An interdisciplinary approach to ancient and late antique commentaries reflects various MPIWG research initiatives on ancient commentaries, partly in cooperation with Topoi and the ERC project BabMed. While most of the research results from these seminars and workshops and events will appear in other publications, the present selection has important strands of coherence which will make this Preprint useful as a window into ancient commentaries. The texts discussed in this preprint extend from later phases in Mesopotamia hermeneutics to the broad reach of Greek and Byzantine scholarship, which also impacted Slavonic technical learning while en route back to Latin Europe via Arabic and Hebrew. The impression offered by these papers is one of familiarity of topics, as one generation of scholars were challenged to explain the intellectual heritage of their predecessors.

A symposium took place in honor of Jürgen Renn at SISSA (Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati) in Trieste, July 14–16, 2022 with sessions of the symposium were organized around the following topics: origins of evolution of knowledge; external representations of knowledge; science and society; organization of knowledge; the spread of knowledge; knowledge evolution and the Anthropocene. A selection of the talks given at the meeting are presented in this preprint. The inspiration to organize the symposium stemmed from Renn’s publication The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene. Since this book is presented by Renn himself as a culmination of the joint research undertaken in his department at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin since 1994, it seemed only fitting to celebrate this milestone achievement at an event that would include many of those who fundamentally shaped this joint research endeavor over the years.

The take-off of the First Industrial Revolution in England around the mid-eighteenth century, which shifted manufacturing to the factory system, was due to the emergence of the new entrepreneurial class with highly skilled and culturally informed technicians who fully assimilated the values of capitalism and transferred them to their fundamental innovations. One could apply the Gramscian concept of “hegemony” to describe the spread of new literary and philosophical societies in which entrepreneurs, technicians, and intellectuals met to discuss solutions to newly emerging problems. Inventions that increased labor productivity flourished, and in the field of energy production, where water wheels and steam engines already existed, decisive advances were to streamline their use in capitalist production, which prevented future developments because science was still tied to old approaches. The contributions of John Smeaton to the development of water wheels, and of James Watt to the steam engine are analyzed here in detail, emphasizing how both led to the completion of Newtonian mechanics and the birth of thermodynamic science. The concept of efficiency that inspired their research was destined to inform all of modernity. In those same years in France, the regime of absolutism prevented the nascent bourgeoise from establishing their hegemony. Through the Enlightenment movement, they sublimated their planning by studying and systematizing the achievements of British “practical mechanics” in a rational sense. In particular, Lazare Carnot, trained in the school of military genius, generalized the criteria that Smeaton had established for water wheels to all mechanical machines, introducing the first formalizations of energy concepts. Lazare’s son, Sadi Carnot, inspired by the same criteria, formulated the first theory of “fire machines” in 1824, opening up the modern field of thermodynamics, which introjected from its inception the criterion of efficiency.

In this previously unpublished text, Wolfgang Edelstein has presented systematic “Preliminary Considerations for a Structural Curriculum Theory,” guided by three concepts that organize the factual and temporal-social references as well as the mode of justification of the school as a place of subject-bound instruction. In 1973, when he presented these considerations, the great dream of a comprehensive educational reform based on the comprehensive school had been shattered, which had been nurtured by the German Education Council and also pushed by the MPI for Human Development, as Edelstein soberly and critically balances at the beginning. In addition, the great promises of the various curriculum theories had come to an end, including the theory of the MPI director Saul B. Robinsohn, which was oriented toward the analysis of social need. Edelstein’s new approach was oriented toward the goal of enabling every learner to achieve self-determination in a civilization determined by the sciences, and perceived the educational system primarily as a world of learning that shapes school learning processes in their factual-temporal logic in a subject-centered way. It is thus a decidedly content- and process-oriented rather than an outcome-oriented view of schooling that he makes the central reference for theoretical work and the criterion for the design of learning processes. Learning and social psychological theories are therefore particularly intensively received, above all Jean Piaget and considerations concerning the “structure of discipline,” with which Jerome Bruner had newly inspired the teaching-related debate.

The borrowing registers of university libraries represent ‒ especially for the history of science ‒ a new source genre and thus a new approach. They enable to reconstruct the decisive influences and stimuli on scientists working at the places in question. In this article, this is exemplified by the Göttingen mathematician Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866), who, apart from a few stays abroad, lived and worked almost exclusively in Göttingen. In the first section, the Göttingen University Library borrowing registers are introduced and the most important previous book-historical publications related to them are presented. In the second section, I first describe how and why I came to examine these registers with reference to Riemann, and present in the following some new results regarding the genesis of Riemann’s groundbreaking philosophical as well as mathematical ideas. I conclude with an unaltered photomechanical reproduction of Riemann’s book and journal borrowings from the Göttingen University Library, as I extracted and compiled them quite some time ago without the use of digital tools. The definitive edition of this article will be published in an appropriate journal for the history of science after having been revised and then translated into English in post-Covid times, with further consultation of the originals in Göttingen. For the convenience of English-speaking readers, a work-in-progress English version of this preprint can be obtained from the author.

The remarkable degree of accuracy with which some of the Old Kingdom pyramids are oriented towards the cardinal directions is one of the most challenging problems in the history of science. The progressive deviation of the orientation of the 4th Dynasty pyramids from true north was long understood to be a consequence of the pyramids having been aligned to a star whose celestial position changed due to the effect of the general precession of the rotational axis of the Earth. Instead of a single star, recent proposals considered a possible orientation towards some notable vertical or horizontal stellar configurations. The main idea behind these recent attempts at explanation was to justify the gradual deviation of the pyramid alignments by way of the selected target stellar configuration exhibiting a similar azimuthal trend. Considering conventional Egyptian chronologies of this period to be only relative, and the astronomically determined data to be fully reliable, the researchers tried to make the two trends match perfectly by shifting the conventional Old Kingdom chronologies by some, often significant, number of years. Too little attention, however, was paid to allowing for systematic and random errors in the surveying of stars and in the orientation of pyramids towards the observed asterism, which may obfuscate the real accuracy of the methods and conceal the actual targets of observations. In this text, we consider recent proposals and analyze their errors. We propose and discuss two new solutions whose systematic errors are minimal among all the known proposals: one based upon the horizontal alignment of Alioth and Mizar, and another one upon the vertical alignment of Kochab and ζ UMi. In contrast to other methods, the latter pair has the advantage that it could have been observed at lower altitudes. Both variants show an impressive degree of agreement with the trend in the orientation of the pyramids for von Beckerath’s (lower estimates) as well as for Baines and Malek’s chronologies of the period. It appears to us that the preserved Egyptian astronomical diagrams are fully consistent with our new proposals.

The following collects observations I made during the reading of Fibonacci’s Liber abbaci in connection with a larger project, “abbacus mathematics analyzed and situated historically between Fibonacci and Stifel”. It shows how attention to the details allow us to learn much about Fibonacci’s way of working. In many respects it depends critically upon the critical edition of the Liber abbaci prepared by Enrico Giusti and upon his separate edition of an earlier version of its chapter 12 – not least on the critical apparatus of both. This, and more than three decades of esteem and friendship, explain the dedication.

Vortrag im Rahmen der Ringvorlesung der International Max Planck Research School „Knowledge and Its Resources: Historical Reciprocities“, 17. Februar 2022:
Wenn man Wissen als Ressource bezeichnet oder von den Ressourcen des Wissens spricht, als handele es sich um Stoffe, über die man verfügen kann, übersieht man allzu leicht die komplexen und dynamischen Strukturen, die die Geschichte des Wissens charakterisieren. In meinem Vortrag möchte ich diese Strukturen näher beschreiben, und zugleich die zentrale Rolle deutlich machen, welche die Wissensgeschichte als Teil der Gattungsgeschichte für die kulturelle Evolution und für unsere Zukunft im Anthropozän spielen kann.

The pioneering work, Scienza e Industria 1848–1915: Gli sviluppi scientifici connessi alla seconda rivoluzione industriale (Science and Industry 1848–1915: Scientific developments related to the second industrial revolution) by Angelo Baracca, Stefano Ruffo, and Arturo Russo is reproduced in this preprint. Published in Italian by Laterza in 1979, it is an unjustly forgotten treasure of a highly fertile and innovative period of the history of science. The introduction to the preprint describes the historical circumstances in which this book and the approach it proposes emerged. It covers a wide range of subjects, from the different ways in which the Second Industrial Revolution unfolded in Great Britain and in continental Europe to the upheaval in modern science, in particular in chemistry in the latter half of the nineteenth century and in physics at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although each of these themes has meanwhile become the subject of detailed historical investigations, the survey and overall picture that Scienza e Industria provides is still intriguing: it connects the new knowledge economy of the Second Industrial Revolution with the conceptual revolutions in modern physics by pointing to the mediatory role of chemistry.

The present article continues an earlier analysis of occurrences of two algebraic unknowns in the writings of Fibonacci, Antonio de’ Mazzinghi, an anonymous
Florentine abbacus writer from around 1400, Benedetto da Firenze, and another anonymous Florentine writing some five years before Benedetto, and Luca Pacioli.
The following article investigates how Benedetto da Firenze explores in 1463 the use of four or five algebraic unknowns in symbolic calculations, describing it afterwards in rhetorical algebra; in this way he thus provides a complete parallel to what was so far only known from Johannes Buteo’s Logistica from 1559. It also discusses why Benedetto may have seen his innovation as a merely marginal improvement compared to techniques known from Fibonacci’s Liber abbaci, therefore omitting to make explicit that he has created something new.

This introduction to historical epistemology offers a general overview of the main themes, debates, and currents of this multifaceted field, which has emerged at the intersection of the philosophy of science and the history of science. The authors offer a historical reconstruction of the main debates that forged historical epistemology and assess today’s challenges. Additionally, they provide the reader with the conceptual and methodological tools that are necessary to enter this field and understand its main questions and approaches. This preprint is in Italian and available in print form only.

