History of Science最新文献

Making science of things: Objects and knowledge in, between, and beyond the sciences. 使事物成为科学：科学内部、科学之间和科学之外的对象和知识。

IF 0.8 3区哲学

History of Science Pub Date : 2026-09-01 DOI: 10.1177/00732753261427253

Tamara Fernando, Brooke Penaloza-Patzak

{"title":"Making science of things: Objects and knowledge in, between, and beyond the sciences.","authors":"Tamara Fernando, Brooke Penaloza-Patzak","doi":"10.1177/00732753261427253","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753261427253","url":null,"abstract":"Things and collections of things are among the most ubiquitous forms of scientific evidence, inducing the very concept itself - from the Latin evidentia, obvious to the mind or eye - into the physical realm. Things also tend to stick around; that which was acquired for research purposes is eventually transferred to storage, where it either disintegrates, or ages and accumulates. This obduracy of being renders things subject to almost infinite afterlives. Centuries-old evidence can always spark new research questions, perspectives, and methods, therewith exciting the perpetual evolution, branching, and convergence of knowledge and ways of knowing. The process of making things work as scientific evidence is inevitably inexact and messy and requires drawing on ways of working and thinking in and beyond other scientific disciplines. This notwithstanding, conversations about the relationship between objects and scientific knowledge are still largely preoccupied with the epistemic bounds of present-day disciplines and European or Euro-American ways of knowing. The aim of this special issue is to lean into that messiness and think beyond those preoccupations, drawing on new insights from environmental, Indigenous, social, and labor history, among other fields. Contributions foreground how physical objects have been used as evidence to undergird scientific enterprises rather than the disciplines into which those efforts are or have been organized. What emerges are rich histories of how evidence-based ideas and practices have intertwined different fields of knowledge in and far beyond the history of science.","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"64 3","pages":"179-190"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13534760/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148882310","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Sense and the science of nineteenth-century environmental determinism. 十九世纪环境决定论的意义和科学。

IF 0.8 3区哲学

History of Science Pub Date : 2026-05-23 eCollection Date: 2026-09-01 DOI: 10.1177/00732753251408130

Brooke Penaloza-Patzak

{"title":"Sense and the science of nineteenth-century environmental determinism.","authors":"Brooke Penaloza-Patzak","doi":"10.1177/00732753251408130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753251408130","url":null,"abstract":"In 1865, nineteen-year-old William Healey Dall was appointed second in command of the Western Union Telegraph Expedition Scientific Corps. The expedition aim was to gauge the feasibility of running a telegraph wire overland from California to Europe by way of the Bering Strait. U.S. Congress, operating under the aegis of the Smithsonian Institution, commissioned a Scientific Corps to capitalize on the expedition infrastructure through the collection of regional things, intelligence, and beings. This contribution follows Dall's use of the mollusks he collected as specimens into the scientific discourses they were called upon to shape. It unpacks how specimens and specimen collections were leveraged as evidence for environmentally deterministic perspectives, and how object-based classificatory practices and theories of biotic development hatched in the natural sciences were brought to bear on analyses of human culture. In so doing, it also proposes a means of excavating how the mode of subjectivity that is sensation, accumulated in the everyday work of science-making, figured alongside more formally trained methods and theories into the formation of scientific knowledge about environs beyond the ken of Euro-American science. The premise here is that the analysis of the things, practices, and theories employed in one researcher's diagnosis of Beringia as an adverse environment, alongside the field diaries, correspondence, and other materials relating to his time in the field, has the potential to lend unique insight into how embodied experience entered the purview of what has historically constituted objective knowledge about the environment.","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"64 3","pages":"272-296"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2026-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13526199/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148867809","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Amazonian cosmologies, plant-human relations, and the colonial entanglements of Indigenous artifacts. 亚马逊宇宙观，植物与人类的关系，以及土著人工制品的殖民纠葛。

IF 0.8 3区哲学

History of Science Pub Date : 2026-04-04 eCollection Date: 2026-09-01 DOI: 10.1177/00732753261423335

