Completed Projects sorted by Research Units

Department 1: Structural Changes in Systems of Knowledge

Department 2: Ideals and Practices of Rationality

Department Rheinberger: Experimental Systems and Spaces of Knowledge

• Appareil du sens—Concepts of the Human Senses in Scientific Observations
• The Relationship between Gestalt Psychology and Scientific Philosophy in Germany in the 1910s and 1920s
• On the History of Cloning. A Comparative Analysis of Life Sciences in Germany since 1950
• Representation and the Production of Knowledge in Molecular Evolution
• Pragmatism and the Life-Sciences. The Emergence of an Evolutionary Philosophy
• Cosmic Ice Theory – science, fiction and the public, 1894–1945
• Müller’s Lab: A Multi-Perspective Approach to the History of Science
• Thinking with Images, Thinking with Words
• Historical Styles of Experimentation and Observation: Historia Experimentalis
• Materials in the History of Science and Technology (1700-1850)
• Technoscience avant la lettre
• Mapping the Field of Vision. From Experimental Investigations of Reading to Pattern Recognition, 1860–1960
• “Purely Swiss” Vitamin C: The Cultural History of a Sociotechnical Project (1933–1953)
• Patent Classification and Scientific Taxonomies: Law as a Space of History of Science?
• A History of Scientific Methods and Expertise in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
• Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen: An Interdisciplinary Workshop
• The Cultural History of the Concept of Catalysis
• Knowledge and Development. Technology and Science in the Postcolonial Culture of Development
• The Genetically Engineered Body: A Cinematic Context
• Exploring the As Yet Unknown in Historical Epistemology, Experimental Systems and Contemporary Nutrition
• Experimenting with Life’s Potential: The Bio-Politics of Nutrition
• Encountering Hermes in the Unknown: Exploring Experimental Vitamin Research during World War I
• The Two Genomics. Ideology, Insider’s History and Material Practices: The Birth of a Scientific Belief.
• Radium and the Secret of Life
• Mutatis Mutandis: The Shifting Meaning of Mutation
• Hume and the Ideology of the Scientific Revolution
• Metaphysics for an Enlightened Age: Condillac and the Practice of 18th-Century Philosophy
• Mutations and Mutagens. Biological and Risky Things in the Analytics of Biopolitics
• Radiation. Policy and Biology of Governmentally Important Substances
• Emerging Complexity. The Dynamics of Discipline, Computational Tools, and Virtual Experiment from 1960-2000
• Social Concepts and Methods in Epistemology around 1930: Edgar Zilsel’s Socio-Historical Approach to Epistemology and his Concept of Science as an “Infinite Process”
• Three Undiscovered Epistemologists: Paul Valéry, Kurt Goldstein, Jacques Lacan
• Propagation of the Soul - Inheritance of Sin
• The Americas´ Mighty Skeletons, 1800-1850
• The Popular Science Book: A New Genre between Literature and Science in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
• The Perfect Machine: The Body and Modernist Surgery in Early 20th-Century Vienna
• Anticipation in Hereditary Disease in Europe 1900-1950
• Solomon’s Temple models as scientific objects
• Styles of Science Communication. German-American Transfer Histories, 1945-1984
• Transitions From Animal to Human Experiment in Medical Research, ca. 1880-1960
• Vital Knowledge of Life: A Systematic Comparison of Helmuth Plessner and Georges Canguilhem
• The Making of a New Research Field: On the Pursuit of Interdisciplinarity in the German Neuromorphological Sciences, 1910–1945
• Enhancing the Human: Sensory Enhancement and the Materiality of the Senses, 1910-1970
• Education of Mining Experts, 18th and 19th Centuries
• The Authority, Methods and Functions of Popular Science in the System of Sciences: Wilhelm Bölsche and Sexology
• Membranous Things: An Archeology of the Nerve Cell, 1920-1960
• History of Modern Surgery
• The Foreign Laboratory Visits of Francis Gano Benedict
• Experimentalization of Life
• Self-Experimentation: Crossing the Borders Between Science, Art, and Philosophy, 1840–1920
• The Virtual Laboratory: Essays and Resources on the Experimentalization of Life, 1830-1930
• Chronos and Psyche: The History of Physiological and Psychological Time Experiments
• Historical Epistemology of Hearing (1850-2000)
• Ear and Instrument - Hermann v. Helmholtz’s “On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music”
• Experimentalization of Gardening in Nineteenth Century Germany. Peter Joseph Lenné and the “Gärtner-Lehranstalt” at Wildpark/Potsdam
• A History of the “Typical”. Scientific Research in Prisoner-of-War-Camps from 1915 to 1918
• Tentative Transgressions. Gaston Bachelard's Experimental Epistemology
• The Way to the Laboratory – Origin and Role of Organisms in Experimental Systems in Early Life Sciences
• Codes of Experimenting and Experimental Spaces around 1900
• Generating Experimental Knowledge: Experimental Systems, Concept Formation and the Pivotal Role of Error
• Discovery and Justification: Revisiting a Precarious Distinction
• Natural Selection in the Lab: Background Knowledge and Its Role in Evolution of Experimental Systems
• Context and Error in the Epistemology of Scientific Experiment
• A Cultural History of Heredity
• Genealogy and Human Heredity in Germany, Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries
• The Structural Turn in Twentieth-Century Biology and Anthropology
• Gardening, Fancying and Heredity
• Reproduction in Biology. Configurations between Science and Culture, 1900-2000
• The Anthropological Concept of Culture in the Context of Evolutionary Debates
• Europe’s Green Revolution: The Rise and Fall of Peasant-Friendly Plant-Breeding in Central Europe, 1890-1945
• Synthetic Biology: Engineering Life in the Test Tube
• Essential Differences: Body and Place in the Early Modern Atlantic
• Knowledge in the Making. Drawing and Writing as Research Techniques
• Epistemic Writings
• Meaningful Scribbles. Children’s Drawings as Psychological Instruments, 1880-1950
• Constructing the Heavens. Drawings of Nebulae in Victorian Science
• Typography of Knowledge. The Layout-Politics of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag (1919-1938)
• Valéry’s Cahiers (1894-1945) - Drawing and Writing as a Practice of Thought
• Strokes and Expressions: The History of Graphological Knowledge (1750-1950)
• Shaping Chaos. Otto Rössler’s Drawings
• Landscapes of Experimentation. Heredity Research in Early 20th-Century Germany

Max Planck Research Group (V. Lipphardt): Twentieth Century Histories of Knowledge About Human Variation

Max Planck Research Group (S. Dupré): Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe

Max Planck Research Group (V. De Risi): Modern Geometry and the Concept of Space

Max Planck Research Group (S. Arnaud): The Construction of Norms in 17th- to 19th-Century Europe and the United States

Minerva Research Group (S. Choudhury): Constructions of the Brain: The emergence of the neurological adolescent

TOPOI Junior Research Group: Historical Epistemology of Space: Experience and Theoretical Reflection in the Historical Development of Spatial Knowledge

Max Planck Research Group (D. Schäfer): Concepts and Modalities: Practical Knowledge Transmission

Emmy Noether Research Group: Philosophy and History of Listening

Research Network: History of Scientific Objects