Die Rolle wissenschaftlicher Expertinnen und Experten in der Corona-Krise ist wiederholt kritisiert worden, insbesondere von geisteswissenschaftlicher Seite.  Ein Hauptvorwurf, der auch an die Adresse der Nationalen Akademie der Wissenschaften Leopoldina gerichtet ist, lautet, wissenschaftliche Experten seien anmaßend, wenn sie als politische Berater mit ihrer wissenschaftlichen Kompetenz und mit Sachzwängen argumentieren. Die Brisanz des Arguments wird noch durch die Behauptung zugespitzt, der wissenschaftliche Experte benötige für seine politische Beraterrolle besondere persönliche Qualitäten, für die ihm die Wissenschaft kein Rüstzeug liefere. Diese Mystifizierung der Figur des Experten dient dann als Rechtfertigung eines vorgefassten, tiefsitzenden Skeptizismus gegenüber naturwissenschaftlichem Spezialistentum und Expertise. Ein Rückblick in die Geschichte entzieht dieser Mystifizierung die empirische Grundlage. Die Geschichte zeigt: Experten oder „Sachverständige“ zeichnen sich vor allem durch praktisch relevantes, empirisches Wissen aus, das im technischen Umgang mit „Sachen“, Experimente eingeschlossen, erworben wurde; diese Sachkompetenz war meist der ausschlaggebende Faktor für ihre Beratertätigkeit. In der anschließenden Diskussion des Begriffs Sachzwang argumentiere ich gegen die weit verbreitete Ansicht, Sachzwänge seien technokratische Totschlagargumente.  Das Argumentieren mit Sachzwängen legt nur offen, welche Konsequenzen und Handlungsoptionen sich aus vorhandenem Sachwissen ergeben, es impliziert jedoch keine Normen und damit auch keine Vorabentscheidung über Handlungsziele.

The role of experts in the recent corona crisis has often been criticized, especially by scholars from the humanities. A major objection is that experts claim their political advice is based on scientific knowledge and that related constraints are presumptuous. The objection—addressed also to the German National Academy of Science—is accompanied by the argument that the advisory role of scientific experts presupposes certain personal qualities of the expert that cannot be acquired in the scientific community. This mystification of the figure of expert then serves as justification for preconceived general skepticism toward scientific expertise. The historical part of this paper shows that experts have long been recognized as persons with outstanding empirical knowledge acquired in technical activities, including experimentation; their role as political advisors is based primarily on the fact that this kind of knowledge is recognized as practically useful knowledge. The historical figure thus does not lend itself to mystifying definitions. The historical part is complemented by a discussion of the concept of natural and technical constraints of actions (Sachzwänge). I argue that this kind of knowledge neither implies norms nor goals of action. Hence it always leaves open different possibilities of action.

One of the truly decisive figures in the flourishing of general relativity that began in the 1950s, the eminent physicist John A. Wheeler (1911-2008) is best known today to the general public because of the adoption of the phrase ‘black hole’. Still, that seems quite a thin reason for scientific fame – the question, then, is: what did Wheeler actually do in that field? A proper answer has to take into account a plurality of levels, from Wheeler's peculiarly visual style to his interactions with his own school and other groups, from the pioneering uses of computers to his early visions of quantum gravity. That is what this paper offers, while tracing Wheeler's evolving positions – from rejection to enthusiastic acceptance and popularisation – during the fifteen years (ca 1952-1967) preceding the moment black holes became ‘black holes’.

Turning everyday ordinary happenings into struggling moments for existence—from breathing to socializing—is how the Covid-19 pandemic will mark history. What we ask here is not how the ordinary becomes abnormal but how it becomes political and diplomatic.  We argue that the spread of the Covid-19 virus, which is measured through virologic and epidemiological models, overlaps with feverous diplomatic and political activities taking place among big geopolitical powers. Yet, this is not new in history of health. The first encounters between diplomats and health professionals were elicited by the social and economic challenges caused, on a global scale, by the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century. Indeed, health sciences and diplomacy have been historically co-produced. Such a historical perspective on science and health diplomacy facilitates our understanding of international institutions such as the World Health Organization as highly political and diplomatic endeavors. The Diplomatic Studies of Science, a new interdisciplinary research field underpinned by a historical perspective on science diplomacy, sheds light on the multiple factors contributing to the worsening of the global COVID-19 crisis we are facing nowadays.

In developed symbolic algebra, from Viète onward, the handling of several algebraic unknowns was routine. Before Luca Pacioli, on the other hand, the simultaneous manipulation of three algebraic unknowns was absent from European algebra and the use of two unknowns so rare that it has rarely been observed and never analyzed. The present paper analyzes the three occurrences of two algebraic unknowns in Fibonacci’s writings; the gradual unfolding of the idea in Antonio de’ Mazzinghi’s Fioretti; the distorted use in an anonymous Florentine algebra from ca 1400; and finally the regular appearance in the treatises of Benedetto da Firenze. It asks which of these appearances of the technique can be counted as independent rediscoveries of an idea present since long in Sanskrit and Arabic mathematics, and raises the question why the technique once it had been discovered was not cultivated – pointing to the line diagrams used by Fibonacci as a technique that was as efficient as rhetorical algebra handling two unknowns and much less cumbersome, at least until symbolic algebra developed, and as long as the most demanding problems with which algebra was confronted remained the traditional recreational challenges.

The Tacuinum sanitatis is a genre of illuminated medical texts from the Late Middle Ages that contains an intriguing and surprising combination of theoretical knowledge and lavish, detailed, and colorful images. By exploring a specific manuscript of this genre, and by comparing it with related practical medical texts and genres, this study wishes to better understand the different aspects of this text and explain this combination. The Late Middle Ages are traditionally thought of as a time of stagnation in the history of science and particularly in the history of medicine. However, in recent decades historians have observed the long-term intellectual and social evolutions of the Middle Ages and have demonstrated the ways in which these changes formed the grounds for the great achievements of the sixteenth century. These evolutions include the translations and dissemination of Greek and Arab knowledge traditions in the Latin West, the establishment of universities, the formation of a medical market and the medicalization of society, and the formation of new audiences for practical and theoretical medical texts. The arts were also heavily influenced by the rise of naturalism and natural study from direct observation, for example. This study demonstrates how a singular text can be linked to major historical evolutions and how a text of this sort can function as a historical source, shedding light on the major intellectual and artistic shift between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

This work offers an introduction to the history of scientific thought in the region between Iran and the Atlantic from the beginnings of the Bronze Age until 1900 CE—a “science” that can be understood more or less as a German Wissenschaft: a coherent body of knowledge carried by a socially organized group or profession. It thus deals with the social and human as well as medical and natural sciences and, in earlier times, even such topics as astrology and exorcism. It discusses eight periods or knowledge cultures: Ancient Mesopotamia – classical Antiquity – Islamic Middle Ages – Latin Middle Ages – Western Europe 1400–1600 – 17th century – 18th century – 19th century. For each period, a general description of scientific thought is offered, embedded within its social context, together with a number of shorter or longer commented extracts from original works in English translation.

The purpose of this manual is to provide an overview of one of the methods used to classify the books included in the “Sphaera database”: http://db.sphaera.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/resource/Start. A method used in libraries to catalogue an inventory of early modern printed texts has been slightly adapted for this purpose. The approach is based specifically on the process outlined in the EDIT16 database: http://edit16.iccu.sbn.it/web_iccu/ihome.htm.

The idea of gravitational collapse can be traced back to the first solution of Einstein’s equations, but in these early stages, compelling evidence to support this idea was lacking. Furthermore, there were many theoretical gaps underlying the conviction that a star could not contract beyond its critical radius. The philosophical views of the early 20th century, especially those of Sir Arthur S. Eddington, imposed equilibrium as an almost unquestionable condition on theoretical models describing stars. This paper is a historical and epistemological account of the theoretical defiance of this equilibrium hypothesis, with a novel reassessment of J.R. Oppenheimer’s work on astrophysics.

Auch in der Wissenschaft wird die politische Rhetorik über- und die Verwaltung unterschätzt. Wissenschaftspolitik kann durch die Art, wie Verwaltung sie umsetzt, ruiniert werden. Der Bologna-Prozess ist ein beredtes Beispiel dafür. Verwalter, die sich, den Methoden des New Public Management folgend, auf  Indikatoren verlassen und so die Wissenschaft steuern, verfehlen ihre Aufgabe. Reflexive Verwaltung dagegen bedenkt die unausgesprochenen Voraussetzungen und unvorhergesehenen Wirkungen ihres Handelns, und kommt so ihrem verfassungsmäßigen Auftrag als vollziehender Gewalt nach, in der Demokratie eingehegt durch Parlament, Regierung und Rechtsprechung. Sie setzt auf eine verantwortungsvolle Haltung der Verwalter und auf deren Urteilskraft. In der Wissenschaft setzt sie auf Serendipity und schützt die Freiheit der Wissenschaftler, auch wenn sie allein ihrer Neugier folgen. Reflexive Verwaltung ist eine anspruchsvolle, erfindungsreiche Tätigkeit, die wesentlich zur wissenschaftsdienlichen Gestaltung öffentlich finanzierter Forschung beiträgt, im Interesse der Wissenschaftler, ihrer Institutionen und des Gemeinwohls.

Verwaltung ist keine Wissenschaft. Sie ist eine Kunstfertigkeit. Verwaltung gewinnt durch Wissen, Bildung, Einsicht, kritisches Denken und Geschmack, wird aber dadurch nicht zur Wissenschaft. Sie bedarf der Erfahrung und der Beispiele gelungener Verwaltung. Das Buch beschreibt solche Beispiele, häufig aus dem Umkreis des Wissenschaftskollegs zu Berlin. Sie zeigen, wie facettenreich diese Tätigkeit ist, insbesondere wenn Verwalter Institutionen gestalten. Sie sollen plausibel machen, dass die perversen Effekte quantifizierender Methoden vermeidbar sind – und dass Wissenschaftsverwaltung zu einer intellektuellen Leidenschaft werden kann.

This preprint is a glossary of uncertainty, closely connected to six specific case studies, which provides an insight into diverse uncertainties and coping methods that were historically discussed and practiced in China and Japan. When people encountered unknowingness or uncertainty in various historical periods, these endeavors were processed in ways that some called predicting, and others thought of as plans or ways to “think ahead”. Still other notions had a very particular character, so not all forms of accounting for and framing the not-yet-known were transferrable beyond an individual example or region. Yet what such forms of explanation often seem to have had in common was a wide range of material formats: in attempts to predict or plan, people may have been less concerned about truthfulness than they were with finding traceable patterns—seeking reliability in repetition.