Raphael Uchôa

{"title":"Amazonian cosmologies, plant-human relations, and the colonial entanglements of Indigenous artifacts.","authors":"Raphael Uchôa","doi":"10.1177/00732753261423335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753261423335","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the deep entanglement of Amazonian artifacts housed in European museums, colonial science, and Indigenous cosmologies. By situating specific collection- and curation processes within their historical contexts, it reveals how scientific practices were intricately tied to colonial expansion, functioning as tools to legitimize and sustain European hegemony. Analysis of Amerindian masks and botanical specimens from the Amazon Basin - two distinct yet interrelated sets of Amazonian artifacts currently held in European institutions - highlights how colonial extractive practices, often reliant on Indigenous slave labor, and geopolitical dynamics shaped the acquisition, interpretation, and display of Indigenous materials. The article also critiques how European scholars and political regimes have treated regions such as the Amazon and Africa as interchangeable, enforcing a reductive, hierarchical view of non-European cultures and reducing the diversity of Indigenous societies to objects of control and categorization. By interweaving insights and critiques by Indigenous and Amazonian intellectuals, particularly Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, and drawing on cosmologies of the Rio Negro region, in the Amazon, this study calls for a fundamental reassessment of knowledge-production frameworks shaped by colonialism and scientific exploration. It underscores the inadequacies of Eurocentric approaches and advocates for the transformative potential of Indigenous epistemologies - not as peripheral perspectives, but as foundational contributions that challenge, reshape, and enrich global histories of science.","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"64 3","pages":"297-325"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2026-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13526195/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148867811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

LORENZO VALLA AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF THE HUMANIST LANGUAGE CONCEPTION 洛伦佐·瓦拉与人本主义语言观念的哲学分析

3区哲学

History of Science Pub Date : 2025-12-15 DOI: 10.33864/2790-0037.2025.v6.i5.169-180

Gulnara Khalafova, Aladdin Malikov

{"title":"LORENZO VALLA AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF THE HUMANIST LANGUAGE CONCEPTION","authors":"Gulnara Khalafova, Aladdin Malikov","doi":"10.33864/2790-0037.2025.v6.i5.169-180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33864/2790-0037.2025.v6.i5.169-180","url":null,"abstract":"The period of Humanism is a stage in the intellectual history of Europe during which language was understood not only as a means of communication, but also as a fundamental instrument shaping thought. In this era, the boundaries of cognition were redefined, and the philosophical analysis of the language–meaning relationship became a central focus. In this context, although Lorenzo Valla is usually known only for his work “The Donation of Constantine”, evaluating his philosophical views solely on the basis of this text does not sufficiently reflect the essence of the humanist language conception. The work in question, in addition to proving the falsity of a political document, also serves as a typical example of humanist linguistic thinking. The article analyzes Lorenzo Valla’s humanist language conception in comparison with the ideas of representatives of other humanist and philosophical traditions — Juan Luis Vives, Pietro Bembo, and William Ockham. In the research, Valla’s approach to the relationship between meaning and expression is examined through an analytical method, and his philological style is evaluated in terms of its influence on the formation of humanist thought. Furthermore, the study draws attention to the incorrectness of reducing Valla’s philosophical–linguistic views in academic literature to only one work, and investigates the process of development of the language conception in the period of Humanism through the historical-philosophical method. As a result, it is determined that Lorenzo Valla made a significant contribution to the development of both the philological and philosophical traditions in the history of humanist thought, and was one of the main humanists who reconceptualized the function of language in the cognitive process.","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"6 5","pages":"169-169"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147913443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Gendering the memory of iron: Theft, lineage, and African metallurgists in the Atlantic world. 对铁的记忆进行性别化：大西洋世界的盗窃、血统和非洲冶金学家。

IF 1.1 3区哲学

History of Science Pub Date : 2025-03-01 Epub Date: 2025-02-24 DOI: 10.1177/00732753251323307

