Selected papers, presented at the conference titled "Birds as Ornithologists: Scholarship Between Faith and Reason", held at Theg-mchog rnam-grol bshad-sgrub dar-rgyas-gling, Monastery, Bylakuppe, India, July 23-25, 2017.

Using a variet y of classical sources, we identify the Owl of Minerva as the European Little Owl (Athene noctua) and describe its habits. Our not-altogether- serious conclusion is that Hegel was wrong to state that the Owl of Minerva begins its flight only at the falling of the dusk.

Cognitive Phenomenology Phenomenal states are mental states in which there is something that it is like for their subjects to be in; they are states with a phenomenology. What it is like to be in a mental state is that state´s phenomenal character. There is general agreement among philosophers of mind that the category of mental states includes at least some sensory states. For example, there is something that it is like to taste chocolate, to smell coffee, to feel the (...) wind in one´s hair, to see the blue sky and to feel a pain in one´s toe. Is there also something that it is like to consciously think, to consciously judge and to consciously believe something? Are such cognitive states, when conscious, phenomenal states? Is there a clear distinction between sensory states and cognitive states? Or, can our knowledge, thoughts and beliefs influence our sensory experiences? Is there a cognitive phenomenology? It is challenging to give a clear characterization of the cognitive phenomenology debate, since different contributors conceive of the debate in different ways. Central for the debate is the question of whether conscious thoughts possess a non-sensory phenomenology. Intuitively, there is something that it is like to consciously think, consciously judge and consciously believe something. However, the debate about cognitive phenomenology is not, strictly speaking, about whether there is something that it is like to consciously think. Rather, the debate concerns the nature of cognitive phenomenology. Is the phenomenology of cognitive states reducible to purely sensory phenomenology? Or, is there an irreducible cognitive phenomenology? A sceptic about cognitive phenomenology claims that conscious cognitive states are non-phenomenal. But, conscious cognitive states may seem to be phenomenal because they are accompanied by sensory states. For instance, when one thinks that ´Paris is a beautiful city`, one´s thought may be expressed in inner-speech and an image of Paris may accompany it. These accompanying sensory states are phenomenal states, and not the thought itself. Contrary to this, the proponent of cognitive phenomenology claims that a conscious cognitive state can have a phenomenology that is irreducible to purely sensory phenomenology. Other debates have also been placed under the ´cognitive phenomenology’ label. There is an ongoing debate within the philosophy of perception about how cognition influences our sensory experiences. Philosophers tend to agree that, for example, an expert ornithologist´s perceptual experience of a type of bird can differ from that of a novice, even if the viewing conditions for both expert and novice are the same. The expert´s knowledge of birds can influence her experience. However, what philosophers disagree about is how the expert´s knowledge influences her experience, and how her knowledge contributes to what her experience is like. (shrink)

"The Natural System" is the abstract notion of the order in living diversity. The richness and complexity of this notion is revealed by the diversity of representations of the Natural System drawn by ornithologists in the Nineteenth Century. These representations varied in overall form from stars, to circles, to maps, to evolutionary trees and cross-sections through trees. They differed in their depiction of affinity, analogy, continuity, directionality, symmetry, reticulation and branching, evolution, and morphological convergence and divergence. Some representations were (...) two-dimensional, and some were three-dimensional; n-dimensional representations were discussed but never illustrated. The study of diagrammatic representations of the Natural System is made difficult by the frequent failure of authors to discuss them in their texts, and by the consequent problem of distinguishing features which carried meaning from arbitrary features and printing conventions which did not. Many of the systematics controversies of the last thirty years have their roots in the conceptual problems which surrounded the Natural System in the late 1800s, problems which were left unresolved when interest in higher-level systematics declined at the turn of this century. (shrink)

Classifications of animals and plants have long been represented by hierarchical lists of taxa, but occasional authors have drawn diagrammatic versions of their classifications in an attempt to better depict the "natural relationships" of their organisms. Ornithologists in 19th-century Britain produced and pioneered many types of classificatory diagrams, and these fall into three groups: (a) the quinarian systems of Vigors and Swainson (1820s and 1830s); (b) the "maps" of Strickland and Wallace (1840s and 1850s); and (c) the evolutionary diagrams (...) of the post-Darwin authors (1860 on). The quinarians distinguished between affinity and analogy and used both in their classifications, whereas Strickland rejected the quinarians' belief in numerical regularity and their use of analogy. Wallace's "maps" are easily given an evolutionary interpretation, and his approach was taken up and modified by later evolutionary anatomists. Sharpe returned to Strickland's methods and merely appended a superficial evolutionary interpretation. Contrary to common belief systematics has a rich conceptual history, and many of the conceptual developments in 19th-century systematics were made by ornithologists. (shrink)