This paper presents six cases in ancient Greek cultures of knowledge, which make it possible to posit a connection between certain modes of presentation and institutional context. Among the texts looked at are the Hippocratic Epidemics, Aristotelian discourse, Hellenistic mechanics, and theoretical mathematics. While historical reconstruction of the institutional contexts involved is impossible, each of the cases leaves room for observations concerning an interdependence of knowledge-presentation and ‘setting’, understood as standard social context of reception. The paper describes resulting modes (collective, epideictic, school mode, how-to mode, analytical, and esoteric modes) as responding to and possibly emerging from certain contexts, but also as registers that later became per se possible choices for science writers, each catering to specific functions within the transmission and presentation of knowledge. With respect to Greek science, it remains an open question, whether and how one can separate a style of reasoning from a mode of presentation, that is, separate epistemic from rhetorical structures.

In this paper, the importance of the cosmographical activities of the Vienna astronomical “school” for the reception of the Tractatus de Sphaera is analyzed. First, the biographies of two main representatives of the Vienna mathematical/astronomical circle are presented: the Austrian astronomers, mathematicians, and instrument makers Georg von Peuerbach (1423–1461) and his student Johannes Müller von Königsberg (Regiomontanus, 1436–1476). Their studies influenced the cosmographical teaching at the University of Vienna enormously for the next century and are relevant to understanding what followed; therefore, the prosopographical introductions of these Vienna scholars have been included here, even if neither can be considered a real author of the Sphaera. Moreover, taking the examples of an impressive sixteenth-century miscellany (Austrian National Library, Cod. ser. nov. 4265, including the recently rediscovered cosmography by Sebastian Binderlius, compiled around 1518), the diversity of different cosmographical studies in the capital of the Habsburg Empire at the turning point between the Middle Ages and the early modern period is demonstrated.

Handwritten comments in the Vienna edition of De sphaera (1518) also show how big the influence of Sacrobosco’s work remained as a didactical tool at the universities in the first decades of the sixteenth century—and how cosmographical knowledge was transformed and structured in early modern Europe by the editors and readers of the Sphaera.

Four years prior to receiving the Nobel Prize, Albert Einstein pledged the prize money to his soon to be ex-wife Mileva to ensure her and their sons’ livelihood and to serve as an advance payment of the sons’ inheritance. With this money, Mileva Einstein bought three Zurich apartment houses in 1924 and in 1930. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, this investment plummeted in value. Thanks to Albert Einstein’s persistent financial efforts for over more than ten years, a small sum constituting the rest of the Nobel Prize capital was actually transferred to the sons, following Mileva’s death in 1948.

This paper discusses the origin of technical terminology in everyday language by outlining stages in a long-term history of technical terminology marked by increasing degrees of reflexivity. It uses the examples of spatial terminology in an ancient Chinese theoretical text, in Newtonian mechanics, and in relativity theory, and attempts to explain the increasing distance of the meanings of technical terms from their everyday counterparts by relating it to historical processes of knowledge integration.

The processes of long-term migration of physicians and scholars affect both the academic migrants and their receiving environments in often dramatic ways. On the one side, their encounter confronts two different knowledge traditions and personal values. On the other side, migrating scientists and academics are also confronted with foreign institutional, political, economic, and cultural frameworks when trying to establish their own ways of professional knowledge and cultural adjustments.

The twentieth century has been called the century of war and forced migration: it witnessed two devastating World Wars, which led to an exodus of physicians, scientists, and academics. Nazism and Fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, forced thousands of scientists and physicians away from their home institutions based in Central and Eastern Europe. “Did you ever go half way …” was a central question that all of them had to align with their personal consciousness, their family bonding, and the relationship to their academic peers. No one could leave without finding their individual answers to this existential question that lay at the bottom of their professional and scientific lives.

Following this general theme, the current special issue particularly reflects on the personal stories and institutional narratives of German-speaking scientists and physicians to North America since the 1930s, as a relevant case study from twentieth-century history of medicine and science. By drawing on diaries, questionnaires, institutional histories (including those of the Max Planck Society among others), novels, and personal estates, this special issue as a whole intends to emphasize the impact of forced migration from a North-American perspective by describing the general research topic; showing how the personal lives of many of these individuals were intertwined with their careers and choices of scientific topics, projects, and personal destinies. Moreover, this special issue seeks to explore whether new historiographical approaches can provide a deeper understanding of the impact of European émigré psychiatrists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists on emerging fields of medicine and science, including community and geriatric medicine, developmental neuroscience, and psychiatric traumatology to which the individuals in the respective cohort have strongly contributed in their new host countries.

The resources used for teaching at medieval universities became increasingly enriched by pictorial material, particularly during the fourteenth century. This work explores the epistemic function of pictorial material—images of science—in the context of medieval and early modern medicine, alchemy, and anatomy. The historical context is defined by the expansion in the thirteenth century of the spatial horizons of Western culture and the consequent need for a cultural identity, first expressed through the assimilation of the local European calendric systems. The regulation of time is determined as the first cause of the diffusion of pictorial material as an epistemic means of transcending the boundaries of learned scholarly circles, thereby enabling a broader access to knowledge. Originally based on a seminar delivered at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at the University of Tel Aviv by Matteo Valleriani, this work is the result of a science history exhibition supported by curator Yifat-Sara Pearl, for which students collaborated with artist and designer Liron Ben Arzi to further develop their research activities.

The exploration of Mesopotamian mathematics took its beginning together with thedecipherment of the cuneiform script around 1850. Until the 1920s, “mathematics in use” (number systems, metrology, tables and some practical calculations of areas) was the object of study – only very few texts dealing with more advanced matters were approached before 1929, and with quite limited results. That this situation changed was due to Otto Neugebauer – but even his first steps in 1927–28 were in the prevailing style of the epoch, so to speak “pre-Neugebauer”. They can be seen, however, to have pushed him toward the three initiatives which opened the “Neugebauer era” in 1929: The launching of Quellen und Studien, the organization of a seminar for the study of Babylonian mathematics, and the start of the work on the Mathematische Keilschrift-Texte. After a couple of years François Thureau-Dangin (since the late 1890s the leading figure in the exploration of basic mathematics) joined in. At first Thureau-Dangin supposed Neugebauer to take care of mathematical substance, and he himself to cover the philology of the matter. Very soon, however, both were engaged in substance as well as philology, working in competitive parallel until both stopped this work in 1937–38. Neugebauer then turned to astronomy, while Thureau-Dangin, apart from continuing with other Assyriological matters, undertook to draw the consequences of what was now known about Babylonian mathematics for the history of mathematics in general.

With only Apuleius and Augustine as partial exceptions, Latin Antiquity did not know Archimedes as a mathematician but only as an ingenious engineer and astronomer, serving his city and killed by fatal distraction when in the end it was taken by ruse. The Latin Middle Ages forgot even much of that, and when Archimedean mathematics was translated in the 12th and 13th centuries, almost no integration with the traditional image of the person took place. With the exception of Petrarca, who knew the civically useful engineer and the astrologer (!), fourteenth-century Humanists show no interest in Archimedes. In the 15th century, however, “higher artisans” with Humanist connections or education took interest in Archimedes the technician and started identifying with him. In mid-century, a new translation of most works from the Greek was made by Jacopo remonensis, and Regiomontanus and a few other mathematicians began resurrecting the image of the geometer, yet without emulating him in their own work. Giorgio Valla’s posthumous De expetendis et fugiendis rebus from 1501 marks a watershed. Valla drew knowledge of the person as well as his works from Proclus and Pappus, thus integrating the two. Over the century, a number of editions also appeared, the editio princeps in 1544, and mathematical work following in the footsteps of Archimedes was made by Maurolico, Commandino and others. The Northern Renaissance only discovered Archimedes in the 1530s, and for long only superficially. The first to express a (purely ideological) high appreciation is Ramus in 1569, and the first to make creative use of his mathematics was Viète in the 1590s.

The Yiji jing 易筋經 (The Canon for Supple Sinews) of 1624 describes martial training currently practiced, particularly in Chinese communities. This article compares two forms that the two co-authors learnt in different places: Singapore and Kunming in the People's Republic of China. One form is known as the Hong Fist (hongguan洪拳) version of the Yijin jing, the other was taught as a form of qigong 氣功. This article focuses on the training of the authors in their respective practice. It demonstrates that the techniques learned instilled in the authors an attentiveness to the meanings that shaped their practice. These meanings were not primarily comprehended in a cognitive fashion but felt and experienced. In particular, the materiality of the environment, or more precisely the resistances that the environment posed to a practitioner, appear to have shaped the practice of the Yijin jing in distinctive ways. As argued here, the practitioners enskilled themselves through their practices into a world of either jin筋/勁 (sinew/power) or qi 氣 (breath/wind).

Peter Fulde is not only one of Germany’s leading solid-state physicists but is prominent also due to his outstanding career, his general involvement in science, and the exceptional activities he undertook in organizing science in various circumstances. Fulde grew up in the eastern part of the country and went to the West as a student. He obtained his PhD in the United States and then returned to Germany to become full professor at the University of Frankfurt at the age of 32 and later director in various research institutes. He was a member of the German Science Council (Wissenschaftsrat), the board of the German Physical Society (DPG) and numerous other bodies. After the re-unification of Germany he returned to the East and built up the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden. Finally, after his retirement in 2007, he followed a call to South Korea to head a similar institute there and eventually helped to establish a Korean analogue of the German Max Planck Society. The interview presented here follows the steps of his life. It was conducted on the occasion of his 80th birthday in April of 2016 and is supplemented by a curriculum vitae and by two brief accounts of his physics research and of his role in Dresden and Korea in the context of the Max Planck Society.

There are powerful social, political, and epistemological reasons for concealing (or revealing) certain people and practices in the course of scientific research and publication. The human sciences—including biology and biomedicine as well as anthropology, linguistics, and social science—depend upon people with diverse values and expertise, who have varied motivations and degrees of political agency. Research encounters are often orchestrated by actors behind the scenes—tissue donors, survey respondents, student subjects, translators, activists, ethics review boards, civic or religious institutions, lawyers, nurses, and archivists. Their contributions move in and out of the shadows as scientific knowledge is made, with important consequences for the authority and authenticity of research findings. Through a collection of case studies, this volume encourages methodological reflection on whether and how historians of science and STS scholars might recover contributions to the human sciences. Ultimately the volume asks how our professional, institutional, geographical and political circumstances condition whom we claim to speak of and for.

