I discuss the early history of holography and explore how perceptions, applications, and forecasts of the subject were shaped by prior experience. I focus on the work of Dennis Gabor (1900–1979) in England,Yury N. Denisyuk (1927-2005) in the Soviet Union, and Emmett N. Leith (1927–2005) and Juris Upatnieks (b. 1936) in the United States. I show that the evolution of holography was simultaneously promoted and constrained by its identification as an analog of photography, an association that influenced its (...) assessment by successive audiences of practitioners, entrepreneurs, and consumers. One consequence is that holography can be seen as an example of a modern technical subject that has been shaped by cultural influences more powerfully than generally appreciated. Conversely, the understanding of this new science and technology in terms of an older one helps to explain why the cultural effects of holography have been more muted than anticipated by forecasters between the 1960s and 1990s. (shrink)

Hysteria, a mysterious disease known since antiquity, is said to have ceased to exist. Challenging this commonly held view, this is the first cross-disciplinary study to examine the current functional neuroimaging research into hysteria and compare it to the nineteenth-century image-based research into the same disorder. Paula Muhr's central argument is that, both in the nineteenth-century and the current neurobiological research on hysteria, images have enabled researchers to generate new medical insights. Through detailed case studies, Muhr traces how different images, (...) from photography to functional brain scans, have reshaped the historically situated medical understanding of this disorder that defies the mind-body dualism. (shrink)

Images are double agents. They receive information from the world, while also projecting visual imagination onto the world. As a result, mind and world tug our thinking about images, or particular kinds of images, in contrary directions. On one common division, world traces itself mechanically in photographs, whereas mind expresses itself through painting.1 Scholars of photography disavow such crude distinctions: much recent writing attends in detail to the materials and processes of photography, the agency of photographic artists, and (...) the social determinants of the production and reception of photographs. As such writing makes plain, photographs cannot be reduced to mechanical traces.2 Yet background conceptions of photography as trace or index persist almost by default, as no framework of comparable explanatory power has yet emerged to replace them. A conception of photography adequate to developments in recent scholarship is long overdue. Rather than constructing such a conception top-down, as philosophers are wont to do, this paper articulates it by examining selected works by James Welling.3 There are several reasons for this: Welling’s practice persistently explores the resources and possibilities of photography, the effect of these explorations is to express a particular metaphysics of the mind’s relation to its world, and appreciating why this metaphysics is aptly expressed by exploring photography requires a revised conception of what photography is. In as much as it provides a framework for a richer interpretation of Welling, the new conception is also capable of underwriting a wide range of critical and historical approaches to photography. (shrink)

The Handbook of Antique Photographs is a short publication created by UCLan Associate Lecturer Brandon Reece Taylorian as part of his Dating Antique Photographs Project funded by UCLan's Institute of Creativity, Communities and Culture. The Handbook begins with a brief history of the origins of portrait photography followed by Taylorian's introduction of a step-by-step method for deconstructing and dating antique photographs ('antique' is defined in the Handbook as referring to any photograph that is more than 100 hundred years (...) old). The Handbook then goes on to provide details on each type of nineteenth-century photograph from the earliest type daguerreotypes to ambrotypes, tintypes, cartes de visite, cabinet cards and cartes postale with examples given for each. Each of the sections includes details on fashion and style of the period, the composition and settings for photographs and the items portrait subjects commonly held. The Handbook concludes by outlining the useful role that photographer logos and royal warrants can play in helping family historians to estimate when their nineteenth-century photographs were taken. (shrink)

In Paris in August 1839, the French government revealed a gift free of charge that would change the world forever. This gift was the daguerreotype process which had been invented by artist Louis Daguerre who used an iodine-sensitised silvered plate and mercury vapour to create some of the world’s earliest photographs and soon afterwards commercial photography was born. The trend of taking photographs spread quickly across the English Channel, but competition was fierce over the next several decades to develop (...) new methods of creating clearer images for less expense and with reduced exposure times. Victorian society embraced the technology of photography and much of the work conducted by family historians today revolves around identifying relatives in nineteenth and early twentieth century photographs. This article explores the history of portrait photography followed by an analysis of the ambrotype, tintype, cartes de visite and cartes postale found in the collection of the Moon/Prescott family from Lancashire which will provide a practical guide to dating and interpreting antique photographs. (shrink)

Based on accounts and rewrites, this article intends to think about paths in photography history, their connections between ethics, and use of image and narrative appropriations. Taking the Pará Amazon as a place of reflection, an effort is made to rethink the power relation-ship constituted by a specific point of view in the history of image. This text had the collaboration of Izabelle Louise Anaúa Tremembé, an indigenous student at Federal University of Pará (UFC). In her accounts, (...) she talks about appropriation culture, exotification of sacred objects, and sexualization of female bodies, as well in her speech, she affirms the lack of knowledge when it comes to their rituals and even brought up that indigenous autonomy in making art has always existed. The accounts were articulated on the occasion of the meeting between teachers and photography and cinema producers, in April 2019, Alcantara, Maranhão. (shrink)

“Erotism and Censorship“ offers an introduction to the history of picture postcards and explores the German censorship until 1930. The specificity of the medium to react to the desires of the clients (mostly male) and to shape them simultaneously is explained in interpretations of examples. A documentary part presents a selection of texts about reproduction technologies. These texts were originally published in journals for collectors of postcards.