David Lack of Oxford University and V. C. Wynne- Edwards of Aberdeen University were renowned ornithologists with contrasting views of the modern synthesis which deeply influenced their interpretation and explanation of bird behavior. In the 1950's and 60's Lack became the chief advocate of neo-Darwinism with respect to avian ecology, while Wynne- Edwards developed his theory of group selection. Lack 's position was consistent with the developing focus on individual level adaptation, which was a core concept of the modern (...) synthesis. Alternatively, Wynne- Edwards viewed the emphasis on populations as the most important development provided by the modern synthesis. In this paper, I present the development of these two positions and trace their roots in the literature of the synthesis. Through an analysis of Lack 's 1966 critique of Wynne- Edwards I conclude that Wynne- Edwards was, in many ways, justified in his pursuit of group level explanations. (shrink)

C. J. Temminck, director of the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie and a renowned ornithologist, gained his contemporary's respect thanks to the description of many new species and to his detailed monographs on birds. He also published a small number of works on biogeography describing the fauna of the Dutch colonies in South East Asia and Japan. These works are remarkable for two reasons. First, in them Temminck accurately described the species composition of poorly explored regions, like the Sunda Islands and (...) Japan. Secondly, he formulated a new law on the geographical distribution of animals around the globe, based on the parallels he observed between the fauna from Europe, Asia and Japan. The underlying ideas that lead Temminck to this law were the typeconcept, which he understood as the ideal morphological plan behind animal form, the unchanging character of the species and a strong belief in nature's divine design. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the type-and the species-concept, the origin and fixity of the species and the meaning of variations aroused heated discussions. When put in the context of his time, Temminck emerges as a scientist whose work was driven by the dominating scientific philosophy of the time in which he lived, under the influence of late eighteenth century natural history and of French empiricists, in particular, the great zoologist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier. Temminck's detailed descriptions of the Dutch East Indian fauna helped the great naturalists after him to understand nature's patterns and to propose comprehensive theories that explain its diversity. (shrink)

‘The Natural System’ is the abstract notion of the order in living diversity. The richness and complexity of this notion is revealed by the diversity of representations of the Natural System drawn by ornithologists in the Nineteenth Century. These representations varied in overall form from stars, to circles, to maps, to evolutionary trees and cross-sections through trees. They differed in their depiction of affinity, analogy, continuity, directionality, symmetry, reticulation and branching, evolution, and morphological convergence and divergence. Some representations were (...) two-dimensional, and some were three-dimensional; n-dimensional representations were discussed but never illustrated. The study of diagrammatic representations of the Natural System is made difficult by the frequent failure of authors to discuss them in their texts, and by the consequent problem of distinguishing features which carried meaning from arbitrary features and printing conventions which did not. Many of the systematics controversies of the last thirty years have their roots in the conceptual problems which surrounded the Natural System in the late 1800s, problems which were left unresolved when interest in higher-level systematics declined at the turn of this century. (shrink)

SUMMARYAs the Enlightenment drew to a close, translation had gradually acquired an increasingly important role in the international circulation and transmission of scientific knowledge. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the translators responsible for making such accounts accessible in other languages, some of whom were women. In this article I explore how European women cast themselves as intellectually enquiring, knowledgeable and authoritative figures in their translations. Focusing specifically on the genre of scientific travel writing, I investigate the narrative (...) strategies deployed by women translators to mark their involvement in the process of scientific knowledge-making. These strategies ranged from rhetorical near-invisibility, driven by women's modest marginalization of their own public engagement in science, to the active advertisement of themselves as intellectually curious consumers of scientific knowledge. A detailed study of Elizabeth Helme's translation of the French ornithologist François le Vaillant's Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique [Voyage into the Interior of Africa] allows me to explore how her reworking of the original text for an Anglophone reading public enabled her to engage cautiously – or sometimes more openly – with questions regarding how scientific knowledge was constructed, for whom and with which aims in mind. (shrink)

British social survey movement ‘Mass-Observation’ (M-O) was founded in 1937 by a poet, a film-maker and an ornithologist. It purported to offer a new kind of sociology – one informed by surrealism and working with a ‘mass’ of Observers recording day-to-day interactions. Various commentators have debated the importance and precise identity of M-O in its first phase, especially in light of its combination of social science and surrealism. This article draws on new archival research, in particular into the ‘paperwork’ practices (...) of Charles Madge, arguing that M-O is best understood as an attempt to define a new relationship between the survey subject and information organiser. The latter – as sociologist, planner or artist – was a distinctive interwar persona, central to ‘scientific humanism’. Bathos, as a formal strategy in modernist aesthetics, is introduced as an explanation of the failure of this particular part of the M-O project. Questions of subjectivity and data link M-O to a longer history of heterodox sociological inquiry. This analysis resolves some of the apparent paradoxes that have been prominent in studies of M-O, and draws attention to the unfulfilled promise of a vast archive of social data. (shrink)