Around 1801 Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau (1737–1816) designed his famous fumigating machine. The machine spread a controlled emission of a specific gas—described as an oxygenated acid—that was supposed to destroy the contagious miasmas in the air, objects, and bodies. During the 1804 outburst of the yellow fever, the Spanish Government ordered that the original design of Guyton’s fumigating machine be adapted to the Spanish market for extensive use in households. This was done against some criticism, as the nature of the contagion was avowedly unknown and the acid fumigation technology polemic. Nonetheless, the machine was pictured as crucial for the health of individuals and for society as a whole. The essay looks at the fumigating machine as a way of exploring how scientific and political practices pervaded societies and, vice-versa, how ways of interpreting nature and politics became embedded in artifacts. It will show, first, how the machine served to spread the new French chemistry among Spaniards; second, how it embodied a new relationship between the citizens and the state, and third, how this artefact was imported by the Spanish absolutist state, appropriated, and used for political propaganda. By focusing on a chemical artefact, it shows a historically complex and significant interweaving of theory, material culture, and politics.

Erich Kretschmann (1887–1973) was a German theoretical physicist whose work on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (1917) offered some interesting insights, but was also critical of Einstein’s semantics. Einstein responded in a paper in 1918 and agreed that Kretschmann’s criticism was valid. Kretschmann wrote his thesis under the supervision of Max Planck and obtained his doctorate in 1914. A psychiatric disease during his adolescence made him permanently unfit for military service and saved him from having to participate in the First World War. From 1920 he lectured in theoretical physics at the University of Königsberg. In 1926 he became an apl. professor, a position which he held until 1945. After his escape from Königsberg in January 1945 he found temporary accommodation at Rendsburg, Schleswig-Holstein. In 1946 he was appointed as a full professor of theoretical physics at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle.

Since its development in economic history, the notion of ‘Useful Knowledge’ has found wide resonance in very diverse fields, engaging scholars working on codified knowledge and scientific practices, material culture and technological innovation, experimentation and policy issues. This preprint presents some of the contributions on this theme delivered at the workshop ‘The Making of Useful Knowledge’ (MPIWG Berlin, 30–31 October 2014).
The meeting aimed at problematizing the apparently coherent picture of useful knowledge that has arisen out of the works of economic historians like Joel Mokyr, and at testing and evaluating the employment of notions of usefulness in the longue durée, moving away from a specific focus on pre-industrial economic growth. Because of this diachronic approach, case studies spanned from the early modern period to the twentieth century.
This volume collects an introduction and six essays by Karel Davids, Jonathan Harwood, Ursula Klein, Thomas Morel, Giuditta Parolini and Cesare Pastorino. Topics of these contributions range from commercial accounting, plant breeding and maritime technology, to mining, mineralogy and applied statistics. The workshop ‘The Making of Useful Knowledge’ was organized by Thomas Morel, Giuditta Parolini and Cesare Pastorino as part of the activities of the Berlin Center for the History of Knowledge.

This paper is the translation by Giampiero Esposito of a paper originally published in French in Acta Mathematica 88, 141-225 (1952) under the title: Théorème d’existence pour certains systèmes d’équations aux dérivées partielles non linéaires. The first three chapters are devoted to the solution of the Cauchy problem, in the nonanalytic case, for a system of nonlinear second-order hyperbolic partial differential equations with n unknown functions and four independent variables. This task is accomplished in chapter III by using the system of integral equations fulfilled by the solutions of partial differential equations that approximate the original nonlinear system. In chapter IV, such results are applied to the vacuum Einstein equations. The resulting Ricci-flatness condition is expressed, in isothermal coordinates, through nonlinear equations of the kind studied here. It is hence proved that the solution of the Cauchy problem, pertaining to such nonlinear equations, satisfies over the whole of its existence domain the isothermal conditions if the same is true for the initial data. One therefore obtains a solution of the vacuum Einstein equations which is unique up to a coordinate change.

When the Federation of German Scientists (VDW) was founded as the West German section of Pugwash in the late 1950s, several high-profile scientists from the Max Planck Society (MPG), especially nuclear physicists, were involved. Well into the 1980s, institutional links existed between the MPG, the Federal Republic’s most distinguished scientific research institution, and Pugwash, the transnational peace activist network that was set up in 1957 in the eponymous Nova Scotia village following the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. In the beginning, the two organisations’ relationship was maintained primarily by the physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. However, it was difficult right from the start, and the distance between them grew during the rise of détente in the 1970s, when the scientific flagship MPG was deployed more and more frequently in matters of foreign cultural policy, not only for the FRG but for the western alliance as a whole. This contribution explores the resources and the risks of transnational political engagement – not only as the individual strategies of top-ranking researchers, but also in terms of policy deliberations within a leading scientific organization at one of the Cold War’s sharpest divisions: the front line between two Germanys.

The paper discusses the interplay of experience and representation in disciplinarily structured science using the example of the fundamental changes in the concepts of space and time brought about by the advanced formalism of twentieth-century physics, which enabled the integration of a growing corpus of experiential knowledge. In particular the question of why certain parts of experiential knowledge had an impact on concepts of space and time, while other parts did not have such an impact, is addressed.

According to the topos “Ende der Naturgeschichte” (Foucault, Lepenies) a veritable historical understanding of Nature came into being around 1800. The contribution re-considers this thesis and discusses in particular the historical speculations in deistic cosmologies as well as in the context of the idea of a “Great Chain of Beings.” Finally attention is drawn to the implications of the fact that the then new physiological understanding of development (ontogenesis) as an epigenetic process became a naturalistic model of historical development in general just in this period.

We investigate possible tools and approaches to develop a Digital Scrapbook, a virtual research environment inspired by the recursive nature of research for scholars where they can combine web and own resources into a new scholarly edition readily enabled for Open Access. Web resources are interlinked in the digital scrapbook by content capture and detail selection, rather than sole bookmark or link to resource URL, along with necessary accompanying metadata. We analyse several open source and commercial tools, with special focus on a Scrapbook-X Firefox Add-On, in order to match to desired Digital Scrapbook features. We further address the wider requirement context for development of such Digital Scrapbook environment, discussing both technical and user experience dimensions. We conclude with a recommendation on how to approach the development and operation of a Digital Scrapbook environment.

Seit dem siebzehnten Jahrhundert war der weit ins Folgejahrhundert hineinreichende Streit über die kulturelle Überlegenheit der Antike oder der Moderne ein zentraler Topos intellektueller Debatten, zunächst in Frankreich, dann auch in anderen europäischen Ländern. Dieser Streit spiegelte sich in Positionen über die sich herausbildenden mathematischen Methoden in der Naturphilosophie wieder. Während nicht in Frage stand, dass es einen Wissensfortschritt bezüglich partikulärer Phänomene (z.B. dem Kompass) gegeben habe, war umstritten, inwiefern antike Methoden und Argumentationsformen für die moderne Wissenschaft nicht mehr verbindlich seien.
Eine zentrale Innovation in der Methode der Mechanik des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts war die Verwendung der analytischen Geometrie (Übersetzung geometrischer Probleme in algebraische Gleichungen) und der Infinitesimalrechnung. In der Bewertung dieser Innovationen gab es große Differenzen: Newton berief sich explizit auf die Autorität der Euklidischen Geometrie als Begründung für die konservative Form der Beweise in den Principia Mathematica, in denen er so weit als möglich einen Rückgriff auf analytische Geometrie und Infinitesimalrechnung vermied. In Lagranges Mechanique analytique andererseits finden sich keinerlei geometrische Diagramme mehr und die Newtonsche Mechanik wird ausschließlich in Form algebraischer Gleichungen präsentiert.
Der Aufsatz untersucht die Frage nach dem Verhältnis dieses radikalen Wandels in der theoretischen Methodologie der Mechanik zu den Vorstellungen der Akteure von antiker Wissenschaft und ihrer Autorität. Des weiteren verfolgt er die Entstehung eines Begriffs von antiker Wissenschaft als eines Anderen der modernen Wissenschaft und das Verhältnis dieses Begriffs zu einer Wissenschaftsgeschichte im modernen Sinne.

The subject of this essay concerns the role of chemistry during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and as such its focus is upon“practical“ or “applied“ chemistry and its functional development within the rapidly industrializing circumstances of the town of Glasgow in the later 18th. and 19th. centuries.The earlier part of this period also witnessed the decades of the so-called Chemical Revolution, the developments in chemical science associated with Antoine Lavoisier and his French colleagues, initiated in the 1770’s and gaining increasing acceptance from the mid-1780’s onwards. One theme of the essay is thus the form of relations holding between these “Two Revolutions“. Were the advances in practical, industrial chemistry significantly derived from the new chemistry, and how, more generally, may such technical innovations be historically understood.? A second theme concerns the variety of locations and forms of industrialized chemical production which characterize the period in question, and a third is the diverse nature of chemical entrepreneurship exhibited by Glasgow’s pre-eminent chemical industrialists. Close attention is paid throughout to the chemical, industrial and social characteristics of specific Glaswegian sites, such as Tennant & Co.’s St. Rollox Works and the Macintosh family’s Dunchatton Cudbear Works. The presence of Glasgow’s commercial and educational institutions is also emphasized as significantly relevant for the social and intellectual formation of what became, by 1800, the first generation of industrial chemists in Glasgow. The essay concludes with further reflection upon the historiographical complexities attending our attempts to grasp the nature of economic, technical and scientific change during this revolutionary period.

The two papers in this preprint provide a framework for analyzing the history of knowledge from the perspective of extended evolution, a conceptual framework that analyzes evolutionary processes as transformations of extended regulatory network structures and is designed to apply to a whole range of phenomena, from genome and biological to cultural and technological evolution. All of these phenomena can be seen as a form of extended knowledge evolution.

This article summarizes a historical perspective on the nation’s experience in the development of nuclear physics, with a special emphasis on its relationship with the Cuban Nuclear Program and the scientific and technological achievements attained as well as their social and economic impact. The development of nuclear energy and nuclear facilities requires the creation of specialized institutions, the training of professionals in the field, the structuring of interdisciplinary groups made up of nuclear physicists and specialists in theoretical and experimental physics, and engineers and specialists in other areas. This article also addresses the multiple peaceful applications introduced in Cuba, particularly those related to the scientific nuclear program.

