Historians of fourteenth-century science have long recognized the extraordinary work at both Oxford and Paris in which natural philosophy was becoming highly mathematical. The movement to subject natural philosophy to a mathematical analysis and to quantify such qualities as heat, color, and of course speed surely stands as one of the most significant aspects of late medieval science. Yet as Edith Sylla has observed, because qualities and quantities pertain to different categories in Aristotelian theory, one might expect Aristotelian theorists to (...) avoid quantifying qualities. Even more serious still, the very task of quantifying physical qualities exposes a tension in the nature of science that was discussed first by Aristotle in his Posterior Analytics. (shrink)

The ways in which the Aristotelian sciences are related to each other has been discussed in the literature, with some focus on the subalternate sciences. While it is acknowledged that Aristotle, and Plato as well, was concerned as well with how the arts were related to one another, less attention has been paid to Aristotle's views on relationships among the arts. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle's account of the subalternate sciences helps shed light (...) on how Aristotle saw the art of rhetoric relating to dialectic and politics. Initial motivation for comparing rhetoric with the subalternate sciences is Aristotle's use of the language of boundary transgression, germane to the Posterior Analytics, when discussing rhetoric’s boundaries, as well as the language of "over" and "under" found in APo. First, I discuss three passages in Rhetoric Book I and argue that Garver's (1988) account cannot be correct. Second, I look to the subalternate sciences, especially focusing on optics and the distinction between "unqualified" optics and mathematical optics. Third, I discuss rhetoric's dependence on both dialectic and politics. (shrink)

Both Pierre Duhem and his successors emphasized that medieval scholastics created a science of mechanics by bringing both observation and mathematical techniques to bear on natural effects. Recent research into medieval and early modern science has suggested that Aristotle's subalternate sciences also were used in this program, although the degree to which the theory of subalternation had been modified is still not entirely clear. This paper focuses on the English tradition of subalternation between 1310 and 1350, and concludes (...) with a discussion of the theory advanced by Thomas Claxton early in the fifteenth century. (shrink)

Resumen: La construcción de una ciencia del Trabajo Social constituye un debate que ha adquirido intensidad disciplinar en la última década. Ello es resultado de los esfuerzos progresivos de vigilancia y depuración epistemológica que se ha venido produciendo allí dónde el Trabajo Social tiene presencia. Para contribuir a dicho proceso, este artículo propone un vértice analítico organizado en tres momentos. El primero de ellos se adentra en cuestiones epistémicas mostrando las construcciones internas que el Trabajo Social ha venido discutiendo con (...) relación a la naturaleza del conocimiento que produce. El segundo momento incide asuntos relativos al poder y en las relaciones asimétricas interdisciplinares que experimenta el Trabajo Social en las Ciencias Sociales. El tercero introduce la necesidad de atender la feminización del sujeto constructor de la disciplina como parte de su identidad epistémica secular. Se concluye que la autonomía como disciplina científica depende de las comunidades epistémicas que conviven en Trabajo Social puedan hacer explícitos sus debates que rescaten saberes ausentes, olvidados, postergados y subalternos en las jerarquías de la sociedad de conocimiento, tanto por cadenas internas como por condicionantes externos que limitan la consolidación del ethos disciplinar.: The aim of the article is to analyse a long-standing challenge in the field of social work related to its historical struggle to be taken seriously as a scientific discipline. The paper identifies a tripartite conceptual framework to guide the discussion of the science of social work. The first part describes debates in contemporary social work about the nature of knowledge, considering that social work has experienced researchers who bring critically important perspectives to bear in national and international venues. The second part focuses on the social work’s subordinate academic status within the social sciences and its historical positioning as an applied rather than research-oriented discipline and the impacts relating its power and interdisciplinary asymmetric relations experienced in social work. Finally, the article raises questions about the anonymity of women in the profession’s history. In that sense, expertise in care, social help and service to the other, are feminized components of the socio-professional identity of social work and a crucial issue to consider in understanding the discipline’s standing among other social sciences. The article argues there is evidence of a large variety of positions within the history of social work concerning issues of scientific production within the field. (shrink)