Are we paying enough attention? At least since the nineteenth century, critics have alleged a widespread and profound failure of attentiveness—to others, to ourselves, to the world around us, to what is truly worthy of focus. Why is there such great anxiety over attention? What is at stake in understanding attention and the challenges it faces? This book investigates attention from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, history, anthropology, art history, and comparative literature. Each chapter begins with a concrete (...) scene whose protagonists are trying—and often failing—to attend. Authors examine key moments in the history of the study of attention; pose attention as a philosophical problem; explore the links between attention, culture, and technology; and consider the significance of attention for conceptualizations of human subjectivity. Readers encounter nineteenth-century experiments in boredom, ornithologists conveying sound through field notations, wearable attention-enhancing prosthetics, students using online learning platforms, and inquiries into attention as a cognitive state and moral virtue. Amid mounting concern about digital mediation of experience, the rise of “surveillance capitalism,” and the commodification of attention, Scenes of Attention deepens the thinking that is needed to protect the freedom of attention and the forms of life that make it possible. (shrink)

By following the arguments between Coenraad J. Temminck and fellow ornithologists Louis J.-P. Vieillot and Nicholas Vigors, this paper sketches, to a degree, the state of zoological classification and nomenclature between 1825 and 1840 in Europe. The discussions revolved around the problems caused by an unstable nomenclature, the different definitions of genera and species and the best method to achieve a natural system of classification. As more and more naturalists concerned with classifying and arranging the groups of birds joined (...) these discussions, a broad platform for debate emerged around the 1840s that gave a major impulse to the disciplines of taxonomy and systematics. Natural history ceased to be dominated by a few influential scientific authorities and became the scientific field where debate preceded agreement and, with it, progress. With this ‘democratization’ of natural history, Temminck’s status significantly changed between 1815 and 1840. After that year, his own views on classification along with certain economical and political developments in The Netherlands led Temminck to abandon the arena of ornithology and therefore, to lose his scientific authority. (shrink)

ArgumentIn this paper I study the engagement of German ornithologists with the Collared Dove, a bird species of Asian origin that spread massively throughout Central Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. Never before had the spread of a single species attracted so much attention from European ornithologists. Ornithologists were not only fascinated by the exotic origin of the bird, but even more so by the unprecedented rapidity of its expansion. As it is argued in the paper, the (...) advent of the bird created an outstanding opportunity for ornithologists to study the process of biogeographic range expansion. The paper traces how knowledge on the dove's expansion took shape in the social, discursive, and material practices of a large-scale observation campaign of German ornithologists. The paper also argues that ornithologists’ observation practices have contributed to the construction of a benevolent cultural image of the Collared Dove. This sets the case of the Collared Dove apart from many recent debates in which newly arriving species have been framed as a threat to biodiversity. The paper contributes both to a historical understanding of scientific fieldwork as well as of the role of scientific knowledge in the shaping of cultural meanings of animals. (shrink)

The contents of the British Ornithologists' Union's journal, "The Ibis," during the first half of the 20th century illustrates some of the transformations that have taken place in the naturalist tradition. Although later generations of ornithologists described these changes as logical and progressive, their historical narratives had more to do with legitimizing the infiltration of the priorities of evolutionary theory, ecology, and ethology than analyzing the legacy of the naturalist tradition on its own terms. Despite ornithologists' claim (...) that the journal's increasing focus on "biology" represented a natural development after the preliminary phase of systematics and geographical ornithology, in fact a small group campaigned to bring the priorities of population ecology, behavior, and selection theory into the journal and British ornithology more generally. The problems involved in this transition highlight the importance of methodological and institutional context in determining and reinforcing appropriate research programs for ornithologists. Comparing the discipline-building rhetoric of moderns with the contents of the past illustrates how modern evaluations of 19th century research programs have been enmeshed in ornithologists' endeavors to forge new identities for traditional disciplines. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Between the 1910s and the 1940s, American naturalists carried out a number of ornithological expeditions in Colombia. With the help of Colombian naturalists, thousands of skins were brought to natural history museums in the United States. By 1948 these birds had become an important treasure: American ornithologists declared Colombia the nation with the most bird species. This story sheds new light on the role science played in the expansion of U.S. political, economic, and cultural influence in Latin America (...) in the early twentieth century, as well as on the relation between nationalist movements in Latin America and the study of the natural world. Recognizing a complex but fruitful interaction between nationalist policies and imperial practices proves important for understanding the success of the naturalists' enterprise in Colombia. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article discusses two approaches to save the European white stork populations from extinction that emerged after 1980. Despite the shared objective to devise transnational, science-based conservation measures, the two approaches’ geographical focus was radically different. Projects by the World Wildlife Fund and the International Council for Bird Preservation focused firmly on the stork’s wintering areas on the African continent. Interventions by a second group of ornithologists at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell concentrated on the Middle (...) East as a migration bottleneck. Based on archival research, interviews and correspondence with involved ornithologists, the article examines stork representations as an important lens for investigating the professional politics of ecology and conservation. It shows that representations of white storks, the birds’ ecology, and derived conservation hotspots became part of the boundary work used by European ornithologists in the creation of changing scientific and institutional identities. (shrink)

