Cette préface présente le contexte politique et culturel du fameux discours de Helmholtz prononcé à Heidelberg le 22 novembre 1862, où il défend une certaine idée de l’université et des relations entre les différentes disciplines qu’elle enseigne. L’idée de pluridisciplinarité, tant invoquée aujourd’hui, est au cœur de son propos, ainsi que celle d’une conciliation possible entre philosophie et sciences de la nature, mais en partant du point de vue de ces dernières.

Aron Gurwitsch’s two unpublished texts bare witness to his uncompromising philosophical research carried out in exile. The text dating from 1937 (Leçon D) testifies to his reflections on constitutive phenomenology, while the second text, dating from the late 1940s or early 1950s (Outline of a project entitled “Phenomenology of Perception”) contains the sketch of Gurwitsch’s main contribution, the theory of the field consciousness.

Kurt Lewin's essay “Gesetz und Experiment in der Psychologie” of 1927, published in this issue of SiC for the first time in English translation, and his “Der Übergang von der aristotelischen zur galileischen Denkweise in Biologie und Psychologie” of 19311 have together contributed most to shape his image as a metatheorist of psychology. A careful examination of what has occasionally been called the “Lewinian tradition,”2 however, reveals that Lewin's metascientific contributions have been much more influential in Europe than in the (...) United States, where he lived and taught as a Jewish refugee from 1934 until his early death on 2 February, 1947. (shrink)

When introducing a collection of essays on Yiddish, Joseph Sherman asserted, among other things, that: Although the Nazi Holocaust effectively destroyed Yiddish together with the Jews of Eastern Europe for whom it was a lingua franca, the Yiddish language, its literature and culture have proven remarkably resilient. Against all odds, Yiddish has survived to become a focus of serious intellectual, artistic and scholarly activity in the sixty-odd years that have passed since the end of World War II. From linguistic and (...) literary research in the leading universities of the world to the dedicated creativity of contemporary novelists and poets in Israel and America, from the adaptation of Yiddish words and phrases to the uses of daily newspapers in English to the elevation of Yiddish as a new loshn koydesh by Hasidic sects, from the publication of new writing to the translation of its established canonical works into modern European languages, Yiddish is continually reminding the world of its vibrancy, relevance and importance as a marker of Jewish identity and survival. (shrink)

Die in diesem Band versammelten Arbeiten des französischen Phänomenologen Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) führen nicht nur auf vorzügliche Weise in dessen Philosophie ein, sie dokumentieren darüber hinaus auch die Entwicklung neu einsetzender Reflexionen in den Jahren nach der Publikation der Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung (1945). Kunsttheoretische, sprachphilosophische und auch soziologische Untersuchungen erschließen dem Leser eine Philosophie, die im Rahmen einer kulturphilosophischen Selbstverständigung das 20. Jahrhundert hinsichtlich seiner großen Themen und seiner radikalen Fragestellungen umgreift. Inhalt: Der Zweifel Cézannes (1945), Das Kino und die (...) neue Psychologie (1947), Das Metaphysische im Menschen (1947), Der Mensch und die Widersetzlichkeit der Dinge (1952), Schrift für die Kandidatur am Collège de France (1951/52), Das mittelbare Sprechen und die Stimmen des Schweigens (1952); Lob der Philosophie (1953), Von Mauss zu Claude Lévi-Strauss (1959), Der Philosoph und sein Schatten (1959), Das Auge und der Geist (1961). (shrink)

an essay on monsters, science and categories from Diderot to Baudelaire.

Nous reformulons la question du naturalisme sur le terrain de la pratique scientifique en privilégiant une analyse épistémologique fine des méthodes, procédures et concepts employés en psychologie. L’enjeu devient alors opérationnel: celui de la mise en place d’un cadre exact et expérimental permettant de rendre compte de la phénoménologie de l’expérience.

The article addresses the old question of vitalism, starting with a very concrete and recent example: the successful laboratory production of the polio virus. Following this, the author recalls two types of arguments on the nature of living being: those of Leibniz and those of Claude Bernard. If, according to the biologists who produced the virus themselves, life’s unique trait is self-replication, what should one make of the dominant position in philosophy of biology today, which denies any argument based on (...) the substantial attribution of properties to living being? The essay concludes by suggesting a new way of acknowledging the specificity of life without turning it into a metaphysical property; a way which emphasizes the import of the philosophy of biology itself. (shrink)

In the period running roughly from 1810 to 1860, French brain research remained split into two large provinces, each of which provided its own epistemological principles, methodological rules, and theoretical aims for the study of man’s mind. The controversies resulting from this split concerned issues as diverse as the intelligibility of mental processes, the unitary or the modular structure of cerebral activities, the relations holding between organic matter and mental function, the relevance and evidential weight of clinical and of experimental—i.e., (...) physiological—data for the explanation of the brain’s workings, and other similarly troublesome conceptual, ontological, and metaphysical riddles pertaining to something that had not yet been baptized ‘the mind-body problem’. (shrink)

Notre préface présente le contexte du fameux discours de Helmholtz sur le voir humain, dont nous donnons ensuite la traduction. Le texte helm-holtzien s’avère être à la fois un hommage soutenu à Immanuel Kant et l’esquisse d’une nouvelle optique physiologique basée sur quelques principes du néo-kantisme.