The paper investigates the structure and functioning of the science and technology (S&T) system in India as it has evolved in the post-independence period (1947 onwards). The networks of entities involved in S&T actions, the paper argues, can be categorised, in terms of adopted approaches to agenda and priority setting and accounting for actions, into two streams. The origins and expansion of the two streams are traced. One, the ‘Elite’ stream (high profile and visibility linked to big industry), adopting what (...) the paper has generically termed the ‘Nehruvian’ model of development, is shown to have emerged as a dominant network. The other socially powerful ‘Subaltern’ stream (less visible, closer to ground realities and linked to village and cottage industry), adopting the ‘Gandhian’ model of development, still remains dispersed and outside the consideration of high-level decision-making bodies. The paper stresses the importance of moving the support and attention from the dominant stream to efforts that attempt a synthesis between the dominant and the subaltern. (shrink)

The scientific and philosophical approach to pain must be supplemented by a hermeneutics studying how racism has complicated the communication of pain. Such an investigation reveals that not only are non-white people seen as credibly speaking their pain, but also pain “science” is one of the ways races have historically been constructed. I illustrate this through a study of Frantz Fanon’s clinical writings, along with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave-owners’ medical manuals and related documents. I suggest that, with this history, what (...) philosophers understand as the problem of pain is best framed as the problem of colonial violence. (shrink)

This essay traces the ontological and political limits of Bruno Latour’s conceptualization of the ‘common world’. Latour formulates this concept in explicating how modernist scientific and political institutions require a metaphysical foundation that is anti-democratic in rigidly partitioning nature from society. In the stead of nature/society, Latour proposes a ‘cosmopolitics’ in which we recognize our embroilment in systems comprised of heterogeneous human and nonhuman actors, and seek to innovate appropriate procedures for governing such systems and composing a more peaceful common (...) world. However, feminist and postcolonialist science studies scholars have argued that Latour’s project fails to apprehend the experiences of subjects marginalized by scientific and political structures of representation. Thus, science studies scholars seem to be faced with a problem; to avoid ontological dissonance and contradiction in integrating Latour’s program with feminist and postcolonialist critiques we must defer his claims that the cosmopolitical program entirely supersedes contemporary social movements and oppositional politics. I offer an alternative. Namely, I argue that Latour’s formulations of cosmopolitics’ procedures and the common world’s boundaries actually require an incipient model of the limits of democratic representation. I modify Latour’s proposed system of representation by reading it against Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of ‘subaltern pasts’, which are unassimilable to academic historical narratives (in their attribution of agency to nonhuman gods, for example). This reading emphasizes how Latour does not adequately theorize and politicize the partially autonomous reality of those excluded from the common world and thus fails to attend to how this externalization replicates the violence of modernist representational institutions. (shrink)

Largely uncontested among interpreters of Aquinas is the claim that the Angelic Doctor presents sacra doctrina as a subalternated science. To be sure, in fourtexts of the Thomistic corpus Aquinas broaches the subject of subalternation in discussions of whether sacra doctrina can be a science. I contend that the appeal to subalternation in these discussions is not to defend sacra doctrina as a subalternated science, but is rather to defend the possibility of arriving at scientific conclusions when an act of (...) belief serves as the starting point for syllogistic reasoning. There is indeed an epistemic similarity between the starting points of a subalternated science and the science of sacra doctrina, insofar as an act of belief serves as the proximate epistemic point of departure in both cases. However, the cognitive similarity between the practitioner of a subalternated science and a practitioner of sacra doctrina does not necessitate that sacra doctrina is a subalternated science. (shrink)

Largely uncontested among interpreters of Aquinas is the claim that the Angelic Doctor presents sacra doctrina as a subalternated science. To be sure, in fourtexts of the Thomistic corpus Aquinas broaches the subject of subalternation in discussions of whether sacra doctrina can be a science. I contend that the appeal to subalternation in these discussions is not to defend sacra doctrina as a subalternated science, but is rather to defend the possibility of arriving at scientific conclusions when an act of (...) belief serves as the starting point for syllogistic reasoning. There is indeed an epistemic similarity between the starting points of a subalternated science and the science of sacra doctrina, insofar as an act of belief serves as the proximate epistemic point of departure in both cases. However, the cognitive similarity between the practitioner of a subalternated science and a practitioner of sacra doctrina does not necessitate that sacra doctrina is a subalternated science. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between theory and praxis by contrasting three different models of intellectual endeavor: totalizing, particular and decolonial. Attending to the critique that Gayatri Spivak raised against Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in Can the Subaltern Speak?, this article advocates a dramaturgical reading of texts as a model for political theory to address subaltern agency. It reads such agency in the smile that Pier Paolo Pasolini registers in his 1967 film version of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Tyrannos. Dramaturgically (...) read, Oedipus reveals another text, the tragic history of a yet insufficiently explored democratic alternative that goes against the established democracy and its complicity with inequality in the continued naturalization of slavery despite its foundation in equality. This subtext demands understanding Oedipus as a political production from the speechless agency of dissident servants, a more subversive aspect of democratic politics. (shrink)