This article’s conclusion is that the theories of Einstein are generally correct and will still be relevant in the next century (there will be modifications necessary for development of quantum gravity). Those Einsteinian theories are Special Relativity, General Relativity, and the title of a paper he published in 1919 which asked if gravitation plays a role in the composition of elementary particles of matter. This paper was the bridge between General Relativity and the Unified Field Theory he sought during the (...) last 25 years of his life. In an article published in the "Annals of Physics" in 1957, Charles Misner and John Wheeler claimed that Einstein's latest equations demonstrated the unified field theory. But Einstein himself felt he had not fully succeeded. The present article begins with Olbers’ paradox (why is the sky dark at night?) Then it briefly proceeds to the subjects of Newtonian gravity, quantum entanglement, gravitational waves, E=mc^2, dark energy, dark matter, cosmic expansion, redshift, blueshift, the cosmic microwave background, the 1st Law of Thermodynamics, and explanation of advanced waves travelling back in time. The section “vector-tensor-scalar geometry” touches on mass, quantum spin, the Higgs boson and Higgs field, stellar jets, the pervasiveness of photons and gravitons, and supersymmetry. Then come half a dozen paragraphs referring to formation of planets, black holes, and bosons of the weak and strong nuclear forces. They end with Descartes’ space-matter relation. Also added are paragraphs about simply-connected mathematics, non-orientability, consciousness, the Law of Falling Bodies, the multiverse, space-time travel developed from maths’ Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem and from an experiment in electrical engineering performed at Yale University, development from future space-time travel of human flight in the manner of fiction’s Superman and Supergirl, as well as downloaded band-gap implants in the brain that could deal with forms of matter. They could add or delete anything and everything we choose by emulating computers’ copy/paste function to add things; as well as their delete function, to remove things. To complete my seemingly unusual ideas, 6 sections are added – 1) “Advanced and Retarded Waves” is extended to include dinosaurs, ageing, and photography, 2) there’s a bit about space-time warping and “imaginary” computers, 3) several paragraphs about restoring health (even gaining immortality) by using gravity, 4) a section about superconductivity and the electric or magnetic fields of planets (this section mentions Mercury, Planet 9 and precession), 5) a section titled EXPLAINING OCEAN TIDES WHEN GENERAL RELATIVITY SAYS GRAVITY IS A PUSH CAUSED BY THE CURVATURE OF SPACE-TIME (this has subsections about M-Sigma, Geysers on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus, and A Brief History of Gravity), plus 5) the potential of COVID-19 to create the Golden Rule, world peace, eternal life, and a non-economic world that doesn’t use any form of money (no cash, credit cards, digital currency, etc.) The final section is called DISTANT-FUTURE SCIENCE INTERPRETED BY RELIGIONS AS SUPERNATURAL and introduces an idea for becoming immortal in these physical bodies. If the Theory of Everything sought by physicists applies to all space-time, then every person’s brain must be entangled with the 22nd century (and far beyond that time too). (shrink)

The ability of videos to serve as evidence of racial injustice is complex and contested. This essay argues that scrutiny of the Black body has come to play a key role in how videos of police violence are mined for evidence, following a long history of racialized surveillance and attributions of threat and superhuman powers to Black bodies. Using videos to combat injustice requires incorporating humanizing narratives and cultivating resistant modes of looking.

The processes of computation and automation that produce digitized objects have displaced the concept of an image once conceived through optical devices such as a photographic plate or a camera mirror that were invented to accommodate the human eye. Computational images exist as information within networks mediated by machines. They are increasingly less about what art history understands as representation or photography considers indexing and more an operational product of data processing. Through genealogical, theoretical, and practice-based investigation, this (...) dissertation project traces a lineage of computation through images from early cybernetics to contemporary machine learning under algorithmic capitalist conditions of political economy. Objects include mundane examples such as smartphone cameras to sublime examples such as the imaging of black holes. It articulates new conditions and forms of perception and surveillance that result from contemporary technological development in computation. The project builds on theorists of computational media such as Friedrich Kittler, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Jussi Parikka, Shane Denson, and Alexander Galloway to examine the interplay between perception, computation, and epistemology. Further theoretical contribution builds on the work of Luciana Parisi and Jacques Ranciére’s articulation of aesthetics, and Michel Foucault’s gesture towards a heterotopia. Finally, it draws from Donna Haraway’s metaphors of the cyborg and sympoiesis to frame the capacity of art to transfigure the limitations of digital network culture into new possibilities for being. Here, it curates practices by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Harun Farocki, Morehshin Allahyari, and Pierre Huyghe. (shrink)