Candice Goucher

{"title":"Gendering the memory of iron: Theft, lineage, and African metallurgists in the Atlantic world.","authors":"Candice Goucher","doi":"10.1177/00732753251323307","DOIUrl":"10.1177/00732753251323307","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1980s, the archaeologist Merrick Posnansky implored Africa-trained scholars to investigate the Caribbean and use their training to reframe the construction of the African diasporic experience. This paper is based on research that responded to Posnansky's challenge. Employing archaeology, community-based fieldwork, oral traditions, gender analysis, and archival sources on both sides of the Atlantic, the paper explores the history of African metallurgy, including the author's personal research experiences in West Africa and the Caribbean. It argues for incorporating the knowledge and skills of African people into a global history of iron technology. It demonstrates how the spatial and social characteristics of iron smelting and refinement have implications for the unfolding of late eighteenth-century forging in Jamaica and industrial growth in other parts of the Atlantic world. While ideas and knowledge operated in the meanings and metaphors found within both material and unseen realms, the eventual reconceptualization of this intertwined past must remain grounded in claims that can be supported by evidence. Connecting kitchens and crucibles, the study argues for an extended family of technological history. Just as understanding the global history of iron production requires attention to Africa, the inverse is simultaneously true: Africa and its history are firmly integrated in global history, including the history of the industrial revolution.","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"3-28"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143494465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"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

Humboldtian Science and Humboldt's science. 洪堡科学和洪堡的科学。

IF 1.1 3区哲学

History of Science Pub Date : 2025-03-01 Epub Date: 2024-05-21 DOI: 10.1177/00732753241252478

Andreas W Daum

引用次数: 0

Fire management and community restraint: The rise of forestry science and the governance of commons. 火灾管理与社区约束：林业科学的兴起与公地治理。

IF 1.1 3区哲学

History of Science Pub Date : 2025-03-01 Epub Date: 2024-12-27 DOI: 10.1177/00732753241304144

Inês Gomes, Frederico Ágoas

{"title":"Fire management and community restraint: The rise of forestry science and the governance of commons.","authors":"Inês Gomes, Frederico Ágoas","doi":"10.1177/00732753241304144","DOIUrl":"10.1177/00732753241304144","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the intersection of environmental history and the history of science, specifically the impact of forestry science and fire management on land use and community dynamics in rural Portuguese mountains. It further traces the evolution of fire management from an ancestral rural practice to a scientific concern and the subsequent integration of vernacular knowledge with scientific methods. In the early twentieth century, fire was a common tool in rural Portugal for land clearance, pasture management, and soil enrichment. Rooted in local knowledge, these practices were increasingly challenged by the rise of scientific forestry, which viewed fire primarily as a threat to be controlled. By the mid-twentieth century, Portuguese forestry policies had undergone a significant shift toward aggressive fire suppression and large-scale afforestation, reflecting a broader trend of prioritizing timber production and forest protection. Notable shifts occurred in the 1970s, marked, among other factors, by the increase in rural fires, a new socioecological vision for the forest and the introduction of prescribed fire techniques influenced by international models. The paper argues that the establishment of scientific fire management practices represents a merging of expert knowledge with local experience. This move represents a shift from exclusionary policies toward a more nuanced understanding of fire's role in landscape management. An examination of these historical developments demonstrates the intricate interrelationship between science, the environment, policy, and local practices, illustrating the way knowledge systems both shape and are shaped by environmental governance.","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"52-72"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142900144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"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

Avian architects: Technology, domestication, and animal minds in urban America. 鸟类建筑师：美国城市中的技术、驯化和动物思维。

IF 1.1 3区哲学

History of Science Pub Date : 2025-03-01 Epub Date: 2024-03-20 DOI: 10.1177/00732753241235433

