability, and seemed to rise above the material conditions of its own making. The article scrutinizes the composition of philology as a heterogeneous ensemble, the functioning of philology comparable to other sciences, whether human or natural, and the historical contingency in the articulation of philology. (shrink)

I examine some aspects of Mach’s concern for photographs and phonographs. I start with the phonographs, and I examine in particular Mach’s reference to this device in his account of the development of written language. My second point is a comparison between Mach's reference to phonographs and hieroglyphs and some very similar insights in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Lastly, I address some aspects of Mach’s interest in photographical techniques, and I try to draw a parallel between Mach’s conception of mental economical pictures (...) and the method of composite portraiture developed by Galton. (shrink)