This essay introduces a Focus section on “Neurohistory and History of Science” by distinguishing images of the brain as governor and as transducer: the former treat the brain as the executive control center of the body, the latter as an interface between the organism and reality at large. Most of the consternation expressed in the symposium about the advent of neurohistory derives from the brain-as-governor conception, which is rooted in a “biologistic” understanding of humanity that in recent years has become (...) bound up in various nefarious “neoliberal” political and economic agendas. However, given the sophisticated attitude that neurohistory’s leading champion, Daniel Smail, displays toward evolutionary theory’s potential impact on historical practice, he is perhaps better understood as part of the brain-as-transducer tradition. This tradition, largely suppressed in current representations of neuroscience, has a strong theological provenance, ultimately concerned with our becoming attuned to the divine frequency, not least by extending the powers of the human nervous system through technology. This essay sympathetically explores the implications of this perspective for historical practice. (shrink)

This essay considers literary "experimentalism" as a constructed category animated by epistemic virtues, using the case study of "contact" as both anthropological and literary values in the 1920s. Examines Language writing, the work of William Carlos Williams, and the Writing Culture group in anthropology.

This paper sketches a historical account of interdisciplinarity. A central claim advanced is that the modern array of scientific and humanistic disciplines and interdisciplinarity emerged together; both are moving targets, which must therefore be studied historically in relation to one another as institutionalized practices. A second claim is that of a steadily increasing complexity; new fields emerged on the boundaries of existing disciplines beginning in the late nineteenth century, followed by multi- and transdisciplinary initiatives in the twentieth, and finally transdisciplinary (...) programmatic research in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The latter two phases in this development have been driven primarily by funding agencies seeking to move the sciences in particular directions deemed socially or politically desirable (in dictatorships as well as democracies), while the existing disciplines remained in place and new ones came into being. Such policy initiatives have transformed both disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in unanticipated ways. The question whether multi- or transdisciplinary arrangements produce epistemically better science or scholarship appears not to have been raised, let alone examined, by the policy actors driving their creation. (shrink)