Is science unified or disunified? Over the last century, the question has raised the interest (and hackles) of scientists, philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science, for at stake is how science and society fit together. Recent years have seen a turn largely against the rhetoric of unity, ranging from the please of condensed matter physicists for disciplinary autonomy all the way to discussions in the humanities and social sciences that involve local history, feminism, multiculturalism, postmodernism, scientific relativism and realism, and social constructivism. Many of these...
Is science unified or disunified? Over the last century, the question has raised the interest (and hackles) of scientists, philosophers, historians, a...
This book focuses on the "Einstein Tower," an architecturally historic observatory built in Potsdam in 1920 to allow the German astronomer Erwin Finlay Freundlich to attempt to verify experimentally Einstein's general theory of relativity. Freundlich, who was the first German astronomer to show a genuine interest in Einstein's theory, managed to interest his architect friend Erich Mendelsohn in designing this unique building. Freundlich's researches were not a success; he came to doubt the very theory he was attempting to prove. (Adequate technology to test Einstein's theory lay many decades...
This book focuses on the "Einstein Tower," an architecturally historic observatory built in Potsdam in 1920 to allow the German astronomer Erwin Finla...
A history of dance's pathologization may startle readers who find in dance performance grace, discipline, geometry, poetry, and the body's transcendence of itself. Exploring dance's historical links to the medical and scientific connotations of a -pathology, - this book asks what has subtended the idealization of dance in the West. It investigates the nineteenth-century response, in the intersections of dance, literature, and medicine, to the complex and long-standing connections between illness, madness, poetry, and performance. In the nineteenth century, medicine becomes a major cultural...
A history of dance's pathologization may startle readers who find in dance performance grace, discipline, geometry, poetry, and the body's transcenden...
"Psychoanalysis may be said to have been born in the twentieth century," Freud said late in his career, "but it did not drop from the skies ready-made." And in his speculative theories of modernism, Bruno Latour argued that "no science can exit from the network of its practice." Deploying Latour's model of scientific theory production, this book argues that the historical emergence of psychoanalysis depended on nineteenth-century scientific practices: laboratory experimentation, medical transmission of research findings along collegial or social networks, and medical representation of...
"Psychoanalysis may be said to have been born in the twentieth century," Freud said late in his career, "but it did not drop from the skies ready-made...
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of the printed word was shattered by the arrival of new media technologies that offered novel ways of communicating and storing data. Previously, writing had operated by way of symbolic mediation--all data had to pass through the needle's eye of the written signifier--but phonography, photography, and cinematography stored physical effects of the real in the shape of sound waves and light. The entire question of referentiality had to be recast in light of these new media technologies; in addition, the use of the typewriter changed the...
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of the printed word was shattered by the arrival of new media technologies that offered nove...
This challenging book argues that a new way of speaking of mathematics and describing it emerged at the end of the sixteenth century. Leading mathematicians like Hariot, Stevin, Galileo, and Cavalieri began referring to their field in terms drawn from the exploration accounts of Columbus and Magellan. As enterprising explorers in search of treasures of knowledge, these mathematicians described themselves as sailing the treacherous seas of mathematics, facing shipwreck on the shoals of paradox, and seeking shelter and refuge on the shores of geometrical demonstrations. Mathematics, formerly...
This challenging book argues that a new way of speaking of mathematics and describing it emerged at the end of the sixteenth century. Leading mathemat...
This book challenges the accepted view of the early Royal Society of London that holds that its fellows did not seriously attempt to implement Francis Bacon's program for the methodological reform of the sciences. Instead, the book shows that Bacon's program shaped the Society's earliest work in important, if often contradictory, ways as fellows wedded Bacon's ideas to their various interests and problem areas. Developing Bacon's program in different directions resulted in a richer understanding of his method than the undirected empiricism often associated with his name. The author...
This book challenges the accepted view of the early Royal Society of London that holds that its fellows did not seriously attempt to implement Francis...
Before Gertrude Stein became the twentieth century's preeminent experimental writer, she spent a decade conducting research in both the leading psychological laboratory and the leading medical school in the United States. This book unearths the turn-of-the-century scientific and philosophical worlds in which the young Stein was immersed, demonstrating how her extensive scientific training continued to exert a profound influence on the development of her extraordinary literary practices. As an undergraduate, Stein worked with the philosopher William James and the psychologist Hugo Munsterberg...
Before Gertrude Stein became the twentieth century's preeminent experimental writer, she spent a decade conducting research in both the leading psycho...
This is a broad-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink aesthetic and literary studies in terms of an "anthropology" of symbolic media generally. Central to the author's argument is the proposition that the idea of literature--at least as it has been understood in the West since the eighteenth century--as the paradigm for artistic experience is both limited and limiting. In its place, the author offers a more general theory of aesthetic experience appropriate to a wide range of media (in the term's broadest sense) and geared toward performativity and bodily experience. The author develops...
This is a broad-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink aesthetic and literary studies in terms of an "anthropology" of symbolic media generally. Cen...
Now that '3-D models' are so often digital displays on flat screens, it is timely to look back at the solid models that were once the third dimension of science. This book is about wooden ships and plastic molecules, wax bodies and a perspex economy, monuments in cork and mathematics in plaster, casts of diseases, habitat dioramas, and extinct monsters rebuilt in bricks and mortar. These remarkable artefacts were fixtures of laboratories and lecture halls, studios and workshops, dockyards and museums. Considering such objects together for the first time, this interdisciplinary volume...
Now that '3-D models' are so often digital displays on flat screens, it is timely to look back at the solid models that were once the third dimension ...