There is a history of thinking that photographs provide a special kind of access to the objects depicted in them, beyond the access that would be provided by a painting or drawing. What is included in the photograph does not depend on the photographer’s beliefs about what is in front of the camera. This feature leads Kendall Walton to argue that photographs literally allow us to see the objects which appear in them. Current generative algorithms produce images in response (...) to users’ text prompts. Depending on the parameters, the output can resemble specific people or things which are named in the prompt. This resemblance does not depend on the user’s beliefs, so generated images are in this sense like photographs. Given this parallel, how should we think about AI-generated images? (shrink)

This study focuses on nuclear tourism, which flourished a decade ago in the Exclusion Zone, a regimented area around the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (Ukraine) established in 1986, where the largest recorded nuclear explosion in human history occurred. The mass pilgrimage movement transformed the place into an open air museum, a space that preserves the remnants of Soviet culture, revealing human tragedies of displacement and deaths, and the nature of state nuclear power. This study examines the impact of the (...) site on its visitors and the motivations for their persistence and activities in the Zone, and argues that through photography, cartography, exploration, and discovery, the pilgrims attempt to decode the historical and ideological meaning of Chornobyl and its significance for future generations. Ultimately, the aesthetic and political space of the Zone helps them establish a conceptual and mnemonic connection between the Soviet past and Ukraine’s present and future. Their practices, in turn, help maintain the Zone’s spatial and epistemological continuity. Importantly, Chornobyl seems to be polysemic in nature, inviting interpretations and shaping people’s national and intellectual identities. (shrink)

Environmental historian Kevin Armitage’s new book offers welcome relief to readers grown weary of anthropocentrism versus nonanthropecentrism debates and Muir-Pinchot-Leopold “third way” arguments. It will also find a receptive audience among those who have maintained all along that education is the key to addressing our environmental woes. In the United States, environmental education has a vibrant history. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a critical mass of policy makers, educators, scientists, and philosophers shared the belief that a (...) curriculum based on the careful observation and study of nature should be taught in primary and secondary school classrooms. The “nature study movement,” as it was called, advanced an ambitious agenda for education reform based on a simple theory: children who develop a deep and abiding interest in the natural world mature into environmentally conscious adults and good citizens. Organized thematically, Armitage’s book lays out the meaning of nature study as well as its scientific and sentimental interpretations (introduction and chap. 1), the influence of progressive education on nature study (chap. 2), the connection between recapitulation theory and nature study (chap. 3), nature study and bird conservation (chap. 4), school gardening as an extension of nature study (chap. 5), the growth of nature photography in tandem with nature study (chap. 6), and finally nature study’s role in promoting agricultural reform (chap. 7). In case the significance of this progressive-era movement is still in doubt, the movement’s legacy can still be felt, Armitage contends, in the ideas of perhaps two of the most influential environmental thinkers of the past century: Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson (conclusion). (shrink)

Ideas will always resist single-statement definitions, but in a rough attempt at generalization one can say that they either play or are attributed a very special role in thinking and expressive processes, in perhaps all domains of human culture. People who specialize in creating, receiving, transforming, and disseminating them are usually called “intellectuals”—even if they do not monopolize those social practices. The constitution and circulation of ideas as structures of thinking and expression, the settings in which they originate and to (...) which they respond, the material supports in which they are conveyed as well as the intellectual agents specialized in dealing with them are studied by the history of ideas and its neighboring fields. These include intellectual history, history of concepts, histoire des mentalités, Geistesgeschichte, history of books, and even cultural history, sociology of knowledge, and the histories of science, philosophy, literature, and the humanities. As it is obvious, such labels do not support a clear-cut division of labor, nor can they be lined up in an organogram that would fix constant hierarchical relations between them. They show up with incommensurable frequency, displaying different connotations within different academic cultures. This explains why in some cases—as in Geistesgeschichte, Begriffsgeschichte, or histoire des mentalités—equivalent English terms are considered problematic or unnecessary. Having flourished, spread, and sometimes also decayed within different national, disciplinary, and generational contexts, the fields designated by them can only have intricate and overlapping limits. A good way to understand the traditions connected to the history of ideas is hence to look closely to their messy border zones. The closest and most intricate connections are those between “history of ideas” and “intellectual history,” which is reflected in the fact that these terms are often employed interchangeably—a use that will be noted also in the remainder of the present text. Even so, “intellectual history” clearly emerged as preferential designation in the English-speaking world in the final decades of the twentieth century. A reason for this is the spread of the suspicion that “ideas” are burdened by essentialist traits that would render us insensitive to historical discontinuity. The notion of ideas is also sometimes regarded as much too oblivious of the way language conditions thought, and accordingly some analysts suggest that it would be out of line with the best theoretical intelligence established since the so-called linguistic turn (see Kelley 2002a: 310–14). However, others claim that ideas should not be equaled to expressed words, as they refer to occurrences that are best described with psychological terms such as beliefs and attitudes, and, further, that there would be non-essentialist ways of addressing them . What seems more uncontroversial is that, in comparison to “history of ideas,” “intellectual history” opens up an enlarged space of ambivalence as regards the analytical focus, which can then toggle from intellectual products to intellectual producers, consumers, and the cultural frameworks in which they interact. There are also important crossroads between the history of ideas and conceptual history (or Begriffsgeschichte), as both terms signal to the historical study of basic structures of thought. Conceptual history, however, at least in its most well-known variety, which was very much inspired by social-historical approaches, tends to be less centered on biographical and psychological issues and to introduce concepts as more depersonalized linguistic entities. Such and other connections and disconnections between the various ways of attending to “the reflective communal life of human beings in the past” (Burrow) will be further discussed in the following from the perspective of a geographically multicentered historical synopsis. Hopefully, its many limitations will be compensated by the possibilty of bringing to the fore relations that otherwise would not become so salient. (shrink)