Ernst Mayr''s scientific career continues strongly 70 years after he published his first scientific paper in 1923. He is primarily a naturalist and ornithologist which has influenced his basic approach in science and later in philosophy and history of science. Mayr studied at the Natural History Museum in Berlin with Professor E. Stresemann, a leader in the most progressive school of avian systematics of the time. The contracts gained through Stresemann were central to Mayr''s participation in a three year expedition (...) to New Guinea and The Solomons, and the offer of a position in the Department of Ornithology, American Museum of Natural History, beginning in 1931. At the AMNH, Mayr was able to blend the best of the academic traditions of Europe with those of North America in developing a unified research program in biodiversity embracing systematics, biogeography and nomenclature. His tasks at the AMNH were to curate and study the huge collections amassed by the Whitney South Sea Expedition plus the just purchased Rothschild collection of birds. These studies provided Mayr with the empirical foundation essential for his 1942Systematics and the Origin of Species and his subsequent theoretical work in evolutionary biology as well as all his later work in the philosophy and history of science. Without a detailed understanding of Mayr''s empirical systematic and biogeographic work, one cannot possibly comprehend fully his immense contributions to evolutionary biology and his later analyses in the philosophy and history of science. (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth century calls to modernize natural history motivated a range of responses. It was unclear how research in natural history museums would participate in the significant technological and conceptual changes that were occurring in the life sciences. By the 1960s, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, was among the few university-based natural history museums that were able to maintain their specimen collections and support active research. The MVZ therefore provides a window to the (...) modernization of natural history. This paper concentrates on the directorial transitions that occurred at the MVZ between 1965 and 1971. During this period, the MVZ had four directors: Alden H. Miller (Director 1940–1965), an ornithologist; Aldo Starker Leopold (Acting Director 1965–1966), a conservationist and wildlife biologist; Oliver P. Pearson (Director 1966–1971), a physiologist and mammalogist; and David B. Wake (Director 1971–1998), a morphologist, developmental biologist, and herpetologist. The paper explores how a diversity of overlapping modernization strategies, including hiring new faculty, building infrastructure to study live animals, establishing new kinds of collections, and building modern laboratories combined to maintain collections at the MVZ’s core. The paper examines the tensions between the different modernization strategies to inform an analysis of how and why some changes were institutionalized while others were short-lived. By exploring the modernization of collections-based research, this paper emphasizes the importance of collections in the transformation of the life sciences. (shrink)

Professor Martin West's paper, titled ‘The Parodos of the Agamemnon’’, argues with characteristic learning and insight that Archilochus’’ fable of the fox and the eagle was a major source for Aeschylus’’ description of the portent of the eagles and the pregnant hare in the parodos of the Agamemnon . The portent is vividly described by the chorus: two eagles, one black and one white behind feed upon a pregnant hare. Poetry is not real life, and Aeschylus’’ picture is not a (...) naturalist's field-report. At the same time, an image's power increases in proportion to its precision, and I have no doubt that at some stage behind Aeschylus’’ description there was a personal sighting of a parallel incident by Aeschylus himself perhaps, or by Archilochus, or by an unknown figure who passed on his report. Fraenkel's commentary avers that ‘precise zoological identification of the species of eagle named by Aeschylus must not be attempted.’’ This is a fair warning, but not for the reason advanced by Fraenkel here: the plumage variation among different birds of the same species, which makes the identification of large raptors in the wilds of Greece today a problem for even the most expert ornithologists. There are two better reasons. One will emerge in the course of this note. The other is that no ancient writer using the Greek language came at all near to the modern classification of eagle species native to Greece. (shrink)

