In this paper, I defend causal presentism in the historiography of science. In causal presentism, historiography of science studies events, processes and practices that were causally relevant to the development of present science. I argue that causal presentism has three main virtues: First, causal presentism avoids the conceptual problems the historiography of science has recognized in its core. Secondly, causal presentism provides a clear account of what counts as historical explanatory understanding about science. Thirdly, causal presentism enables novel ways to (...) address several conceptual and methodological problems in the historiography of science. The conclusion is that causal presentism is distinctively strong position with respect to the historiography of science. (shrink)

This article draws attention to several different practices of observation, manipulation, and experimentation with the surface of natural things. Beginning from the observation that the surfaces of natural things invited observation, manipulation, measurement, and re-configuration, with the promise to unveil the knowledge of depths, this article explores how practical knowledge about the surface of things and bodies led to new conceptions of nature and matter as composed of layers, corpuscles, and artificially reproducible solid parts in early modern Europe. This article (...) explores issues of knowledge production, and studies the ways in which material knowledge-making practices contributed to the habits of observing and experimenting with the surface of nature. By discussing three groups of cases in which nature was known by its surface and practice was mixed with theoretical appraisals of matter—surgeons, butchers, and food-cutters; gardeners and agronomists; and physicians—this article argues that “cognitive models” focusing on the description as well as the manipulation of natural surfaces informed both artisanal practices and natural philosophy, bridging the “high” and the “low” in the age of the “scientific revolution.”. (shrink)

This round table discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and allude to historiographical and methodological questions through a range of examples. Topics include the emergence of (...) children's rooms in US consumer magazines, research on the unborn in nineteenth-century sciences of development, the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry, German literary discourses about the child's initiation into writing, and the sociopolitics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particularly amenable to interdisciplinary perspectives that take the history of science as part of a broader history of knowledge. (shrink)