According to the antirealist argument known as the pessimistic induction, the history of science is a graveyard of dead scientific theories and abandoned theoretical posits. Support for this pessimistic picture of the history of science usually comes from a few case histories, such as the demise of the phlogiston theory and the abandonment of caloric as the substance of heat. In this article, I wish to take a new approach to examining the ‘history of science as a (...) graveyard of theories’ picture. Using JSTOR Data for Research and Springer Exemplar, I present new lines of evidence that are at odds with this pessimistic picture of the history of science. When rigorously tested against the historical record of science, I submit, the pessimistic picture of the history of science as a graveyard of dead theories and abandoned posits may turn out to be no more than a philosophers’ myth. (shrink)

The chapter begins with an initial survey of ups and downs of contextualist history of philosophy during the twentieth century in Britain and America, which finds that historically serious history of philosophy has been on the rise. It then considers ways in which the study of past philosophy has been used and is used in philosophy, and makes a case for the philosophical value and necessity of a contextually oriented approach. It examines some uses of past texts and (...) of history that reveal limits to noncontextual history, including Strawson's Kant, Rorty's grand diagnosis of the Western tradition, and Friedman on Kant's philosophy of mathematics. It then considers ways in which the history of philosophy may become philosophically deeper by becoming more historical, and instances in which history of philosophy of various stripes has or may deliver a philosophical payoff. Along the way, it urges historians of philosophy to attend not only to individual philosophers and their problems and projects, but also to the larger shape of the history of philosophy and its narrative themes. (shrink)

The professionalization of the study of history in the Nineteenth Century made possible a new way of thinking about the history of philosophy: the thought emerged that philosophy itself might be relative to time, historical culture, and nationality. The simultaneous demise of speculative metaphysics scattered philosophers’ confidence that the historical variance of philosophical systems could be viewed in terms of the teleological self-realization of reason. Towards the late Nineteenth Century, philosophers began to explicitly address the worry that all (...) philosophical systems might have only relative validity. This paper compares two key figures in late-nineteenth-century debates concerning historical relativism: Wilhelm Windelband and Wilhelm Dilthey. Beneath the deep disagreements between these two authors, it reveals their common concern to immunize philosophy from the threat of historical relativism. The paper traces how both philosophers sought to fend off relativism by defending the idea of an ahistorical and permanent stratum of philosophical thinking. And it argues that although they succeeded in blocking historical versions of relativism, they did so at the cost of incurring a relativism vis-à-vis philosophical systems. This relativism turned out to be rooted not in the historicity of philosophy but in the timeless essence of philosophical reasoning itself. (shrink)

This paper examines the fortunes of non-European philosophies in histories of philosophy written by European and American philosophers from the 17th century to the present day. It charts the shift from inclusive histories of philosophy, which included non-European philosophies, to exclusive histories of philosophy, which excluded and/or marginalized non-European philosophies, at the end of the 18th century. This shift was motivated by racial Eurocentrism, which cast a long shadow over histories of philosophy written during the 19th and 20th centuries. The (...) paper also considers recent attempts to produce a more inclusive history of philosophy. By examining the history of the inclusion and exclusion of non-European philosophies in histories of philosophy, this paper seeks to challenge the assumption that philosophy began and has been practised exclusively by European or western thinkers. (shrink)

Human biological memory systems have adapted to use technological artifacts to overcome some of the limitations of these systems. For example, when performing a difficult calculation, we use pen and paper to create and store external number symbols; when remembering our appointments, we use a calendar; when remembering what to buy, we use a shopping list. This chapter looks at the history of memory artifacts, describing the evolution from cave paintings to virtual reality. It first characterizes memory artifacts, memory (...) systems, and the two main functions such artifacts have, which are to aid individual users in completing memory tasks and as a cultural inheritance channel (section 2). It then outlines some of our first symbolic practices such as making cave paintings and figurines, and then moves on to outline several key developments in external representational systems and the artifacts that support these such as written language, numeral systems and counting devices, diagrams and maps, measuring devices, libraries and archives, photographs, analogue and digital computational artifacts, the World Wide Web, virtual reality, and smartphones (section 3). After that, it makes some brief points about the cumulative nature of the cultural evolution of memory artifacts and speculates about the possible future of memory artifacts, arguing that it is very difficult to look beyond an epistemological horizon of more than five years (section 4). (shrink)

