Medicine and astronomy were both scientific disciplines to which visual demonstration proved helpful, were taught in the universities, and were deeply influenced by humanism and by the development of print culture, but they did not use printed images in the same way. Thus, all the aspects of astronomical activity benefited from the accompaniment of printed images, whereas, even for anatomy, illustration does not seem to have been seen as a necessity in Renaissance medical books. To explore such a difference, the (...) chronology of the development of illustration in both fields (from the first illustrated incunabula to the mid-sixteenth century) is compared, and some explanations (economical, epistemological, cultural) are proposed and questioned. -/- . (shrink)

The author discusses Herzen's "liberal socialism" and later adoption of "communal peasant socialism," comparing his views with those of Marx, Engels, and Chernyshevskii. He shows how Herzen and his legacy influenced the evolution and eventual abandonment of populist ideas in Russia.

…Marx so far surpasses us all with his genius, his almost excessive scholarly conscientiousness, and his fabulous erudition that if someone were to attempt to criticize his discoveries, he would only get burnt in this endeavor. That will be possible only for people of a more developed epoch.