Over the last few decades feminists, science and technology studies scholars and others have grappled with how to take materiality into account in understanding social practices, subjectivity and events. One key area for these debates has been drug use and addiction. At the same time, neuroscientific accounts of drug use and addiction have also arisen. This development has attracted criticism as simplistically reinstating material determinism. In this article we draw on 80 interviews with health professionals directly involved in drug-related public (...) policy and service provision in three countries to identify the main ways the neuroscience of addiction (and thus the agency of the brain) is understood. We analyse these understandings using contemporary posthumanist theory to develop new options for conceptualizing matter in public responses to addiction. We close by calling for a new approach to addiction and the brain based on a process model of materiality and public debate. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between theory and praxis by contrasting three different models of intellectual endeavor: totalizing, particular and decolonial. Attending to the critique that Gayatri Spivak raised against Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in Can the Subaltern Speak?, this article advocates a dramaturgical reading of texts as a model for political theory to address subaltern agency. It reads such agency in the smile that Pier Paolo Pasolini registers in his 1967 film version of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Tyrannos. Dramaturgically (...) read, Oedipus reveals another text, the tragic history of a yet insufficiently explored democratic alternative that goes against the established democracy and its complicity with inequality in the continued naturalization of slavery despite its foundation in equality. This subtext demands understanding Oedipus as a political production from the speechless agency of dissident servants, a more subversive aspect of democratic politics. (shrink)

Mahatma Gandhi, one of the greatest global icons of all times, is known as much for his successful leadership of India’s non-violent anti-colonial freedom movement as for his virtue and simplicity. His ideals have inspired diverse social and political movements across the world: _against _apartheid in South Africa, racial segregation in the United States, several state policies and actions in India and nuclear weaponisation, and _for _environmental sustainability and world peace. Hence, a pertinent question is often raised by media and (...) academia: How would Gandhi have responded to the contemporary Indian and global situation marked by ethnic conflicts, terrorism, economic insecurity under the dominance of a global neo-liberal economic order and moral degeneration in private and public lives? Addressing this question in this volume through critical and variant re-readings of _Hind Swaraj_, his key manifesto of socio-political transformation, social scientists, political philosophers and social activists seek to establish a social and academic dialogue with Gandhi, interrogating his thoughts, values and vision, and examining their relevance to present-day problems. In spotlight is a contentious issue: the relationship between modernity and emancipation of subalterns, in the light of his critique of modern civilisation, the central thesis of the text. This book will be of interest to those in Gandhian studies, political science, history, philosophy, sociology, development studies, as well as activists, policy makers and the lay reader. (shrink)

Transdisciplinary research knits together knowledge from diverse epistemic communities in addressing social-environmental challenges, such as biodiversity loss, climate crises, food insecurity, and public health. This paper reflects on the roles of philosophy of science in transdisciplinary research while focusing on Indigenous and other subaltern forms of knowledge. We offer a critical assessment of demarcationist approaches in philosophy of science and outline a constructive alternative of transdisciplinary philosophy of science. While a demarcationist focus obscures the complex relations between epistemic communities, transdisciplinary (...) philosophy of science provides resources for meeting epistemic and political challenges of collaborative knowledge production. (shrink)

This article presents findings of a research carried out among pro-refugee individuals in social media in Hungary. During the so-called refugee crisis that emerged in the summer of 2015, anti-immigrant sentiments in the Hungarian public were fueled by a strong governmental campaign. This unusually strong propaganda campaign created a strong hegemonic discourse. Nevertheless, a pro-refugee counterpublic opposing the hegemonic discourse also emerged. The article discusses existing scholarly literature on the phenomenon and how it appears in and is shaped by the (...) digital sphere. The empirical findings focus on two characteristics of the pro-refugee counterpublic. First, we look at the political affiliations of this counterpublic. Second, we ask if the different digital affordances used by the counterpublic and their combinations indicate the formation of a community. The methodological ambition of the article is to present a digital data-driven approach, based on data provided by Facebook, which allows the individual profiling of each user. The connections and schemata of these profiles provide the analytical background of the present research. We aim to illustrate that such a digital approach has a number of advantages over traditional sociological methods, especially in the research of subaltern counterpublics. (shrink)

