Franz Anton Mesmer’s 1766 thesis on the influence of the planets on the human body, in which he first publicly presented his account of the harmonic forces at work in the microcosm, was substantially copied from the London physician Richard Mead’s early eighteenth-century tract on solar and lunar effects on the body. The relation between the two texts poses intriguing problems for the historiography of medical astrology: Mesmer’s use of Mead has been taken as a sign of the Vienna physician’s (...) enlightened modernity while Mead’s use of astro meteorology has been seen as evidence of the survival of antiquated astral medicine in the eighteenth century. Two aspects of this problem are discussed. First, French critics of mesmerism in the 1780s found precedents for animal magnetism in the work of Paracelsus, Fludd and other early modern writers; in so doing, they began to develop a sophisticated history for astrology and astrometeorology. Second, the close relations between astrometeorology and Mead’s project illustrate how the environmental medical programmes emerged. The making of a history for astrology accompanied the construction of various models of the relation between occult knowledge and its contexts in the enlightenment. (shrink)

Farmers all over the world perform experiments, and have done so since long before modern experimental science and its recognized forerunners. There is a rich anthropological literature on these experiments, but the philosophical issues that they give rise to have not received much attention. Based on the anthropological literature, this study investigates methodological and philosophical issues pertaining to farmers’ experiments, including the choice of interventions to be tested, the planning of experiments, and the use of control fields and other means (...) to deal with confounding factors. Farmers’ experiments have some advantages over the field trials of agricultural scientists, but also some comparative disadvantages. The two experimental traditions are complementary, and neither of them can replace the other. Several aspects of farmers’ experiments are shown to have a direct bearing on central topics in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Farmers all over the world perform experiments, and have done so since long before modern experimental science and its recognized forerunners. There is a rich anthropological literature on these experiments, but the philosophical issues that they give rise to have not received much attention. Based on the anthropological literature, this study investigates methodological and philosophical issues pertaining to farmers’ experiments, including the choice of interventions to be tested, the planning of experiments, and the use of control fields and other means (...) to deal with confounding factors. Farmers’ experiments have some advantages over the field trials of agricultural scientists, but also some comparative disadvantages. The two experimental traditions are complementary, and neither of them can replace the other. Several aspects of farmers’ experiments are shown to have a direct bearing on central topics in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Farmers all over the world perform experiments, and have done so since long before modern experimental science and its recognized forerunners. There is a rich anthropological literature on these experiments, but the philosophical issues that they give rise to have not received much attention. Based on the anthropological literature, this study investigates methodological and philosophical issues pertaining to farmers’ experiments, including the choice of interventions to be tested, the planning of experiments, and the use of control fields and other means (...) to deal with confounding factors. Farmers’ experiments have some advantages over the field trials of agricultural scientists, but also some comparative disadvantages. The two experimental traditions are complementary, and neither of them can replace the other. Several aspects of farmers’ experiments are shown to have a direct bearing on central topics in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

An experiment, in the standard scientific sense of the term, is a procedure in which some object of study is subjected to interventions that aim at obtaining a predictable outcome or at least predictable aspects of the outcome. The distinction between an experiment and a non-experimental observation is important since they are tailored to different epistemic needs. Experimentation has its origin in pre-scientific technological experiments that were undertaken in order to find the best technological means to achieve chosen ends. Important (...) parts of the methodological arsenal of modern experimental science can be traced back to this pre-scientific, technological tradition. It is claimed that experimentation involves a unique combination of acting and observing, a combination whose unique epistemological properties have not yet been fully clarified. (shrink)