The essay focuses on of the very first incunabulum herbal, printed in Rome by Philippus de Lignamine in 1482/83. It takes this incunabulum as a starting point for further reflections on the status of plant illustrations and their naturalism in herbals of the 15th and 16th centuries. Philippus’ intention was to edit a herbal of the so-called Pseudo-Apuleius tradition. For this, he used the schematized illustrations of a Pseudo-Apuleius manuscript he had previously discovered as patterns for the plant illustrations of his print. Philippus believed the manuscript to be a Roman antique herbal manuscript, but investigations by Hunger (1935) have shown that the manuscript was a ninth-century Pseudo-Apuleius copy. The essay asks for the reason of Philippus’ reuse of schematic plant pictures. It argues that at the end of the 15th century, the belief in the truthfulness of antique herbal texts was still as big as to stimulate Philippus to copy the presumed antique illustrations. There was an intense printing activity of treatises completely or partly dedicated to herbs during the last quarter of the 15th century, in Germany as well as in Italy. At the same time, however, herbal illustrations in manuscripts, during the last third of the 15th and the first third of the 16th century, were becoming far more naturalistic than prints and employed own means of picturing plants. The manuscripts also used pictorial patterns, but were more inventive in iconography during the first third of the 16th century, employing nature prints and dried plants, and therefore employed their own ways to convey knowledge on plants.

The paper discusses the interplay of experience and representation in disciplinarily structured science using the example of the fundamental changes in the concepts of space and time brought about by the advanced formalism of twentieth-century physics, which enabled the integration of a growing corpus of experiential knowledge. In particular the question of why certain parts of experiential knowledge had an impact on concepts of space and time, while other parts did not have such an impact, is addressed.

We propose to use “endangerment sensibility” to designate the perception that vast portions of the world are in danger of extinction or destruction, together with the complex of concepts, values and practices dealing with human and non-human entities considered threatened. We then sketch main issues associated with the endangerment sensibility in three areas that are crucial across all domains from biodiversity to cultural heritage: diversity as a constitutive value; listing as a fundamental epistemic practice; and emotions as integral to both the values and the sciences of endangerment. Exploring “endangerment” in such a perspective highlights the extent to which it is rooted in historically situated ethical, political, emotional and epistemic configurations. Wir verwenden den Begriff “Sensibilität der Gefährdung” als Bezeichnung der Wahrnehmung, dass weite Teile der Welt Gefahr laufen, vernichtet zu werden, sei es durch Aussterben oder Zerstörung. Wir schließen in den Begriff all jene Konzepte, Werte und Praktiken ein, die sich auf als gefährdet eingestufte menschliche wie nichtmenschliche Einheiten beziehen. Wir skizzieren drei Kernpunkte, welche die Sensibilität der Gefährdung von der Biodiversität bis zum Kulturellen Erbe prägen: Erstens Diversität als grundlegende Wertschätzung; zweitens Listung als fundamentale epistemische Praxis; und drittens Gefühle als integralen Bestandteil der Werte wie auch der Wissenschaften der Gefährdung. Aus dieser Perspektive bringt die Erforschung der “Gefährdung” als Phänomen der Wahrnehmung zum Vorschein, inwieweit die betreffenden Sensibilitäten jeweils in historisch situierten ethischen, politischen, emotionalen und epistemischen Konstellationen wurzeln.

The relationship between the determination of the circumference of the Earth and the geographical mapping performed by Ptolemy in his Geography is discussed. A simple transformation of the Ptolemaic coordinates to the circumference of the Earth measured by Eratosthenes, based on the assumption that the metrical values of the stadion used by both Ptolemy and Eratosthenes are equivalent, drastically improves the positions of the locations given in Ptolemy’s catalogue at least for a great part of the oikoumenē. Comparing the recalculated positions of the identified localities with their actual positions, it turns out that the distances extracted by Ptolemy from ancient sources are remarkably precise. This in turn confirms the high precision of Eratosthenes’s result for the circumference of the Earth. It is shown that many distortions of Ptolemy’s world map can be explained as pure mathematical consequences of a mapping onto the surface of a sphere of wrong size.

Post-revolutionary Cuba is a unique case among underdeveloped countries. This small plot of land – less than one thousand of the emerged Earth surface with barely 1.5 per thousand of the World population, with scarce resources – decided in 1959 to develop an advanced scientific system, with the explicit goal of both solving the most urgent problems for the development of the country and for its population (primarily the health problems), and to overcome the condition of subalternity. This process was very original also for the free and open-minded recourse to every kind of support and collaboration, with Soviet and Western scientists and institution, besides a typical Cuban inventiveness. The success of this project was striking. In the following three decades Cuba built an advanced and articulated scientific system, and achieved an excellence level in leading scientific fields. Among these, one can mention electronics and superconductivity, but probably the most striking top-level results were achieved, quite surprisingly, in a capital-intensive and typically American field like biotechnology. This last success has called the attention of the most qualified international Journals, such as Nature, Science and the specialized literature. Even more remarkable is that the development of Cuban biotechnology was completely independent from any collaboration and support from the Soviet Union, which was backward in this field. At the turn of the 1980s, however, the collapse of the Soviet Union left Cuba in an extremely difficult economic situation, seriously putting at risk the achievements of the Revolution, and posing again the threat of subalternity. Most analysts even predicted the downfall of the Cuban economy and regime. The American embargo was intentionally worsened. Actually, the Cuban scientific system withstood the tremendous shock despite the loss of every support, confirming the maturity and autonomy it had attained, even though the economic difficulties inevitably undermined many scientific sectors. In face of such a critical situation, the Cuban government reconfirmed and reinforced the choice of supporting its most advanced and profitable scientific sectors, especially in the biomedical sector, as a strategy to overcome the present difficulties. This strategy proved to be once again a well chosen choice. The present essay presents a wide-ranging reconstruction of the complex process of Cuban scientific development, based on, and reviewing the relevant literature that has addressed this problem. The explicit thesis is that the Cuban way of addressing and overcoming subalternity is unique in contemporary history. An original contribution is the first reconstruction of the unique role of Italian biologists in the training and growth of Cuban geneticists and biotechnologists between mid 1960s and mid 1970s.

In 1878 the mathematician Joseph Boussinesq pointed out a structural analogy between some features of living beings and singular solutions of differential equations. Sudden transitions between ordinary and singular solutions could represent sudden release of energy in biological process and in the fulfilment of free will. He assumed that a guiding principle rather than a physical action might lead the system beyond the threshold of singular points. Deterministic processes, which corresponded to ordinary solutions, gave way to indeterministic processes, which corresponded to singular solutions. Alongside the mathematical pathway, a different conceptual stream had already emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. Both physicists and physiologists made use of concepts like triggering actions and guiding principles in order to represent explosions and unstable equilibrium in inanimate matter, and the complex interaction between volitions and motions in human beings. A third conceptual stream was represented by philosophical debates on the problematic link between deterministic physical laws and free will. The new issues stemming from the fields of mathematics, physics, and life sciences found room in philosophical journals, but the interest of philosophers gradually faded away towards the late 1880s. At the same time, the majority of mathematicians and physicists had never shown a systematic interest in this subject matter. We find in Boussinesq an original and almost isolated attempt to merge mathematical, physical, biological issues into a consistent philosophical framework. However questionable his research programme might be, it was actually a daring and systematic one. In the twenty-first century, some philosophers of science rediscovered the problematic link between determinism and singular solutions of differential equations. The memory of late nineteenth-century debates had already disappeared, but recently Marij van Strien has put forward a direct comparison between those debates and recent theses on determinism.

The cultural meaning of Renaissance debates on ephemerides cannot be restricted to the technical dimension of astronomical computation. Predictive precision was in fact the presupposition for astrological forecasts. Given the intellectual and ethical relevance of astrology in that epoch, a criticism of the reliability of ephemerides invested also the tenability of astrological beliefs, and questioned social and cultural practices linked to it. The interconnection of mathematical-astronomical, astrological, philosophical and ethical issues in debates over heavenly predictions is witnessed by the fierceness of the Turin controversy of 1580-1581 opposing the astrology critique Benedetto Altavilla and the ducal mathematician Giovanni Battista Benedetti. The preprint includes a transcription of selected passages from four Turin publications by these authors as an appendix: Benedetto Altavilla, Animadversiones in Ephemeridas, Taurini, apud haeredes Nicolai Bevilacquae, 1580; idem, Breve discorso intorno gli errori dei calculi astronomici, Turino, appresso gli heredi del Bevilacqua, 1580; idem, In Nome di Dio, broadside (11 August 1581); Giovan Battista Benedetti, Lettera per modo di discorso... all’illustre Bernardo Trotto, intorno ad alcune nuove riprensioni, ed emendazioni, contra alli Calculatori delle Effemeridi, Torino, appresso gl’heredi del Bevilacqua, 1581.

In discussions of the possible connections between Copernicus and his Islamic predecessors, the so-called Ṭūsī-couple, invented by the 13th-century Persian polymath Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, has often been invoked by various modern historians to bolster their cases for or against transmission from Islamic astronomy to Copernicus. This paper seeks to clarify the possible routes of transmission by first explaining the various versions of the Ṭūsī-couple that were meant to produce either straight-line or curvilinear oscillations from circular motions, and then summarizing what is known about this transmission, providing new evidence as well as reinterpreting existing evidence. It becomes clear that there are a variety of avenues by which the various couples could have come into Europe, such as through Byzantium, through Spain, and through Italy, and that Copernicus acknowledges the earlier existence of at least one version of the couple in a draft of De Revolutionibus. The paper concludes with a historiographical note that maintains that the long, complex development and use of the Ṭūsī-couples within an Islamic context, and the lack of anything comparable in Europe before Copernicus, provides a compelling argument for transmission rather than parallel discovery within a Latin/European context.