This volume explores the relationship between experience and theory in Indian social sciences in the form of a dialogue. It focuses on questions of Dalit experience and untouchability. While Gopal Guru argues that only those who have lived lives as subalterns can represent them accurately, Sundar Sarukkai feels that people located outside the community can also represent them. Thematically divided into five sections, the first discusses the problems associated with theory in the social sciences in the Indian context. (...) The next makes inquiries into the nature of personal and collective experience. The third explores the larger connection between ethics and theory in India, both in the natural and social sciences. The fourth examines the ontological and epistemological nature of experience itself and the politics of experience, and the last focuses on the experience and theory of experience in India. The authors invoke the image of a cracked mirror to suggest a more complex and distorted relation between experience and theory. This book will interest scholars, researchers, and students of Dalit studies, subaltern studies, and politics. (shrink)

Science fiction has often been at the forefront of popular renderings and exploration of various “subaltern” groups, including that of nonhuman animals. I argue that science fiction’s freedom from the boundaries of what is currently possible allows writers such as Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, Olaf Stapledon, Daniel Keyes, Octavia Butler, Cordwainer Smith, and H. Beam Piper to explore ethical possibilities regarding animals that are diverse from those of the context in which they wrote. It is also (...) notable that the earlier science fiction writers only critique majority views regarding animals, whereas their antecessors go so far as to suggest the empowerment of the “Other,” in this case, nonhuman animals. (shrink)

This article identifies two tendencies in left-wing approaches toward the social sciences. The first expresses skepticism towards science as a kind of product of the ruling ideology that solely reproduces the status quo. The second worries about the capacity of scientific inquiry to actually change people's ingrained beliefs and prejudices. Antonio Gramsci and W.E.B. Du Bois are representative of these two diverging approaches. Their views on science, however, offer more commonalities than at first meet the eye. They are both (...) critical of sociological traditions that seek to discover universal laws of society, arguing that such an approach fails to grasp the complexity of causality and the role of human action in shaping their lives and history. On the other hand, both see the potential for rigorous and nuanced scientific analysis to offer grounds for concrete action and warn off wishful thinking. By combining their views, this article presents a conception of the role and potential of social scientific inquiry for progressive movements toward social change that navigates between the double-sided concerns represented by Gramsci and Du Bois. (shrink)

Historians of the sciences have paid great attention to the ways that faith in what has been called the quantitative spirit emerged as a dominant feature of the politics of science, a theme of obvious salience in current epidemiological and climate crises. There are instructive connexions between measurement practices and orientation towards other cultures—as though scientific modernity somehow appeared through the primacy of robust quantification over subaltern, past, and exotic worlds, where merely provisional judgment allegedly still operated. This highly (...) simplistic Orientalist distinction accompanied assumptions that the remote was best understood as the ancient, a viewpoint common at the same late Enlightenment moment as the apparent institutionalisation of the regime of the exact sciences within European polities. Under this regime, precision surveys—the way the state saw—have often been understood as integral for European societies and even more so in colonised territories. This version of what might be called metrological Orientalism can be disoriented through excellent recent scholarship that explores complex entanglements of measurement practices circulating across very different scientific cultures, which shows how precision devices that claimed merely to represent phenomena often helped produce them. Studies of select cases of relations between European practitioners and indigenous experts, in fields such as Egyptian hydraulics or South Pacific surveys, can reveal even more: the role that judgment and exactitude played in forging very different, politically significant versions of the past history of the sciences. These disorientations can aid novel forms of historical understanding of the politics of science. (shrink)