This bibliographical guide gives a comprehensive overview of the historiography of philosophy and thought in the Japanese language through an extensive and thematically organized collection of relevant literature. Comprising over one thousand entries, the bibliography shows not only how extensive and complex the Japanese tradition of philosophical and intellectual historiography is, but also how it might be structured and analyzed to make it accessible to a comparative and intercultural approach to the historiography of philosophy worldwide. The literature is categorized and (...) organized according to thematic focus areas such as geographical regions and continents, nations or peoples, religious traditions and philosophical teachings such as Buddhism, Islam, Shintō, and Confucianism, as well as disciplines such as ethics, aesthetics, and political thought. The bibliography is accompanied by an introduction outlining the research method as well as quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyzing the material, followed by a chronological overview of the historiography of philosophy and thought in the Japanese language and of the Japanese tradition of writing “world histories of philosophy.” As a first step towards a “history of the historiography of philosophy” in non-European languages, we hope that this guide will provide a useful tool for interculturally oriented scholarship aimed at a non-Eurocentric and diversified historiography of philosophy in a global perspective. (Open access, see link below.). (shrink)

During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Henri Bergson became an international celebrity, profoundly influencing contemporary intellectual and artistic currents. While Bergsonism was fashionable, L. Susan Stebbing, Bertrand Russell, Moritz Schlick, and Rudolf Carnap launched different critical attacks against some of Bergson’s views. This book examines this series of critical responses to Bergsonism early in the history of analytic philosophy. Analytic criticisms of Bergsonism were influenced by William James, who saw Bergson as an ‘anti-intellectualist’ ally (...) of American Pragmatism, and Max Scheler, who saw him as a prophet of Lebensphilosophie. Some of the main analytic objections to Bergson are answered in the work of Karin Costelloe-Stephen. Analytic anti-Bergsonism accompanied the earlier refutations of idealism by Russell and Moore, and later influenced the Vienna Circle’s critique of metaphysics. It eventually contributed to the formation of the view that ‘analytic’ philosophy is divided from its ‘continental’ counterpart. (shrink)

This book contains a selection of papers from the workshop *Women in the History of Analytic Philosophy* held in October 2019 in Tilburg, the Netherlands. It is the first volume devoted to the role of women in early analytic philosophy. It discusses the ideas of ten female philosophers and covers a period of over a hundred years, beginning with the contribution to the Significs Movement by Victoria, Lady Welby in the second half of the nineteenth century, and ending with (...) Ruth Barcan Marcus’s celebrated version of quantified modal logic after the Second World War. The book makes clear that women contributed substantially to the development of analytic philosophy in all areas of philosophy, from logic, epistemology, and philosophy of science, to ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. It illustrates that although women's voices were no different from men's as regards their scope and versatility, they had a much harder time being heard. The book is aimed at historians of philosophy and scholars in gender studies. (shrink)

Logical positivism is often characterized as a set of naive doctrines on meaning, method, and metaphysics. In recent decades, however, historians have dismissed this view as a gross misinterpretation. This new scholarship raises a number of questions. When did the standard reading emerge? Why did it become so popular? And how could commentators have been so wrong? This essay reconstructs the history of a “caricature” and rejects the hypothesis that it was developed by ill-informed Anglophone scholars who failed to (...) appreciate the subtleties of European scientific philosophy. It argues that the received view has a more complicated history and was frequently promoted by the European positivists themselves. The essay shows that the view has roots in both American and European scientific philosophy and emerged as a result of the complex interplay between the two communities in the years before the intellectual migration. (shrink)

One of the most influential ideas of twentieth-century art history and aesthetics is that vision has a history and it is the task of art history to trace how vision has changed. This claim has recently been attacked for both empirical and conceptual reasons. My aim is to argue for a new version of the history of vision claim: if visual attention has a history, then vision also has a history. And we have some (...) reason to think that at least in certain contexts, visual attention does have a history. (shrink)

Luck egalitarianism is a family of egalitarian theories of distributive justice that give a special place to luck, choice, and responsibility. These theories can be understood as responding to perceived weaknesses in influential earlier theories of both the left – in particular Rawls’ liberal egalitarianism (1971) – and the right – Nozick’s libertarianism (1974) stands out here. Rawls put great emphasis on the continuity of his theory with the great social contract theories of modern political thought, particularly emphasising its Kantian (...) character, while Nozick overtly develops his theory as an elaboration of John Locke’s account of property. By contrast, how luck egalitarianism is related to the history of political thought or philosophy more generally has been left unexplored by its proponents. Perhaps this is because they see luck egalitarianism, with its focus on individual choice and association with such contemporary concerns as equality of opportunity, as without significant predecessors in the canon. My purpose in this chapter is to make the tentative first steps towards identifying some historical antecedents of luck egalitarianism among the main works of Western political thought, in particular Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Locke. (shrink)

The history of political ideas and the logic behind its development is the most complicated section of the general history of thought in the Islamic Era. The first question raised in our critical study of the history of political ideas is the Jollowing: what is the domain of Iranian civilization at the Islamic period? The answer to this question would have a philosophical coloring. The author of this article has tried to answer this question neatly. The second (...) question raised in the paper is the following: Is political discourse based on philosophical discourse? In sum, the author has dealt with different facets of the history of political ideas in the domains of Iranian civilization at the time of the Islamic Era. Preface The history of political ideas! and the logic behind its development is the most complicated and gloomy section of the general history of thought in the Islamic Era. (shrink)

The book is a history of the concept of experience in philosophy. Minakov focuses mainly on Western 19-20th century philosophical movements and their use of the experience concept. Author uses topological method to describe growth of the conseptual content of experience, as well as decline in its use in the end of 20th century.