Notre préface présente le contexte du fameux discours de Helmholtz sur le voir humain, dont nous donnons ensuite la traduction. Le texte helm-holtzien s’avère être à la fois un hommage soutenu à Immanuel Kant et l’esquisse d’une nouvelle optique physiologique basée sur quelques principes du néo-kantisme.

We mourn the loss of Yehuda Elkana, founding editor of this journal. Setting science in context was a mission of his life. For him this did not mean to relativize and historicize science to the point where it is no longer distinguishable as central to the human quest for knowledge. Rather, an understanding of science as being rooted in social, material, and cultural contexts was for him the key to its central role for solving the problems of humanity with which (...) he was so deeply concerned. (shrink)

When Emanuel Ringelblum was born on November 21, 1900, in Buczacz, the small, multilingual and multi-ethnic Galician town was to be found on the far northeastern part of the Austrian Empire. As a mail stamp on a Correspondenz-Karte or Karta korrespondencyja of 1890 shows, the place was officially spelled in accordance with its Polish orthography. However, it was called Butschtasch in German, Bichuch in Yiddish, and still differently in Ukranian. After World War I, it was for a short while part (...) of Ukrania, and subsequently became Polish, then Soviet, and Ukranian again in the aftermath of the end of the Soviet Union. Ringelblum's cousin, Shmuel Josef Agnon, was also born in Buczacz. But their lives were to diverge in most respects. Agnon is remembered as one of the leading authors of modern Hebrew belles-lettres who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966. And one remembers Ringelblum as the one who, with utmost and relentless courage, organized the underground archive Oyneg Shabes in the Warsaw ghetto. Samuel D. Kassow, the expert on the history of Oyneg Shabes and the author of a brilliant monograph on this subject, asserts that “more than anyone else it was Emanuel Ringelblum who encouraged individuals to write, who organized and conceptualized the archive, and who transformed it into a powerful center of civil resistance”. (shrink)

With the death of Ernst Mach on February 19, 1916, one day after his seventy-eighth birthday, a question finally became explicit that had been looming for some time. It was as simple as it was fundamental: who, in the end, was this man, a scientist or a philosopher? The importance of this question for contemporaries can easily be gleaned from the obituaries that appeared in the weeks following Mach's death: one in the Physikalische Zeitschrift, written by Albert Einstein, and another (...) in the Archiv für die Geschichte der Philosophie, written by Mach's former student Heinrich Gomperz. They both addressed this critical issue in plain words. Einstein stressed that Mach “was not a philosopher who chose the natural sciences as the object of his speculation, but a many-sided, interested, diligent scientist who also took visible pleasure in detailed questions outside the burning issues of general interest”. Gomperz in turn first emphasized the great loss science had experienced with Mach's death, asking subsequently whether “the suffering science is physics or philosophy?”. His answer broadly followed Einstein's conclusion; relying on Mach's own words, he reminded his readers that Mach never claimed to be a philosopher, but merely was looking for a viewpoint that transcended the disciplinary constraints of particular scientific activities. (shrink)

It is one thing to deal with any aspect of Lev Vygotsky’s work from a purely scholarly standpoint. It is something quite different to deal with Vygotsky’s work from both an academic standpoint and also that of someone who is involved in East–West editorial and commercial projects. This article sheds light upon what it meant to work on Vygotsky’s theories for someone who was formally affiliated to West European academia and who also became involved more or less at the same (...) time in various East–West publishing projects related to Vygotsky and his circle. (shrink)

Au terme allemand d’Experiment correspond en fran­çais le terme d’expérience. Or, en sens opposé, expérience peut devenir soit Versuch, soit Erfahrung. Ainsi, le mot expérience véhiculé à plusieurs reprises par Lavoisier dans le discours préliminaire de son Traité a été traduit en allemand par Erfahrung, et en anglais par experiment, ce qui démontre que le terme français prête à des interprétations divergentes, mais également possibles. L’article explicite l’em­ploi du mot expériment, néologisme mort-né du début de xixe siècle, comme équivalent de (...) Versuch., Experiment et experiment dans le but de réduire l’am­biguïté sémantique propre au terme d’expérience. (shrink)

Au terme allemand d’Experiment (ou Versuch) correspond en fran­çais le terme d’expérience. Or, en sens opposé, expérience peut devenir soit Versuch, soit Erfahrung (savoir, savoir-faire, connaissance, événement vécu, etc.). Ainsi, le mot expérience véhiculé à plusieurs reprises par Lavoisier dans le discours préliminaire de son Traité a été traduit en allemand par Erfahrung, et en anglais par experiment, ce qui démontre que le terme français prête à des interprétations divergentes, mais également possibles. L’article explicite l’em­ploi du mot expériment, néologisme mort-né (...) du début de xixe siècle, comme équivalent de Versuch., Experiment et experiment dans le but de réduire l’am­biguïté sémantique propre au terme d’expérience. (shrink)