Accounts of Hobbes’s ‘system’ of sciences oscillate between two extremes. On one extreme, the system is portrayed as wholly axiomtic-deductive, with statecraft being deduced in an unbroken chain from the principles of logic and first philosophy. On the other, it is portrayed as rife with conceptual cracks and fissures, with Hobbes’s statements about its deductive structure amounting to mere window-dressing. This paper argues that a middle way is found by conceiving of Hobbes’s _Elements of Philosophy_ on the model of (...) a mixed-mathematical science, not the model provided by Euclid’s _Elements of Geometry_. I suggest that Hobbes is a test case for understanding early-modern system-construction more generally, as inspired by the structure of the applied mathematical sciences. This approach has the additional virtue of bolstering, in a novel way, the thesis that the transformation of philosophy in the long seventeenth century was heavily indebted to mathematics, a thesis that has increasingly come under attack in recent years. (shrink)

Politics and Modernity provides a critical review of the key interface of contemporary political theory and social theory about the questions of modernity and postmodernity. Review essays offer a broad-ranging assessment of the issues at stake in current debates. Among the works reviewed are those of William Connolly, Anthony Giddens, J[um]urgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor and Roy Bhaskar. As well as reviewing the contemporary literature, the contributors assess the historical roots of current problems in the works of (...) Nietzsche and Max Weber. (shrink)

This article examines the legacy of Gramscian thought in Anglophone social sciences. It focuses in particular on three currents or disciplines, namely Cultural Studies, Anthropology, and Gender Studies. All three have sought and sometimes found in Gramscian categories a number of theoretical and political instruments through which to think the structures of domination, individual or collective subjectivity, and their relation to culture, in particular through the use of the dialectical relationship of hegemony/subalternity. Demonstrating how Gramsci was received in the (...) intellectual and political Anglophone context, the article highlights certain genealogies which have sometimes led to what amounts to a number of fully-fledged “translations” of Gramscian concepts, but also to a series of “lighter”, more distant uses. In this perspective, the article focuses on the translation of Gramsci undertaken by the New Left in the Seventies, insofar as this detour has proved of capital importance for the successive interpretations of Gramscian theories in the Anglophone social sciences. (shrink)

I discuss two questions: (1) would Duhem have accepted the thesis of the continuity of scientific methodology? and (2) to what extent is the Oxford tradition of classification/subalternation of sciences continuous with early modern science? I argue that Duhem would have been surprised by the claim that scientific methodology is continuous; he expected at best only a continuity of physical theories, which he was trying to isolate from the perpetual fluctuations of methods and metaphysics. I also argue that the (...) evidence does not support the conclusion that early modern doctrines about mathematics and physics are continuous with the subalternation of sciences from Grosseteste, Bacon, and the theologians of fourteenth-century Oxford. The official and dominant context for early modern scientific methodology seems to have been progressive Thomism, and early modern thinkers seem to have pitted themselves against it. (shrink)

I discuss two questions: (1) would Duhem have accepted the thesis of the continuity of scientific methodology? and (2) to what extent is the Oxford tradition of classification/subalternation of sciences continuous with early modern science? I argue that Duhem would have been surprised by the claim that scientific methodology is continuous; he expected at best only a continuity of physical theories, which he was trying to isolate from the perpetual fluctuations of methods and metaphysics. I also argue that the (...) evidence does not support the conclusion that early modern doctrines about mathematics and physics are continuous with the subalternation of sciences from Grosseteste, Bacon, and the theologians of fourteenth-century Oxford. The official and dominant context for early modern scientific methodology seems to have been progressive Thomism, and early modern thinkers seem to have pitted themselves against it. (shrink)

(1994). Annex: The survey questionnaires. World Futures: Vol. 39, The Evolution of European Identity: Surveys of the Growing Edge A Report by the European Culture Impact Research Consortium (EUROCIRCON), pp. 161-164.

Philologus, founded in 1846, is one of the oldest and most respected periodicals in the field of Classics. It publishes articles on Greek and Latin literature, historiography, philosophy, history of religion, linguistics, reception, and the history of scholarship. The journal aims to contribute to our understanding of Greco-Roman culture and its lasting influence on European civilization. The journal Philologus, conceived as a forum for discussion among different methodological approaches to the study of ancient texts and their reception, publishes original scholarly (...) contributions with a strong international focus. Publications languages are: German, English, Italian, French. As of 2014 the publication of supplementary volumes will be resumed. The series Philologus. Supplemente / Philologus. Supplementary Volumes will publish monographs and edited volumes pertaining to all aspects of the study of ancient literature and its reception, with a special focus on topics concerning literary theory, philosophy and the history of scholarship from an interdisciplinary perspective. (shrink)