To develop a more fine-grained picture of how the theory of general relativity was received and elaborated from 1914 until 1924, we move outside the personal networks of its creator, Albert Einstein. We set aside the question when and why Einstein himself came to recognize that the new field physics required higher mathematics and focus on the cross-fertilization between mathematics and physics that contributed to the theory. The breakdown of disciplinary boundaries had a greater impact on academic politics in Germany, as the intrusion of mathematics heightened tensions that had long been brewing within the German physics community. A second factor contributing to the tensions was the increasing prominence in the community of German physicists of those of Jewish extraction. We examine these phenomena in two localities, Göttingen and Berlin that serve as focal points for polarization in the natural sciences. First, we discuss the openness in their scientific approach and in their recruitment policy of the paladins of Göttingen—Felix Klein and David Hilbert—and then proceed to trace the fruits of that policy in the successor generation that was largely composed of Jews. We then look at Einstein in Berlin, and more specifically, at how his “conversion” to Zionism in 1920 crystallized his idiosyncratic views on cultural politics that alienated him from others in the Berlin community, including some of his Jewish colleagues. We examine four incidents that undergird his solidarity with Hilbert, a “Gesinnungsgenosse,” who believed that belonging to the international community of scientists took precedence over any sense of patriotic duty or ethnic identity.

The Max Planck Society (MPG) has presented itself since its reestablishment in 1948 as a refuge for basic research in the Federal German Republic. This programmatic claim developed under the political conditions of the middle 1940s, during which the end of the Second World War overlapped with the beginning of the Cold War and the western part of the subjugated “Third Reich” very quickly was drawn in as the inevitable junior partner of the western alliance. Within an American-dominated discourse, what had up until then been a hybrid concept changed into a dichotomous one: basic research was described as being clearly distinguishable from applied research, that is, as not immediately relevant for politics, economics, or the military. It was moreover elevated to a symbol of freedom, created by the western democracies to use against the totalitarian Stalinist opponent. With this semantic charge, the concept of basic research forged during the Cold War did three things for the MPG: as far as dealing with the past was concerned, it helped obscure the hybrid character of research, which the Kaiser Wilhelm Society had demonstrated as part of the NS-regime, especially in armaments research. With regard to contemporary politics, during the immediate postwar period it helped legitimate the organizational integrity of the MPG, its institutional independence, and the scientific autonomy of its members. For the future, the commitment to basic research remained a constantly renewing, yet diffuse mission. Debates about closing, reforming, or reestablishing Max Planck institutes show that the research plans were supposed to satisfy the claims about “basic research,” but also that this yardstick could never be calibrated in a binding way. Basic research served as a vague yet undisputed parameter for strategic scientific decisions within the MPG and its positioning in the scientific system of the Federal Republic.

Esoteric Knowledge remains a central problem of ancient science, since much of the scholarly heritage of ancient schooling was only meant for a small circle of adherents, rather than for the general public. For this reason, knowledge was restricted within schools or within professions, only accessible to those with a personal connection to experts and savants. The expression ‘esoteric’ is used today rather indiscriminately. Within the category of ‘esoteric knowledge’ one understands a variety of related expressions, such as ‘mystical’ or ‘occult’, as well as the more concrete ‘absolute’ or ‘elevated’ knowledge, which can also be considered as ‘hidden’, ‘secret’, or ‘inaccessible’, and even ‘fanciful’ or carried away. The confused pattern of these definitions is the reason why a closer look at the historical development of this concept is so important. This Preprint provides case studies of esoteric knowledge, within the realms of philosophy (e.g. esoteric vs. exoteric knowledge), religious knowledge (early Christian thought, Gnosticism, cultic practices), geography, divination, alchemy, dream interpretation, and iconography. Examples of esoteric knowledge presented here extend from Mesopotamia and Egypt into Graeco-Roman and early medieval models, in Akkadian, Egyptian, Syriac, Greek and Latin sources, indicating the durability and continuity of this concept.

Modern ship model testing has a long international prehistory of several centuries. This paper deals with its precursors from the 17th c. to its maturing by the beginning of the 20th c., also in Germany. The prerequisites for a practicable, design relevant model test methodology were created in many steps with important contributions by prominent scientists such as Huygens, Mariotte, Newton, Van Zwijndrecht, Chapman, D'Alembert, Beaufoy, John Scott Russell, Reech, Rankine, William and Robert Froude, David Taylor and many others. These developments characterize the status reached by the turn to the 20th c. when several German model basins were founded, too.

Around 1930, it was discovered that certain Babylonian cuneiform texts contain calculations that agree with what turns up in the solution of second-degree equations. Since the meaning of most of the terminology had to be derived from the numbers contained in the texts, this led to a reading of these as numerically based algebra. This interpretation stood unchallenged until the author of the present book discovered around 1982 that it was incompatible the global structure of the terminology. As it turns out, two different and non-synonymous operations had both been understood as addition; two different subtractive operations had been conflated, and four different operations had been seen as one and the same multiplication. Instead, the structure points to a technique based on a geometry of squares and rectangles with measurable sides and areas. Avoiding such philological detail as would only be informative for readers that are familiar with basic Assyriology (yet with appendixes meant for these), the book analyses a number of texts in "conformal translation", that is, a translation in which the same Babylonian term is always translated in the same way and, more important, different terms are always translated differently. All of these texts are from the second half of the Old Babylonian period, that is, 1800-1600 BCE. It is indeed during this period that the "algebraic" discipline, and Babylonian mathematics in general, culminates. Even though a few texts from the late period show some similarities with what comes from the Old Babylonian period, they are but remnants. Beyond analyzing texts, this preprint gives a general characterization of the kind of mathematics involved, and locates it within the context of the Old Babylonian scribe school and its particular culture. Finally, it describes the origin of the discipline and its impact in later mathematics, not least Euclid's geometry and genuine algebra as created in medieval Islam and taken over in European medieval and Renaissance mathematics.

Two theses by Hegel, which at first sight seem to be far away from each other, prove to be as closely connected and as possible starting point for the solution of currently philosophical problems.
On the one hand, Hegel recognizes: "The task of philosophy determines itself in that it makes the unity of thinking and being, which is its basic idea, to its own object and in that to understand it, i.e., to grasp the most internal of necessity, the notion." Thus, he sees the highest task of philosophy in that to supersede the abstract contradiction between thinking and being.
Otherwise, he states: "The general is the value, the motion as a sensual is the exchange – the same generality is mediation as knowing motion – property, that means, an immediate having which is mediated by the recognized-being – or its being is, is the spiritual essence."
Starting from these statements, the concept of the general (the concrete-general) as well as possibility and sense of the speculative thinking and of a post-Kantian ontology are considered.

If the emergence of physics as a definite academic discipline was a heritage of the late nineteenth century, the emergence of a new theoretical practice, and the settlements of chairs of theoretical physics were the most interesting outcome of that process. The hallmark of the new theoretical practice was the awareness that the alliance between the mathematical language and the experimental practice celebrated by Galileo had to be updated. Besides “definite demonstrations” and “sound experiments” there was a third component, which could be labelled conceptual or theoretical: it dealt with principles, models, and patterns of explanation. That conceptual component, neither formal nor empirical, came to be looked upon as a fundamental component of scientific practice. It is worth remarking that, in that fin de siècle, science had finally managed to realize, at least in part, Bacon’s dream, and the myth of scientific progress emerged. In the debates on science which took place in France from the early 1870s to the early 1890s two main issues were at stake: determinism and reductionism. On the one hand we find some scientists, historians, and philosophers who relied on simplified epistemological and historiographical frameworks, and put forward an optimistic cult of human progress. On the other hand, a sophisticated point of view on science was put forward by scientists and philosophers who did not deny the effectiveness of scientific progress but were able to go beyond the simplified conception of scientific practice as an unproblematic alliance between mathematical and empirical procedures. In 1892 the young physicist Pierre Duhem published the first paper explicitly devoted to meta-theoretical issues or, to make use of a more recent expression, to philosophy of science. At that time he had already published a book on thermodynamic potentials and their applications to different fields of physical sciences, and a demanding paper, where he had put forward an original mathematical approach to thermodynamics on the track of Analytical Mechanics. Theoretical physics, the history of physics, and meta-theoretical remarks on science were mutually interconnected in Duhem’s actual praxis. The historical and epistemological remarks he began to publish systematically in the 1890s were subsequently collected in the book he published in 1906, La théorie physique, son objet, et sa structure. He represented the scientific enterprise as a three-stages task: from the knowledge of “specific facts”, the human mind was able to derive some “experimental laws” by induction, and then create a scientific theory. If the objects of experimental laws were facts, the objects of physical theories were experimental laws. In any case, a theory had nothing to do with the truth: it could not be qualified as true or false, but “suitable or unsuitable, good or bad”. The plurality of theoretical frameworks corresponding to a set of laws was consistent with this essential feature of theories. Moreover he put forward three fundamental theses on experimental physics: first, a physical experiment was not a purely empirical process; second, it could not be so powerful as to lead to the refutation of a single hypothesis; third, it was less reliable, even though more precise, than ordinary experience. After the Second World War some themes which had been put forward in the late XIX-century philosophy of science re-emerged in an unexpected way. In reality, Duhem’s books and papers had almost been forgotten, but a new interest in some of his meta-theoretical theses emerged in the context of a philosophical tradition that was deeply linked to logic. In 1951 Willard van Orman Quine sharply criticised both the dichotomy analytic/synthetic and reductionism, but he neither quoted from nor mentioned Duhem. In 1960 Adolf Grünbaum put forward a refutation of what he called “Duhemian argument”, but the core of Duhem’s meta-theoretical remarks got lost in a net of logical deductions which were extraneous to their context. Only from the 1970s onwards historians, historians of science, and philosophers of science began to be attracted by late XIX-century context in general, and Duhem’s philosophy of science in particular. Late XIX-century philosophy of science stemmed from a remarkable epistemological and historiographical awareness, and that awareness would deserve to be further explored.