This essay is a case study of the self-destruction that occurs in the work of a social-constructionist historian of science who embraces a radical philosophy of science. It focuses on Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud in arguing that a history of science committed to the social construction of science and to the central theses of Kuhnian, Duhemian, and Quinean philosophy of science is incoherent through self-reference. Laqueur's text is examined in detail in (...) order to make the main point; a similar phenomenon in the work of the feminist historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller is then briefly discussed. (shrink)

Johannes Steuchius’ disputatio uses Arabic logic to present an historical account of the development of philosophical thought in Arabia before and after the emergence of Islam. Steuchius first proposes that philosophy drew its origins from the East. His evidence for this claim is that many of the Greek philosophers, considered the forefathers of European philosophy, began cultivating their philosophical thinking as a result of exposure to ancient Eastern philosophy. After the introduction of Greek philosophy, it is agreed that dialectic was (...) among the first of the arts the Arabs practiced. (shrink)

This essay aims to appreciate the evolution of the problems regarding the ontological understanding of the photographic image and its derivative, the film, in the face of the sophistication of the apparatus of its production. The creative freedom in making images through optical machines is inversely proportional to their credibility as documents. Since its appearance in the human landscape, as a cultural object, the technology of recording images with lights has brought with it a complex of aporias about what would (...) the nature of the image produced by cameras be: a document or an artistic object, intentionally produced and with created meaning? Consequently: are they denotative or, necessarily, connotative? The development of automatic image capture in the 1980s represented the first update of the question. To what extent, and for how long, will it be possible to trust photography and film as documents through which man aims to access reality? The question now seems to be settled, definitively, in the face of the invention of artificial photography made by algorithms. (shrink)

In this paper I first introduce Tomasello’s notion of thought and his account of its emergence and development through differentiation, arguing that it calls into question the theory bias of the philosophical tradition on thought as well as its frequent atomism. I then raise some worries that he may be overextending the concept of thought, arguing that we should recognize an area of intentionality intermediate between action and perception on the one hand and thought on the other. After that I (...) argue that the co-operative nature of humans is reflected in the very structure of their intentionality and thought: in co-operative modes such as the mode of joint attention and action and the we-mode, they experience and represent others as co-subjects of joint relations to situations in the world rather than as mere objects. In conclusion, I briefly comment on what Tomasello refers to as one of two big open questions in the theory of collective intentionality, namely that of the irreducibility of jointness. (shrink)

In “Conceptual Differences Between Children and Adults,” Susan Carey discusses phlogiston theory in order to defend the view that there can be non-translatability between scientific languages. I present an objection to her defence.

This paper was written to study the order of medical advances throughout history. It investigates changing human beliefs concerning the causes of diseases, how modern surgery developed and improved methods of diagnosis and the use of medical statistics. Human beliefs about the causes of disease followed a logical progression from supernatural causes, such as the wrath of the Gods, to natural causes, involving imbalances within the human body. The invention of the microscope led to the discovery of microorganisms which (...) were eventually identified as the cause of infectious diseases. Identification of the particular microorganism causing a disease led to immunization against the disease. Modern surgery only developed after the ending of the taboo against human dissection and the discovery of modern anesthesia and the discovery of the need for anti-septic practices. Modern diagnostic practices began with the discovery of x-rays and the invention of medical scanners. Improved mathematics, especially in probability theory, led to statistical studies which led to a much greater ability, to identify the causes of disease, and to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments. These discoveries all occurred in a necessary and inevitable order with the easiest discoveries being made first and the harder discoveries being made later. The order of discovery determined the course of the history of medicine and is an example of how social and cultural history has to follow a particular course determined by the structure of the world around us. (shrink)

Digital ethics, also known as computer ethics or information ethics, is now a lively field that draws a lot of attention, but how did it come about and what were the developments that lead to its existence? What are the traditions, the concerns, the technological and social developments that pushed digital ethics? How did ethical issues change with digitalisation of human life? How did the traditional discipline of philosophy respond? The article provides an overview, proposing historical epochs: ‘pre-modernity’ prior to (...) digital computation over data, via the ‘modernity’ of digital data processing to our present ‘post-modernity’ when not only the data is digital, but our lives themselves are largely digital. In each section, the situation in technology and society is sketched, and then the developments in digital ethics are explained. Finally, a brief outlook is provided. (shrink)

