British Journal for the History of Science最新文献_第5页

Petty's instruments: the Down Survey, territorial natural history and the birth of statistics. 佩蒂的工具：唐氏调查、领土自然史和统计学的诞生。

IF 0.8 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2024-03-01 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087423001097

Svit Komel

{"title":"Petty's instruments: the Down Survey, territorial natural history and the birth of statistics.","authors":"Svit Komel","doi":"10.1017/S0007087423001097","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0007087423001097","url":null,"abstract":"William Petty's work has usually been regarded as an epistemic break in the history of statistical and politico-economic thought. In this paper, I argue that Petty's statistical notions stemmed from the natural-historical techniques he originally implemented to manage the Down Survey. Following Bacon, who viewed the description of trades as a paramount branch of natural history, Petty approached the art of surveying itself as an object of natural-historical analysis. He partitioned the surveying work into individual tasks and implemented a meticulous division of labour, employing hundreds of disbanded soldiers as surveyors and using questionnaires to calibrate the responses of his 'instruments', as he called his specialized workers. By borrowing these methods from natural history to organize surveying work, Petty was able to conceptualize Ireland as a political body defined by tables of aggregate data. I then compare the Down Survey with John Graunt's observations on the bills of mortality to show that both are representative of a particular style of natural history, aimed at describing the natural and political state of a circumscribed territory. I close by considering other manifestations of 'territorial natural history', indicating a continuity between this research tradition and the appearance of statistics in the British Isles.","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"43-64"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139472629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The end of an era. 一个时代的终结

IF 0.8 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2024-03-01 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087423001036

Peter J Bowler

{"title":"The end of an era.","authors":"Peter J Bowler","doi":"10.1017/S0007087423001036","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0007087423001036","url":null,"abstract":"These volumes conclude a series initiated in 1974, marking almost fifty years of effort by a huge cohort of scholars. This review is thus a valedictory for the whole series as well as an account of what we have learned from the most recent volumes about Darwin's final years (1879-82). The project was begun by Frederick Burckhardt, who shared the editorial role for the early volumes with Sydney Smith and a rolling sequence of assistant editors and advisers who eventually comprised a significant fraction of the leading members of what used to be called the 'Darwin industry'. Smith passed away in 1988 (volume 7 notes his legacy). Burkardt too left this world in 2007 - volume 16, part 1 includes an obituary, but his name has been retained and Cambridge University Press still ask that the series be cited as 'Burkhardt et al.' Duncan Porter took over for volumes 8-15, again with a sequence of fellow editors and assistants, after which James Secord became head of the project through its final years. The dedications of successive volumes record the efforts of individual scholars who have aided the teams and the involvement of the many institutions and foundations that have leant moral and material support over the years. For those of us with Cambridge connections, the University Library will not seem the same without the presence of the team it supported.","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"113-117"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139098935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Ian Hesketh (ed.), Imagining the Darwinian Revolution Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022. Pp. 352. ISBN 978-0-822-94708-0. $55.00 (hardcover). - CORRIGENDUM. Ian Hesketh（编辑），《想象达尔文革命》匹兹堡：匹兹堡大学出版社，2022 年。Pp.352.ISBN 978-0-822-94708-0. 55.00 美元（精装）。- CORRIGENDUM.

IF 0.8 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2024-01-15 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087423001085

James A Secord

引用次数: 0

Sex, science and curated community at the World League for Sexual Reform 1929 conference. 1929年世界性改革联盟会议上的性、科学和策划社区。

IF 0.8 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2023-12-01 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087423000535

Laura C Forster

{"title":"Sex, science and curated community at the World League for Sexual Reform 1929 conference.","authors":"Laura C Forster","doi":"10.1017/S0007087423000535","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0007087423000535","url":null,"abstract":"This article interrogates the scientific conference as a means by which the organizers of the World League for Sexual Reform's 1929 conference attempted to marshal the 'scientific spirit' in order to present progressive sexual reform as a rational and scientifically informed undertaking. The conference was carefully curated to make the sex reform movement (and the assorted characters that gathered under its banner) look serious, legitimate and, most importantly, scientific. The conference was also an attempt by organizer Norman Haire to exert control over the strategy of sexology, an enterprise that put him at odds with other prominent sexologists of the time. Crucially, Haire understood sexology as inherently intellectually interdisciplinary, but was strategically convinced that the only sound rubric through which to promote and gain acceptance for the movement was through medical science. This central debate, about how best to define the contested concept of sexology, continues among historians today. By examining how the 1929 conference organizers wrestled to define their sex-reforming remit and how they curated the conference to that end, this paper will offer a window onto the mechanisms via which adherents of intellectual communities contend with heterogeneity, how we judge forms of knowledge and, ultimately, what constitutes science.","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"469-484"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71414667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Niche development: the International Foundation for Science and the road to Sweden. 生态位发展：国际科学基金会和通往瑞典的道路。

IF 0.8 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2023-12-01 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087423000547