The strong impetus towards self-reflection of science during the 1960ies culminated around 1970 in the foundation of many relevant research institutions in different countries. Although included into that general trend, the MPI for the Exploration of Living Conditions in the Sci-entific-Technological World at Starnberg, established under the direction of Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker in 1970, pursued a unique idea, somewhat apart from the mainstream charac-terizing most institutes in the emerging field of science research (science of science, science studies, social studies of science, etc.). Meanwhile science research usually was focused on science as a sub-system of modern societies, for the Starnberg institute the typical subject was the “scientific-technological world” – mankind in global context increasingly based on sci-ence as a leading source of innovation and evolution. As a key concept for describing and analyzing the living conditions in the scientific-technological world, von Weizsäcker employs the idea of ambivalence. Obviously it means a proto-theoretical, fuzzy concept that cannot be introduced explicitly per definition; starting with an intuitive perception, “ambivalence” should gradually gain meaning by using it in dif-ferent argumentative contexts. Following a circular course (Kreisgang) – a procedure typical for von Weizsäcker’s style of thought – , he moves successively from explicit ambivalence in the application sphere of science through ambivalent features in scientists’ behaviour and ac-tion up to the general ambivalence of human existence prior to rationality and science, dis-closed at an anthropological level of deliberation situated between philosophy and common sense. He criticized profoundly the wide-spread conviction about the alleged neutrality of science becoming ambivalent only due to application under contrary goals; von Weizsäcker’s approach allowed to overcome the essentially inadequate and ethically questionable opinion mentioned above and to understand scientific cognition even at the level of “pure science” as an ambivalent enterprise. The given paper mainly discusses an essay by von Weizsäcker written in the starting year of the Starnberg institute (October 1970) under the title “Living conditions, Reflection on the interrelation of subjects”. The essay was a response to many conceptual proposals, presented by his (mostly young) scientific co-workers, and intended, at the same time, to inspire further discussion about the future profile of the institute. Von Weizsäcker’s remarkable effort to pay attention to the different ideas of his collaborators and to fit them into a more general network gave him reason to sketch a complex conceptual structure capable to integrate a broad range of suggestions; so the concept of ambivalence may be characterized as an indispensable mo-ment of central importance in the intellectual architecture of the Starnberg institute.

The paper reviews Einstein's engagement as a mediator and popularizer of science. It discusses the formative role of popular scientific literature for the young Einstein, showing that not only his broad scientific outlook but also his internationalist political views were shaped by these readings. Then, on the basis of recent detailed studies, Einstein’s travels and their impact on the dissemination of relativity theory are examined. These activities as well as Einstein’s own popular writings are interpreted in the context of his understanding of science as part of human culture.

This paper focuses on the linguistic representation of spatial concepts in two unrelated languages with a non-written tradition. It explores the degree to which environmental experience and spatial orientation is reflected in language, i.e., it is in line with anthropological linguistic approaches placing language in its social and cultural context, and its cultural practices. Spatial knowledge is not only encoded in concepts or categories, but is embodied in the lived histories of human beings, and their cultural and linguistic practices. The cultures under survey present an alpine region (Eipo, Papua Province, Indonesia) and vast prairies (Dene Chipewyan, Alberta, Canada). The mental and perceptual course maintaining in these cultures rely on cognitive maps, i.e., the orientation techniques are processes of inference within the structure of cognitive maps. We adopt cognitive maps as known from navigation techniques of dead reckoning of orientation. This kind of navigation is based on dynamic cognitive maps and mental triangulation so that the navigator has a spatial conception of their position at any time. It is argued here that this is of special importance also for orienting oneself in the alpine regions of Eipo or the vast prairies extensions of the Dene. Our question concerns the relationship between non-linguistic information and spatial language. The point of departure is that non-linguistic information has its impact upon spatial language and categorization, i.e., reference of space and its relation to semiotic systems. We present language data indicating the influence and constructive process of environmental landmarks and cultural heritage upon shaping of spatial categorization in the two languages.

The essay presents an outline of a historical epistemology of space in the sense of a developmental theory of forms of spatial thinking. Starting with the natural conditions of spatial cognition through to concepts of space imposed by advanced disciplinary science, manifestations of spatial thinking in different cultures and historical epochs are sketched. The essay attempts to contribute to an assessment of the epistemic status of human spatial knowledge by highlighting genetic and structural relations between the different forms of knowledge. While the occurrence of each new form depends on specific socio-cultural conditions, its concrete realization does not solely depend on these conditions, but also on the cognitive structures it builds upon and on the further experience made possible by these conditions. Different forms of spatial knowledge do not replace each other in historical succession; they are simultaneously present within single societies and influence each other.

In his written work Archimedes’ primary contributions to ship design were the Law of Buoyancy and the Criterion of Stability of a floating object. These laws form the foundations of the floatability and upright stability of ships. How did he create and justify this fundamental knowledge? Might he have applied it to contemporary issues in the ship design of his era? How was this knowledge passed down through the centuries and when and how was it applied to practical ship design decisions? What is the role of Archimedes’ fundamental insights in today’s ship design? This article will address these issues in its three sections on Archimedes’ own contributions, the history of his heritage in the maritime field and the continuing significance of his physical laws in modern ship design. Motto on Archimedes: All praise him, few read him, all admire him, few understand him. (A. Tacquet, 1612-1660).

In diesem Artikel untersuchen wir die Verbreitung von Wissen über die Waage im neunten Jahrhundert in Baghdad, der Haupstadt des Abbasiden Kalifats. Wir fassen dieses Wissen als eine Kombination von praktischen und theoretischen Komponenten auf, welche in verschiedenen sozio-kulturellen Bereichen angesiedelt waren. Wir analysieren die Verbreitung dieser Wissensformen sowie deren Wertesysteme unter Baghdader Gelehrten aus einer globalen Sicht als Schnittpunkte von langfristiger und lokaler Geschichte. Wir nähern uns diesem Thema in vier Schritten: 1. durch eine Darlegung unserer theoretischen Positionen; 2. mittels eines Überblick über Diskussionen unter Historikern der Wirtschaftsgeschichte West- und Ostroms, des Sasanidenreiches und der Kaliphate der Umayyaden und Abbasiden mit dem Ziel, die Veränderungen in Bereichen zu ermitteln, in denen Waagen und Gewichte die größte Bedeutung hatten – Handel, vor allem über große Entfernungen, und Administration; 3. durch eine Zusammenfassung der aus unserer Sicht bedeutendsten Aspekte früher abbasidischer institutioneller und intellektueller Geschichte; 4. mit einer Analyse der Interessen an Waagen und Gewichten unter Ärzten, ‘Theologen‘ und Juristen. Der zweite Teile unseres Artikels dient der neuen, umfassenden Analyse von drei Texten über die Schnellwaage, die Thabit b. Qurra zugeschrieben sind, von Kommentaren und Zusätzen in den Manuskripten von einem dieser drei Texte und eines wichtigen lateinischen Textes (Liber de canonio), der bisher als eine direkte Übersetzung einer antiken griechischen Arbeit angesehen worden ist. Durch die Anwendung eines breiten Bereiches von Methoden, um den Charakter, den Inhalt und die Kontexte dieses Quellenmaterials zu ermitteln, sind wir in der Lage, mehrere wichtige neue Ergebnisse zu erzielen, die die komplexe soziokulturelle Natur von Thabits gräko-arabischen Hybridtexten belegen. Wir schlagen eine neue zeitliche Abfolge der Entstehung dieser Texte und eine neue Sicht auf ihre wechselseitigen Beziehungen vor. Wir präsentieren zwingende Belege für die neue Interpretation des Liber de canonio als einer gräzisierenden Übersetzung einer arabischen Vorlage. Darüber hinaus können wir die Bedeutung von intellektuellen Netzwerken und Patronagebeziehungen für die Entstehung der neuen Wissenschaft der Gewichte nachweisen.

From Rudolf Clausius’ classical version of Thermodynamics two different traditions of research really emerged. If James C. Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann pursued the integration of thermodynamics with the kinetic theory of gases, others relied on a macroscopic and more abstract approach, which set aside specific mechanical models. Starting from 1869, the French engineer François Massieu was able to demonstrate that thermodynamics could be based on two “characteristic functions” or potentials. Josiah W. Gibbs and Hermann von Helmholtz exploited the structural analogy between Mechanics and Thermodynamics: from a mathematical point of view, Helmholtz’s “free energy” was nothing else but Gibb’s first potential. In the meantime, in 1880, the young German physicist Max Planck aimed at filling the gap between thermodynamics and the theory of elasticity. Five years later Arthur von Oettingen put forward a formal theory, where mechanical work and fluxes of heat represented the starting point of a dual mathematical structure. In 1891 Pierre Duhem generalized the concept of “virtual work” under the action of “external actions” by taking into account both mechanical and thermal actions. Between 1892 and 1894 his design of a generalized Mechanics based on thermodynamics was further developed: ordinary mechanics was looked upon as a specific instance of a more general science.

The paper presents translations and interpretations of numerous sections from the so-called 'Later Mohist Canon' that document reflective thinking on epistemic and spatial concepts. The 'Later Mohist Canon' originated in late Warring States period China (ca. 300 BCE) and, among the corpus of extant, transmitted ancient Chinese texts, is highly atypical in several respects concerning both contents and style. Yet, it is shown that there are many passages that can be clearly related to other, more traditional, contemporaneous sources. The interpretations given aim at the reconstruction of historical forms of thinking and are informed by pertinent linguistic and textual analysis. Furthermore, general issues of interpretation, such as the problem of anachronistic understanding, are discussed by way of example.

Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker war eine Schlüsselpersönlichkeit in der Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (MPG). Der Beitrag stellt sein Wirken in den Kontext der Entwicklung der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft und beleuchtet die institutionellen und persönlichen Netzwerke, die diesem Wirken zugrunde lagen. Eingegangen wird unter anderem auf seine Rolle im deutschen Uranprojekt, bei der Vorbereitung der Mainauer und Göttinger Erklärung, des Tübinger Memorandums sowie bei der Vorbereitung der Gründung des MPI für Bildungsforschung und seines Starnberger MPI zur Erforschung der Lebensbedingungen der wissenschaftlich-technischen Welt. Eine besondere Rolle wird dabei das Verhältnis Weizsäckers zu Hellmut Becker spielen, dem Gründungsdirektor des MPI für Bildungsforschung. Ein weiteres Thema ist die Verbindung von Naturwissenschaft und Geisteswissenschaft im Wirken Weizsäckers und die Beziehungen zwischen den beiden Wissenschaftskulturen in der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. Schließlich wird die Frage aufgeworfen, welche Herausforderungen Weizsäckers Wirken noch heute für die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft darstellen könnte.

