The fruits of knowledge—such as books, data, and ideas—tend to generate far more attention than the ways in which knowledge is produced and acquired. Correcting this imbalance, Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe brings together a wide-ranging yet tightly integrated series of essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit. Composed by scholars in disciplines ranging from the history (...) of science to art history to religious studies, the pieces collected here look at the production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within many different communities. They focus, in particular, on how the methods employed by scientists and intellectuals came to interact with the practices of craftspeople and practitioners to create new ways of knowing. Examining the role of texts, reading habits, painting methods, and countless other forms of knowledge making, this volume brilliantly illuminates the myriad ways these processes affected and were affected by the period’s monumental shifts in culture and learning. (shrink)

Lefèvre’s invaluable book takes as its subject the burgeoning of ‘technological’ literature from the 1400s to the late eighteenth century, and its instantiation in six textual corpuses: architectur...

Examines the relationship between making objects and knowing nature in Europe from the mid-15th to mid-19th centuries.

We conducted focus groups with 47 potential jurors who were presented with diferent scenarios in a hypothetical malpractice case involving failure to order a PSA test. Better documentation that a patient made an informed decision to decline a PSA test appeared to provide more medical-legal protection for physicians, especially with the use of a decision aid.

Screening for prostate cancer with the prostate-specific antigen blood test is controversial, as evidence to date has not demonstrated such screening does more good than harm. While the potential benefit of PSA screening on reducing prostate cancer mortality has not been documented in randomized trials, many risks of PSA screening have been well documented. These risks include a substantially higher risk of a prostate cancer diagnosis over a screenee’s lifetime, false-positive and false-negative test results, possible complications from biopsies done in (...) response to suspicious test results, and substantial risks of side effects from subsequent prostate cancer treatments. Nevertheless, PSA screening is widespread in the United States, and many physicians in a national survey reported supporting routine PSA screening as well as getting PSA tests themselves, despite the lack of evidence. (shrink)

This paper has two parts. In the first, I try to show that Russell's arguments against the thesis of Kant's first antinomy are unsatisfactory; in the second, I argue that the Universe, if transcendentally real, must be finite in both space and time.

The objective of this study is to evaluate if use of a patient decision aid, when choosing between a repeat cesarean or a trial of labor after a cesarean, reduces medical liability exposure. The authors conclude that use of a PDA conferred liability protection when potential jurors were presented with a hypothetical malpractice claim against an obstetrician following a TOLAC.

What are historians doing in the laboratory? Looking back over six years of collaborative work, researchers of the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University discuss their experience with hands‐on reconstruction as a historical method. This work engages practical forms of knowledge—from pigment‐making to metal casting—recorded in the BnF Ms. Fr. 640, an anonymous French manuscript compiled in the later sixteenth century. Bodily encounters with materials and processes of the past offer insights into the material and mental worlds of early (...) modern artists and artisans, and train the eye in the interpretation of historical objects. At the same time, reconstruction contributes to the interpretation of the text: it is only by attempting to implement the instructions of practical or recipe literature that these texts can be understood as vehicles of emergent knowledge that only fully manifests itself in the doing. Overall, our approach to reconstruction mirrors that of the anonymous author‐practitioner, who explored a wide range of techniques through experimenting and writing. (shrink)