This paper examines taxonomy comparison from a cognitive perspective. Arguments are developed by drawing on the results of cognitive psychology, which reveal the cognitive mechanisms behind the practice of taxonomy comparison. The taxonomic change in 19th-century ornithology is also used to uncover the historical practice that ornithologists employed in the revision of the classification of birds. On the basis of cognitive and historical analyses, I argue that incommensurable taxonomies can be compared rationally. Using a frame model to represent taxonomy, (...) I show how rational comparisons were achieved in the historical case through compatible contrast sets and attribute lists. Through analyzing the cognitive processes of classification and concept representation, I further explain how rival taxonomies in the historical case could be rationally compared on ‘platforms’ rooted in such cognitive mechanisms as relational assumptions and preferences for body parts in conceptual processing. (shrink)

It is almost a truism that nature is social, but by what means is nature made social at the level of the interactional encounter? While the transformation of society/nature relationships is often approached through the problematic of distance, and at the scale of macro-historical transformation, this article uses a conflict between American birdwatchers and ornithologists over scientific “collecting” (literally, the killing of birds) to examine the processes through which individuals come to know nature, and come to know it so (...) differently. With John Dewey’s (1958 [1925]) “experience” as the unit of analysis, I trace changes in each group’s experience with birds over the past century; the phenomenology of the resulting encounters; and the understanding that emerges from each in order to understand (1) how, empirically, these two very different loves of birds are formed, and (2) knowledge of nature as an affective sensibility shaped by experiences of closeness. (shrink)

The contents of the British Ornithologists' Union's journal, "The Ibis," during the first half of the 20th century illustrates some of the transformations that have taken place in the naturalist tradition. Although later generations of ornithologists described these changes as logical and progressive, their historical narratives had more to do with legitimizing the infiltration of the priorities of evolutionary theory, ecology, and ethology than analyzing the legacy of the naturalist tradition on its own terms. Despite ornithologists' claim (...) that the journal's increasing focus on "biology" represented a natural development after the preliminary phase of systematics and geographical ornithology, in fact a small group campaigned to bring the priorities of population ecology, behavior, and selection theory into the journal and British ornithology more generally. The problems involved in this transition highlight the importance of methodological and institutional context in determining and reinforcing appropriate research programs for ornithologists. Comparing the discipline-building rhetoric of moderns with the contents of the past illustrates how modern evaluations of 19th century research programs have been enmeshed in ornithologists' endeavors to forge new identities for traditional disciplines. (shrink)

C. J. Temminck, director of the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (now the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden) and a renowned ornithologist, gained his contemporary's respect thanks to the description of many new species and to his detailed monographs on birds. He also published a small number of works on biogeography describing the fauna of the Dutch colonies in South East Asia and Japan. These works are remarkable for two reasons. First, in them Temminck accurately described the species composition (...) of poorly explored regions, like the Sunda Islands and Japan. Secondly, he formulated a new law on the geographical distribution of animals around the globe, based on the parallels he observed between the fauna from Europe, Asia and Japan. The underlying ideas that lead Temminck to this law were the typeconcept, which he understood as the ideal morphological plan behind animal form, the unchanging character of the species and a strong belief in nature's divine design. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the type-and the species-concept, the origin and fixity of the species and the meaning of variations aroused heated discussions. When put in the context of his time, Temminck emerges as a scientist whose work was driven by the dominating scientific philosophy of the time in which he lived, under the influence of late eighteenth century natural history and of French empiricists, in particular, the great zoologist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier. Temminck's detailed descriptions of the Dutch East Indian fauna helped the great naturalists after him to understand nature's patterns and to propose comprehensive theories that explain its diversity. (shrink)

By following the arguments between Coenraad J. Temminck and fellow ornithologists Louis J.-P. Vieillot and Nicholas Vigors, this paper sketches, to a degree, the state of zoological classification and nomenclature between 1825 and 1840 in Europe. The discussions revolved around the problems caused by an unstable nomenclature, the different definitions of genera and species and the best method to achieve a natural system of classification. As more and more naturalists concerned with classifying and arranging the groups of birds joined (...) these discussions, a broad platform for debate emerged around the 1840s that gave a major impulse to the disciplines of taxonomy and systematics. Natural history ceased to be dominated by a few influential scientific authorities and became the scientific field where debate preceded agreement and, with it, progress. With this ‘democratization’ of natural history, Temminck's status significantly changed between 1815 and 1840. After that year, his own views on classification along with certain economical and political developments in The Netherlands led Temminck to abandon the arena of ornithology and therefore, to lose his scientific authority. (shrink)