Jenny Beckman

{"title":"Niche development: the International Foundation for Science and the road to Sweden.","authors":"Jenny Beckman","doi":"10.1017/S0007087423000547","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0007087423000547","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the crowded landscape of conferences and organizations within which the International Foundation for Science (IFS) was shaped in the early 1970s. The IFS aimed to support scientists from developing countries, circumventing the bureaucracy of established international organizations such as UNESCO and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The new foundation was a potential rival to such institutions, which ironically provided the conditions essential to its emergence. Their conferences, board meetings and assemblies, where scientists and policy makers convened, provided key infrastructure for the development of the IFS. This infrastructure appears simultaneously both as an almost invisible feature of international science policy, and as a political problem. The solution to this problem was Stockholm: a geographical place that was also placeless, occupying both national and international status, desirable in its political, scientific and geographical neutrality. In an organizational context, academies and scientific societies who found their role circumscribed by existing international institutions used the IFS to argue for their particular role and expertise in funding and promoting scientific development. Geographically and politically, neutral Sweden provided a setting which was located between East and West, and which added to the country's own reputation for championing the causes of developing nations.","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"553-566"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49683496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 1

'Super Bowl of the world conference circuit'? A network approach to high-level science and policy conferencing. “世界巡回超级碗”？高级科学和政策会议的网络方法。

IF 0.8 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2023-12-01 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087423000559

Sven Widmalm

{"title":"'Super Bowl of the world conference circuit'? A network approach to high-level science and policy conferencing.","authors":"Sven Widmalm","doi":"10.1017/S0007087423000559","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0007087423000559","url":null,"abstract":"Elite conferences, such as the Nobel Symposia organized by the Nobel Foundation since 1965, have often put a premium on the uninhibited exchange of ideas rather than the broad exchange of information. Nobel Symposium 14, The Place of Value in a World of Fact (1969), combined this ethos with the ambition to engage with 'world problems' that were thought by many at the time to constitute a global crisis. This paper examines the relationship between the Nobel Foundation's ideal of scientific neutrality/objectivity and the 'neutral activism' in Swedish 1960s foreign policy. Furthermore, it investigates the social networking that preceded and followed the symposium, arguing that these processes were more important for the symposium's impact than the actual meeting. They formed channels through which it was able to influence other larger meetings, like the 1972 UN conference on the human environment, and contributed to the creation of international organizations, most importantly the International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study. This suggests that the common historiographic focus on science meetings as events should be complemented by analytical perspectives that also view them as processes.","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"535-551"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41215754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 1

The Pugwash scientists' conferences, Cyrus Eaton and the clash of internationalisms, 1954-1961. 普格沃什科学家会议，赛勒斯·伊顿和国际主义的冲突，1954-1961年。

IF 0.8 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2023-12-01 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087423000377

Waqar H Zaidi

{"title":"The Pugwash scientists' conferences, Cyrus Eaton and the clash of internationalisms, 1954-1961.","authors":"Waqar H Zaidi","doi":"10.1017/S0007087423000377","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0007087423000377","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the contest between Canadian American industrialist Cyrus Eaton and the Pugwash scientists' leadership for influence over the early Pugwash scientists' conferences. Eaton's activism has generally been dismissed in the historical literature as ineffective, naive and too uncritical of the Soviet Union. This paper argues that he was genuinely committed to international peace and security, that Eaton shared with Pugwash scientists a belief in the importance of intellectuals to global unity, and that he worked to bring about greater international peace and understanding through both his personal activism and his own conferences held in the town of Pugwash. Eaton, however, favoured a broader push for peace, which included participation by a wider range of intellectuals and a call for rapprochement with the Soviet Union. These differences between Eaton and the Pugwash scientists, I argue, were more than simply about approach: they represented different internationalist visions and manifested in different conceptualizations for the Pugwash scientists' conferences. Eaton hoped to incorporate non-scientists and humanism into the conferences, and integrate them into his own broader conference programme at his Thinkers' Lodge at Pugwash. The scientists, however, wanted to keep their conferences as distinctly scientists' events, tied to science and its authority.","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"503-517"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41239802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Technical conferences as a technique of internationalism. 技术会议是一种国际主义技术。

IF 0.8 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2023-12-01 DOI: 10.1017/S000708742300033X

Jessica Reinisch

引用次数: 0

Functional informality: crafting social interaction toward scientific productivity at the Gordon Research Conferences, 1950-1980. 功能性非正规性：在戈登研究会议上为科学生产力打造社会互动，1950-1980年。

IF 0.8 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2023-12-01 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087423000389

Georgiana Kotsou

{"title":"Functional informality: crafting social interaction toward scientific productivity at the Gordon Research Conferences, 1950-1980.","authors":"Georgiana Kotsou","doi":"10.1017/S0007087423000389","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0007087423000389","url":null,"abstract":"In the early and mid-twentieth century, scientific conferences were a popular tool to establish communication between scientists. Organisational efforts, research and funds were spent defining what makes a productive and successful scientific gathering. A unique example of this was the monitoring and evaluation system of the Gordon Research Conferences (GRCs), which conceptualized informal communication in small, specialized meetings as the best method of advancing cutting-edge research. Studying the detailed monitoring reports of the sessions and the evaluation forms filled by the participants, this paper explores how a concrete format of scientific knowledge production and identity formation was created and reproduced. The normative assessment of the participants' interactions is examined in the contexts of (a) their professional affiliations, (b) the conference presentations and discussions and (c) activities related to play. The study of the GRCs exemplifies how scientists actively conceptualised characteristics like academic affiliation, manners, leisure practices and social categories such as gender as ways to understand, describe and measure how knowledge is best produced and transmitted, turning the conferences into a fertile ground for meta-scientific reflections.","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"519-534"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41162784","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The art of gathering: histories of international scientific conferences. 聚会的艺术：国际科学会议的历史。

IF 0.8 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2023-12-01 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087423000638

Charlotte Bigg, Jessica Reinisch, Geert Somsen, Sven Widmalm

引用次数: 0