Matthew Holmes

{"title":"Avian architects: Technology, domestication, and animal minds in urban America.","authors":"Matthew Holmes","doi":"10.1177/00732753241235433","DOIUrl":"10.1177/00732753241235433","url":null,"abstract":"In the mid-nineteenth century, the house sparrow (Passer domesticus) was introduced to the United States, quickly spreading across the country. For a brief period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the observation of sparrow behavior was something of an urban pastime. Traits such as intelligence, reason, persistence, and craftsmanship were conferred onto sparrows by American urbanites. This paper argues that sparrow intelligence was often conflated with domestication: the ability of the birds to adapt to living alongside humans. Praise for the ingenuity of sparrows generally revolved around their nest building, particularly when such structures overcame the challenges posed by urban infrastructure and technology. Sparrows were far less praiseworthy when they caused electricity outages or contaminated water supplies. The sparrow in the United States demonstrates how the relationship between these anecdotes and their implications for animal minds was mediated by the technology and infrastructure of cities. Admirers of sparrows were not measuring the birds' mental capacity, but rather their ability to adapt to human habitations. Sparrows were only granted intelligence once they had demonstrated their ability to become domesticated.","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"101-119"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140177532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"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

Struggling with exactitude in a fragmented state: Intelligence testing in early twentieth-century China. 在支离破碎的状态下与精确性抗争：二十世纪初中国的智力测验。

IF 1.1 3区哲学

History of Science Pub Date : 2025-03-01 Epub Date: 2024-03-17 DOI: 10.1177/00732753241235432

Pang-Yen Chang

{"title":"Struggling with exactitude in a fragmented state: Intelligence testing in early twentieth-century China.","authors":"Pang-Yen Chang","doi":"10.1177/00732753241235432","DOIUrl":"10.1177/00732753241235432","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the rise and decline of the enthusiasm for intelligence testing in early twentieth-century China, focusing on the appeal, the challenges, and the critiques revolving around this psychological instrument. The introduction of intelligence testing reflected not only China's urgent needs in modernizing its merit system, but also Chinese psychologists' aspirations for pursuing exactitude and redefining the racial characteristics of their compatriots against foreign interpretations. But despite psychologists' endeavors, the political and geographical fragmentation of Republican China troubled the epistemic imperative of uniformity demanded by Euro-American psychometrics and therefore undermined the validity of measurement. Subsequently, the legitimacy of intelligence testing began to be questioned by several influential Chinese psychologists in the late 1920s and 30s. The difficulties in standardization and the hostility within the psychology community formed a vicious cycle, impeding the progress of nationwide testing. Through this history, the article demonstrates not only the elevation of measurement to epistemic authority in modern China, but also how its promise was challenged by a diverse and rapidly changing society.","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"73-100"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140144512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"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 persona of the physician in the early German Enlightenment: An analysis of the mediation of epistemic strategies in medical textbooks and advice literature. 德国早期启蒙运动中医生的角色：对医学教科书和咨询文献中认知策略中介的分析。

IF 1.1 3区哲学

History of Science Pub Date : 2025-01-27 DOI: 10.1177/00732753241312255

Andreas Rydberg

{"title":"The persona of the physician in the early German Enlightenment: An analysis of the mediation of epistemic strategies in medical textbooks and advice literature.","authors":"Andreas Rydberg","doi":"10.1177/00732753241312255","DOIUrl":"10.1177/00732753241312255","url":null,"abstract":"This article uses medical textbooks and advice literature to analyze the persona of the physician in the early German Enlightenment. The article pursues three lines of argument. First, it uses medical textbooks to situate the physician in the context of early modern observational life, focusing in particular on epistemic virtues, techniques, and technologies for conducting and documenting observations. Second, it introduces the concept of epistemic advantage to analyze the ways in which medical advice literature - ranging from ideal accounts of the political physician to satirical portrayals of the Machiavellian physician - mediated strategies for using medical knowledge to shape people's conceptions of disease as well as of the physician as a medical authority. Third, it launches the concept epistemic contestation to capture situations of distrust and dispute, in which the physician's authority was challenged both by patients and by other medical practitioners. Such mediation of epistemic virtues, techniques, technologies, and strategies in medical textbooks and advice literature must be understood in relation to an emerging media landscape that fundamentally affected the conditions for cultivating and performing a medical persona. By adopting this comprehensive approach to medical personhood, the article appeals to readers interested in early modern and Enlightenment medicine as well as those concerned with the broader intersections of medical persona, authority, power, and knowledge.","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"732753241312255"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143054118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"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