ArgumentThe sphygmograph as designed and tested by Jules-Étienne Marey – an apparatus destined to write pulse tracings on paper – revolutionized medical diagnostics in the early 1860s. Since the accuracy with which this device registered and objectified the pulse was controversial from the outset, the young scholar Ernst Mach decided to thoroughly examine Marey's sphygmograph. The investigation led to the invention of an alternative, truly Machian, sphygmograph. Mach's sphygmograph had originated in the regime of theoretical and applied physics, whereas the (...) instrument invented by Marey had been rooted in the regime of experimental physiology. This one type of instrument thus serves as the focal object of a comparative study of two antagonistic epistemological approaches to sphygmography. (shrink)

On ignore presque tout des circonstances qui ont amené Hermann von Helmholtz à s’engager en 1878 dans ce que l’on pourrait appeler une « campagne de promotion académique ». Seul parmi les historiens des sciences, Philipp Felsch mentionne dans son excellente monographie consacrée au physiologiste italien Angelo Mosso [Felsch 2007, 43] le fait que Helmholtz rédigea, très probablement à la demande de son collègue cadet ou à celle d’un secrétaire (permanent ou non) d’une académie des sciences eur...

The ArgumentIn this contribution, I argue for epistemological impurity as the key to the historical reconstruction of the proto-biological sciences of the eighteenth century.The traditional approaches to the more or less complex and more or less stratified past of science either focus on the ideal content of that which has in the meantime been recognized as standard biological knowledge or otherwise try to uncover the implicit cognitive principles at work in order to reveal their shortcomings.A closer look at the breakdown (...) of the classical models of mechanistic explanation and the detailed analysis of the new empirico-experimental research in the neurophysiology of the eighteenth century shows, however, that eclectic procedures of various kinds have dominated the field. This eclecticism supported, and was in turn supported by, what has recently become known as “thinking with one's hand.” The paper illustrates this specific kind of thinking with reference to the case of Nicolas Le Cat's microphysics of nervous activity. (shrink)

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a prolific writer, a multifaceted naturalist, and a zoologist by second profession. Throughout his adult life he lived up to his passion of politely contributing to the advancement of natural philosophy by publishing more than 30,000 pages, probably too much for even the most scrupulous historians of science who seek to reconstruct his theories and to shed some light on the role he played in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century biology.

Animals are “in” – since prehistoric times when humans were hunting animals, and when they fabricated the Paleolithic dog as well as the Paleolithic cat. In less general terms, animals are “in” since they received names and were listed, observed, mummified, turned into totems, and, later on, dissected, tortured under laboratory conditions, trained as experimental subjects or “purified” as model organisms. And they are massively “in” again, but now from overtly legal and moral points of view, at least since the (...) last two decades of the twentieth century. This is to say that modern members of the species Homo sapiens have always been connected to animals of the most various kinds – from the human flea and the cat flea to marine mammals, such as dolphins and whales, from horses to parrots, from scallops to worms, and so on. (shrink)

The article examines epistemological and ontological underpinnings of reasearch performed by means of magnetic resonance imaging and functional magnetic resonance imaging. It takes as its guiding line the important distinction between instruments and apparatuses drawn by Rom Harré. According to Harré, instruments such as barometers or thermometers do not cause the states they measure into existence. Apparatuses, in contradistinction, cause material states into existence to begin with, whereby theses states are subsequently processed according to suitable methods. Thus, when the objects (...) of examination are subjected to 2 or more Tesla in fMRI, a strength of magnetic field never occuring in earthly nature, technical means literally create the states to be examined. Close examination of the functioning of MRI and fMRI indicates that brain states, e.g., are not simply read, or perceived as degrees of temperature are read on scale. Hence, one does not see any mental funtion when looking at fMRI outputs, for the visible output has been semantically processed on the basis of invisible quantum mechanical processes that have undergone translations into digital data caused by the fMRI device itself. (shrink)

Preliminary remark:The following conversation began as a series of written email exchanges. Due to technical reasons, this exchange had to be interrupted at some point. Rather than rewriting the text that had obtained from scratch, I continued the conversation, turning the real “other” of the dialogue into an imagined one. Heartfelt thanks to Oren Harman, the guest editor of this topical issue, for continuing support and for having taken the risk of designing this unusual topical issue ofScience in Contextwith me. (...) AM. (shrink)

Aron Gurwitsch’s two unpublished texts bare witness to his uncompromising philosophical research carried out in exile. The text dating from 1937 testifies to his reflections on constitutive phenomenology, while the second text, dating from the late 1940s or early 1950s contains the sketch of Gurwitsch’s main contribution, the theory of the field consciousness.

Note du traducteur: La transcription rend fidèlement l’orthographe de l’inédit autographe de Helmholtz, et cela jusqu’à l’oubli du « t » dans le mot « nicht », erreur que l’auteur ne semble pas avoir remarquée ou à laquelle il ne devait pas accorder d’importance, vu qu’il s’agissait, probablement, d’une ébauche très avancée du rapport qui aurait dû, ou pu, être copiée, après correction, pour l’envoi en Italie.Dans la transcription ainsi que dans la traduction, l’espace laissé en blanc d’une...