Das Prinzip Kontingenz in der Naturwissenschaft der Renaissance Der Gegenstand dieses Preprints ist die Renaissance-Naturwissenschaft, ihre Theorie und Praxis. Der Essay zielt darauf ab, zwei alte, aber noch weit verbreitete Gemeinplätze der Wissenschaftsgeschichte zu entzaubern: zum einen die Vorstellung, dass die Entwicklung der Naturwissenschaften deterministisch konnotiert sei, weil sie auf das progressiven Enthüllen einer objektiv festgelegten Natur nach dem Motto „Veritas filia temporis“ gerichtet ist; und zum anderen die Überzeugung, dass eine mathematische Naturwissenschaft keinen Raum für die Kontingenz zulässt, weil ein mathematisches Verständnis der Wirklichkeit mit dem Determinismus notwendigerweise gekoppelt sei. Im Gegensatz zu diesen Vorstellungen waren Renaissance-Ingenieure und Wissenschaftler sich der historischen Kontingenz ihrer Disziplinen (etwa der Astronomie, der Mechanik und der Mathematik) durchaus bewusst. Sie reflektierten darüber, dass die Gestalt ihrer Disziplinen unmittelbar von Überlieferungen und Übersetzungen von Quellen und Theorien sowie von der Hybridisierung dieser mit mittelalterlichen Konzeptionen abhing. Darüber hinaus weisen die Naturvorstellungen von Ingenieuren wie Cardano, Tartaglia, Baldi, Ramelli, Benedetti und Galilei starke Ähnlichkeiten zur Naturvorstellungen von zeitgenössischen Philosophen auf: Vor allem war der Begriff der Natur als ein nach dem Modell des Handwerkers gedachtes Subjekt, das die Wirklichkeit mathematisch, aber mit einer gewissen Ungenauigkeit hervorbringt, ihnen gemeinsam. Die Erfahrung der Ingenieure und Handwerker war die Basis für diese Naturkonzeption, in welcher der Akzent auf dem Herstellungsprozess einer Natura naturans lag statt auf dem fertigen „Produkt“. Beispiele aus Werken verschiedener Renaissance-Autoren und aus den experimentellen Praktiken des Galileo werden untersucht und gedeutet, um die Rolle der Kontingenz in der frühneuzeitlichen Mechanik als Indiz einer Entwicklungsstufe der Naturwissenschaften zu verstehen, die bereits den Anspruch auf umfassende Welterklärung erhebt, diesen aber noch nicht in die Form eines mechanistischen Weltbildes gekleidet hat.

The interlink between the determination of the circumference of the Earth and the geographical mapping performed by Ptolemy in his Geography (c. 150 AD) is discussed. As Ptolemy himself stated, he used the value of 180,000 stades for the circumference of the Earth which is in stark contrast to the famous result of Eratosthenes, i.e. 252,000 stades. Many scholars see these different values as a result of the diverse definitions of a stade used by both ancient authors. Such a view cannot, nevertheless, explain the excessive distortion of Ptolemy's world map along the east-west direction. We have treated the problem with the methods of spherical trigonometry and have shown that many features of Ptolemy’s map can be easily explained and corrected under the presupposition that the length of the stade used by Ptolemy coincides with that of Eratosthenes. The latitudinal distortion in Ptolemaic map is caused by his underestimating of the size of the Earth in combination with his efforts to keep the known latitudes of the localities. Another mathematical consequence is a significant longitudinal displacement of the localities lying approximately on the same meridian (so-called antikemenoi poleis), as in the case Carthage in relation to Rome. It is shown that a simple transformation of the Ptolemaic coordinates to the circumference of the Earth measured by Eratosthenes drastically improves the positions of the locations given in Ptolemy´s catalogue. The comparison of the recalculated positions of the identified localities with their actual positions confirmed a very high precision of Eratosthenes' result for the circumference of the Earth.

This study is a reconstruction of the life and work of the Scottish mathematician and physician Duncan Liddel (Aberdeen, 1561–1613). It deals with Liddel’s curriculum studiorum and academic career in northern protestant Germany (at the universities of Frankfurt/Oder, Rostock and Helmstedt); his participation in the debates of important intellectual circles such as that of Dudith-Sbardellati and Crato von Crafftheim in Wrocław and Tycho’s “astronomical Academy” on Hven, in Denmark; and Liddel’s eventual return to Aberdeen, where he funded a chair of mathematics and a scholarship for several students at the Marischal College and endowed the university with his scientific and humanistic library. This bio-bibliographical study, based on archival and library investigations, offers an insight into the institutions and networks that permitted a wide European circulation of scholars and ideas, as well as transfer processes of knowledge and scientific practices, during the Renaissance.

In the context of a new analysis of the notebooks of Erwin Schrödinger, the paper deals with the question of the relation between Schrödinger's creation of wave mechanics and the contemporary efforts by Werner Heisenberg and his colleagues to establish a new quantum mechanics. How can one explain, from a broader historical and epistemological perspective, the astonishing simultaneity and complementarity of these discoveries? The paper argues that neither the physical problems with which both approaches deal nor what ultimately turned out to be their common mathematical ground are sufficient to explain their complementarity. Instead, their closeness is explained by analyzing their common roots in classical mechanics and its transformation in the light of the most fundamental new quantum law, the relation between energy and frequency found by Planck. It is shown, in particular, that for both approaches a bridge between quantum and classical aspects involving this relation was crucial. In the case of Heisenberg, this bridge was given by Bohr’s correspondence principle. In the case of Schrödinger it was constituted by Hamilton’s optical-mechanical analogy.

Dieser Preprint versammelt eine Auswahl von Beiträgen zum Symposium zu Ehren von Hans-Jörg Rheinbergers 65. Geburtstag. Es fand am 24.1.2011 im Max-Planck-Institute für Wissenschaftsgeschichte statt und brachte Freunde, Studenten und Kollegen von Hans-Jörg Rheinberger zusammen.

In 1986 the President of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences extended invitations to the Academies of Sciences of Western Europe to create a Committee of European scientists who would join the existing U.S. Committee on International Security and Arms Control (CISAC) and a comparable group of senior scientists of the Soviet Academy in their informal discussions of issues of arms control and nuclear disarmament. The Italian Academy was the first to respond positively, and in 1988 a conference on these issues took place in Rome. Others followed in different countries, their numbers rising to 18 by 2010. After the death in 1989 of Edoardo Amaldi. President of the Lincei, these conferences were named “International Amaldi Conferences of National Academies of Sciences on Scientific Problems of Global Security”. At later conferences scientists from Eastern Europe, Asia and the Third World were also invited. Most European academies had been reluctant to take up studies in subjects of hot political significance. But many encouraged members to take part as individuals. Meanwhile, the political landscape has changed dramatically. It may be justified to consider the consequences for the Amaldi Conferences. In this paper the history of the founding and of the development of the Amaldi Conferences is described with special reference to the following aspects: - The Origin - The Vision of a European CISAC - Widening the Scope of the Amaldi Conferences? - Are the Amaldi Conferences still serving their initial purpose? - Are there new chances today for a European CISAC?

This extensive study offers a general overview of the reception of Copernicus’s astronomical and cosmological proposal from the years immediately preceding the publication of his major work, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (Nuremberg, 1543), to the Catholic prohibition of the heliocentric system in 1616. It is a reconstruction of the Renaissance cultural debates that were either provoked by the impact of Copernicus’s work or that conversely reshaped and transformed the meaning of Copernicus’s achievements. Certain aspects of this reception and transformation are treated with particular attention: epistemology, cosmology, space conceptions, natural philosophy, the incipient classical physics, theology and anthropology. The treatment of the different authors, issues and debates is based on an extensive and up-to-date bibliography concerning both the primary sources and the secondary literature.

Es wird gezeigt, daß Hegels Bestimmung, die höchste Aufgabe der Philosophie sei es, den abstrakten Gegensatz von Denken und Sein aufzuheben, auch heute (unter Einbeziehung aller bisherigen philosophischen Kritik) ihren Sinn nicht verloren hat. Allerdings ist das Ziel schwerer zu erreichen als Hegel meinte. Vor allem bedarf es einer gründlicheren Analyse des epistemologischen Status der Naturwissenschaft als notwendiger Vorstufe des Absoluten, um die genannte Aufgabe zu lösen, mithin um dem spekulativen Denken eine solide Basis zu geben. Zudem wird geschlußfolgert, daß es erforderlich wäre, Entwicklung – im Unterschied zu Hegel – so zu konzipieren, daß sie die Produktion neuer Möglichkeiten denkbar macht, wodurch sich ein Begriff von einem System konsistent fassen ließe, der Hegels Ambitionen realisiert. Die Bildung der Prinzipien des Systems (des Systems der Philosophie überhaupt) darf nicht als abgeschlossen gelten, die unterstellte Logik nicht als schon fertig. Das System muß so begründet sein, daß es die Neubildung von Prinzipien nicht nur zuläßt, sondern geradezu fordert. Jede Weiterentwicklung oder Negation des Systems wäre dann seine Bestätigung. In diesem Sinne wäre das (von Hegel postulierte) ewige Leben des Geistes dieses: den Gegensatz von Denken und Sein ewig zu produzieren und ewig aufzuheben.

The paper reviews the historical origins of the current split between different forms of reflection on science, in particular between normative philosophical positions and descriptive historical positions that consider science as embedded in society and culture. It analyzes the historical and intellectual contexts in which this split emerged in the early part of the twentieth century, taking the philosopher Moritz Schlick and the scientist and historian Ludwik Fleck as main reference points. The history of Einstein’s general theory of relativity and its new understanding of space and time is analyzed in relation to these positions. The paper follows the split between the different forms of reflection through further developments in the philosophy and history of science, discussing the views of Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Martin Heidegger, and Thomas Kuhn, among others. It suggests that current debates on historical epistemology could benefit from taking the split of rationality—inherited from the catastrophic twentieth century—as a challenge to be addressed by an integrative historical theory of knowledge development.

The paper discusses the interplay of experience and representation in disciplinarily structured science using the example of the fundamental changes in the concepts of space and time brought about by the advanced formalism of twentieth-century physics, which enabled the integration of a growing corpus of experiential knowledge. In particular the question of why certain parts of experiential knowledge had an impact on concepts of space and time, while other parts did not have such an impact, is addressed.