Staphylococcus aureus ST45 is a major global MRSA lineage with huge strain diversity and a high clinical impact. It is one of the most prevalent carrier lineages but also frequently causes severe invasive disease, such as bacteremia. Little is known about its evolutionary history. In this study, we used whole-genome sequencing to analyze a large collection of 451 diverse ST45 isolates from 6 continents and 26 countries. De novo-assembled genomes were used to understand genomic plasticity and to perform coalescent (...) analyses. The ST45 population contained two distinct sublineages, which correlated with the isolates’ geographical origins. One sublineage primarily consisted of European/North American isolates, while the second sublineage primarily consisted of African and Australian isolates. Bayesian analysis predicted ST45 originated in northwestern Europe about 500 years ago. Isolation time, host, and clinical symptoms did not correlate with phylogenetic groups. Our phylogenetic analyses suggest multiple acquisitions of the SCCmec element and key virulence factors throughout the evolution of the ST45 lineage. (shrink)

The History of Ideas is presently enjoying a certain renaissance after a long period of disrepute. Increasing quantities of digitally available historical texts and the availability of computational tools for the exploration of such masses of sources, it is suggested, can be of invaluable help to historians of ideas. The question is: how exactly? In this paper, we argue that a computational history of ideas is possible if the following two conditions are satisfied: (i) Sound Method . A (...) computational history of ideas must be built upon a sound theoretical foundation for its methodology, and the only such foundation is given by the use of models , i.e., fully explicit and revisable interpretive frameworks or networks of concepts developed by the historians of ideas themselves. (ii) Data Organisation. Interpretive models in our sense must be seen as topic-specific knowledge organisation systems (KOS) implementable (i.e. formalisable) as e.g. computer science ontologies. We thus require historians of ideas to provide explicitly structured semantic framing of domain knowledge before investigating texts computationally, and to constantly re-input findings from the interpretive point of view. In this way, a computational history of ideas maximally profits from computer methods while also keeping humanities experts in the loop. We elucidate our proposal with reference to a model of the notion of axiomatic science in 18th -19th century Europe. (shrink)

This chapter provides a brief overview of the history of behavioral neurology, dividing it roughly into six eras. In the ancient and classical eras, emphasis is placed on two transitions: firstly, from descriptions of head trauma and attempted neurosurgical treatments to the exploratory dissections during the Hellenistic period and the replacement of cardiocentrism; and secondly, to the more systematic investigations of Galenus and the rise of pneumatic ventricular theory. In the medieval through post-Renaissance eras, the scholastic consolidation of knowledge (...) and the role of compendia are emphasized, along with the use of new methods from within a mechanistic framework. With the discovery of electrical conductance and the rise of experimentalism, we frame the modern era as period of intense debate over localization, decomposition, and other mechanistic principles, and marked by rapid discovery about the brain. The chapter ends with a discussion of the contemporary era, focusing on the establishment of behavioral neurology research on aphasia, apraxia, and neuropsychiatric conditions. (shrink)

The author argues for a greater involvement of professional historians of science into teaching science to improve the historical component of science. Yet, however much some teachers like history they find no room in the curriculum for a history of science course. The solution is in make the history of science a useful tool for teaching physics. The author shares his experience of using historical experiments carried out by students in a lab setting. Playing scientists not only (...) improved understanding of physical concepts but also enhances students' self-confidence, creativity, and self-reliance. (shrink)

An alliance of established experts on critical care, Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), has published two protocols for treatment of COVID-19. The first one, methylprednisolone, ascorbic acid, thiamine, and heparin (MATH+), is intended for hospital and intensive care unit treatment of pulmonary phases of the disease. It is based on affordable, commonly available components: anti-inflammatory corticosteroids (methylprednisolone, "M"), high-dose vitamin C infusion (ascorbic acid, "A"), vitamin B1 (thiamine, "T"), anticoagulant heparin ("H"), antiparasitic agent ivermectin, and supplemental components ("+") (...) including melatonin, vitamin D, elemental zinc, and magnesium. -/- The MATH+ protocol has received scarce attention due to the World Health Organization (WHO) advising against the use of corticosteroids in the beginning of the pandemic. In addition, randomized controlled clinical trials were required as a condition for adoption of the protocol. As the hospital mortality rate of MATH+ treated patients was approximately a quarter of the rate of patients receiving a standard of care, the authors of the protocol considered performing such trials unethical. Other parties have later performed clinical trials with corticosteroids and anticoagulants, which has led to a more widespread adoption of these components. -/- In October 2020, ivermectin was upgraded from an optional component to an essential component of the protocol. According to the authors, ivermectin is considered the first agent effective for both prophylaxis (prevention) of COVID-19 and for treatment of all phases of COVID-19 including outpatient treatment of the early symptomatic phase. Therefore, at the end of October 2020, a separate ivermectin-based I-MASK+ protocol for prophylaxis and early outpatient treatment of COVID-19 was published. (shrink)

Review of 'History of Rationalities: Ways of Thinking from Vico to Hacking and Beyond' by Luca Sciortino Palgrave McMillan, Cham (Switzerland) 2023, pp. 351 € 84,94 .

PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, vol. 52, number 1, pp.44-63. R.M. Nugayev, Kazan State |University, USSR. -/- THE HISTORY OF QUANTUM THEORY AS A DECISIVE ARGUMENT FAVORING EINSTEIN OVER LJRENTZ. -/- Abstract. Einstein’s papers on relativity, quantum theory and statistical mechanics were all part of a single research programme ; the aim was to unify mechanics and electrodynamics. It was this broader program – which eventually split into relativistic physics and quantummmechanics – that superseded Lorentz’s theory. The argument of this paper (...) is partly historical and partly methodological. A notion of “crossbred objects” – theoretical objects with contradictory properties which are part of the domain of application of two different research programs – is developed that explains the dynamics of revolutionary theory change. (shrink)

A lot of words investigated by philosophers get their inception for conventional or extra-philosophical dialect. Yet the idea of substance is basically a philosophical term of art. Its employments in normal dialect tend to derive, often in a twisted way, different from its philosophical usage. Despite this, the idea of substance differs from philosophers, reliant upon the school of thought in which it is been expressed. There is an ordinary concept in play when philosophers discuss “substance”, and this is seen (...) in the concept of object, or thing when this is contrasted with properties, attributes or events. There is also a difference in view when in the sense that while the realists would develop a materialistic theory of substance, the idealist would develop a metaphysical theory of substance. The problem surrounding substance spans through the history of philosophy. The queries have often been what is substance of? And can there be substance without its attributes? This paper tends to expose the historical problems surrounding substance. This paper criticizes the thinking which presupposes that there could be a substance without its attributes or substance existing alone. This paper adopts complimentary ontology principles which state that for anything to exist, it must serve as a missing connection to reality. This suggests that everything interconnects to each other and substance cannot exist in isolation. (shrink)

This paper’s aim is to establish an explanation for the separation of Northern minds, by examining the influence of a variety of factors on the shaping of people’s sense of identity at the time. Near the end of the 16th century the Groningers had proven to be a people with a mind of their own—impetuous, unruly and, in the end, unwilling to join the Republic in its efforts to liberate itself from its oppressive Spanish overlord. One by one the Dutch (...) cities had joined the revolution, but the city of Groningen refused. The ‘Ommelanden’—the city’s surrounding territory—however, did not—laying bare a critical disagreement between two ‘classes’: the Saxon city elite and the predominantly Frisian countryside nobles (Dutch plural: landjonkers/jonkheren). (shrink)

Bergson offers an epistemological critique of Darwin’s theory that focuses on his gradualism: for Darwin variation is “minute”, and Bergson glosses “insensible.” His main argument is that if variations are insensible, they cannot confer an advantage to the organism and therefore be selected. Yet, for Darwin, the selected variation is not insensible: to be selected, it must be beneficial to its bearer in the struggle for existence. This article aims at understanding the origin of this misunderstanding by tracing the (...) class='Hi'>history of this critique. To do this, we will study Bergson’s sources, showing that his interpretation of Darwin is in line with the critique of many biologists at the turn of the 20th century, albeit in a confused way. This will lead us back to the origin of this critique: the work of Mivart. In this study, we wish to reveal the anchor of the Bergsonian interpretation in the debates of his time, and the shifts from the traditional exposition of the argument that led Bergson to formulate this false paradox. This article will also analyze more precisely the counterexample of the “analogy of structure” to show that, despite Bergson’s misunderstanding, he did point to actual limits of the Darwinian theory. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Hegel thought that systematicity was both a necessary condition for a body of thought to be recognized as philosophy and a normative principle by which progress in the history of philosophy can be evaluated. I argue that Hegel’s idiosyncrasies in the interpretation of thinkers who he considers to be philosophers can be explained by referring to the structure of his own philosophical system. I also argue that Hegel’s conception of philosophy as being essentially (...) systematic leads him to claim that traditions that do not have systematic philosophy do not have philosophy at all and this leads to their marginalization. Finally, I identify the role of Hegel’s assumptions in shaping the self-understanding of philosophers through the shaping of the philosophical canon. (shrink)

In recent decades, perspectivism has developed into an epistemological research program claiming its independence. This autonomy stems from Perspectivism’s potential ability to resolve the contradictions between realist and constructivist programs. Perspectivism is based on the idea that the object depends on perspective, which constitutes any subjective attempt to cognize it. Perspectivists reconstruct and explain the factors involved in the formation of perspective, identifying the conditionality of epistemic acts, using concepts such as “position”, “point of view”, “view”, “angle”, “horizon”, “focus”, “picture”, (...) “context”, “aspect”, etc. Although these concepts are part of the perspectivist’s toolkit, their meanings and interrelation have so far been taken for granted and have not yet been critically and comprehensively analyzed. The purpose of this article is to take steps toward clarifying the conceptual basis for defending perspectivism as an epistemological program. Once consistently uncovered and correlated in a conceptual model, Perspectivist concepts can be used as a tool for a detailed analysis of theories, positions, and beliefs. The article begins with a preliminary description of the concept of perspectivism and its brief history as an epistemological program. In particular, the first modern attempts to outline perspectivist epistemology are described in the works of F. Kaulbach (1990), W. Stegmaier (2008), and M. Massimi (2017, 2020). The problem of identifying the special a priori status of perspectivist notions as a strategy for justifying the autonomy of Perspectivism is then posed. A method for demonstrating such a status, based on Kant’s transcendentalism and P. Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics, is then suggested. (shrink)