This book is the first to trace the origins and significance of positivism on a global scale. Taking their cues from Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill, positivists pioneered a universal, experience-based culture of scientific inquiry for studying nature and society—a new science that would enlighten all of humankind. Positivists envisaged one world united by science, but their efforts spawned many. Uncovering these worlds of positivism, the volume ranges from India, the Ottoman Empire, and the Iberian Peninsula to Central Europe, (...) Russia, and Brazil, examining positivism’s impact as one of the most far-reaching intellectual movements of the modern world. Positivists reinvented science, claiming it to be distinct from and superior to the humanities. They predicated political governance on their refashioned science of society, and as political activists, they sought and often failed to reconcile their universalism with the values of multiculturalism. Providing a genealogy of scientific governance that is sorely needed in an age of post-truth politics, this volume breaks new ground in the fields of intellectual and global history, the history of science, and philosophy. (shrink)

While the history of science in Polish language has a long history, both intellectual and institutional, it became less visible internationally following the fall of the Iron Curtain. This article looks into the institutional state of history-of-science writing in Poland, and discusses several key focal points that emerged in recent years. By distinguishing between the core history of science, written at institutions devoted to this discipline, and broader academic discussions concerning science's past, I claim that, in recent decades, more important (...) topical and theoretical innovation has come from what we can term the “esoteric” circle (referring to Ludwik Fleck)—that is, scholars who do not identify themselves as historians of science. Given that those scholars from abroad who are interested in Polish history of science are in fact general historians, we get a strong impression that we are witnessing a deeper turn in the field, one with diminishing specialization and greater attention paid to situating science in a broader range of societal processes. (shrink)

This article introduces a collection of studies of biological concepts crossing over to other disciplines and nonscholarly discourses. The introduction discusses the notion of nomadic concepts as introduced by Isabelle Stengers and explores its usability for conceptual history. Compared to traveling and interdisciplinary concepts, the idea of nomadism shifts the attention from concepts themselves toward the mobility of a concept and its effects. The metaphor of nomadism, as outlined in the introduction, helps also to question the relation between concepts' movement (...) and the production of boundaries. In this way conceptual history can profit from interaction with translation studies, where similar processes were recently discussed under the notion of cultural translation. (shrink)

Ukrainian science and its terminology in the nineteenth century experienced a number of twists and turns. Divided between two empires, it lacked institutions, scholars pursuing it, and a unified literary language. One could even say that until the late nineteenth century there was a possibility for two communities with two literary languages to emerge – Ruthenian and Ukrainian. Eventually, both communities and languages merged. This article tracks the meanderings of this process, arguing that scholarly publications played a crucial role in (...) shaping the standard for the scientific language. The article follows the biography of the naturalist Ivan Verhrats’kyi, the author of the first dictionaries of naturalist terminology in Ruthenian in 1860, a translator and author of textbooks, and the head of the Mathematical–Naturalist–Medical Section of the Shevchenko Society in L’viv. He thus shaped many Ruthenian, and then Ruthenian–Ukrainian scholarly projects. Initially successful with his approach to making the Ruthenian scientific language vernacular, in the 1890s his approach was losing ground to the internationalization of vocabulary and to the growing pressure toward the unification of Ruthenian and Ukrainian. Finally, in the beginning of the twentieth century, Verhrats’kyi became marginalized within the Ukrainian scholarly community. By discussing the history of a minority language within imperial structures, I argue that the media in which scholarly work was published requires special attention. In the Ruthenin–Ukrainian case, they determined the standard for scientific language. Lacking professional journals, Ruthenian scholars published in the 1860s–late 1880s in popular newspapers and in school textbooks, requiring them to use a language that was near to the spoken tongue of the Habsburg province. Once the political situation changed, favoring Ruthenian–Ukrainian unification, and scholarly journals appeared and transgressed the imperial boundary, the favored language had to be transimperial, ousting out the vernacular. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 44, Issue 4, Page 339-351, December 2021.

During the summer of 1900, the Chemical Section of the Society for the Promotion of Russian Industry and Commerce in Warsaw published a very special booklet in which prominent philologists debated proposals concerning adjustments to chemical nomenclature. Several issues were discussed, including systems of classification of chemical compounds, new specialist terms, and which element names to select among the many then in use. Chemists translated and modified these proposals while strongly disagreeing with using philological expertise. But both the booklet and (...) the debate were novelties within discussions on chemical terminology, which provides an opportunity to examine the peculiarities of such endeavors. This article examines this special moment in the history of chemistry when chemists ceded (partially) their authority over their subject to philologists. I discuss how this episode was shaped by the low grade of academic professionalization in the Polish-language scholarly community and the practical needs of industry, which engendered different habitus among scholars debating chemical issues. This paper asks what language was for chemists and philologists and which epistemic ideals were linked with it. I argue that this episode was a form of interdisciplinary interrogation in which philologists and their arguments were instrumentalized for the needs of chemists. (shrink)