The paper analyzes a complex of methodological problems associated with the visual turn in modern historical science, as well as the peculiarities of the perception of the historical past and the organization of history teaching in modern culture and in the system of historical education. The analysis evaluates the prospects of already existing approaches in philosophy in the development of problems of the visual. The ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the phenomenology of perception, with his (...) emphasis on the “physical presence” of a body in the process of perception, are proposed as a significant source for the reflection on the visual. The involvement of visual elements in the historical narrative, as shown in the article, complicates the methodology and practice of source criticism, while at the same time allowing historical science to make its contribution to understanding the image as such. (shrink)

Summary Several subdisciplines within historiography, most notably the arms and armour or martial arts studies, are interested in inferring physical qualities of historical material objects from historical sources. Scholars from these fields face serious deficiency of written accounts when it comes to various crucial information regarding their subject matter. Therefore, researchers’ attention is often drawn to iconographical sources, sometimes resulting in certain fascination with the material culture depicted in primary technical literature (Fachliteratur). This tendency seems particularly (...) strong in studies on HEMA which rely heavily on pre-modern combat treatises known as ‘fight books’ (Fechtbücher) and are tempted either to treat the available iconography as a faithful representation of its corresponding material reality or to interpret apparent mismatch between icono-graphical representations and their material source domain as evidence for the inferior skills of the illustrator. We would like to put forward that there is a fundamental oversight in such approach to Fachliteratur in general and fight books in particular, namely the lack of consideration for the artwork as a diagrammatic representation of the functional aspects of depicted embodied technique, where proportional ‘realism’ is of lesser priority. It may be fruitful to develop a more nuanced method of ‘reading’ such images. Our survey of select late-medieval fight books shows that equipment, and even body parts, are regularly distorted in their depictions in the fight books to better communicate the subject matter, especially where textual descriptions would be complicated. Interpreted in Gestalt terms, this phenomenon may serve as an example of historical pragmatic application of the cognitive principle of holism – that the whole is something different than the sum of its parts. (shrink)

Sacred texts are important sources for all religions. These resources have a variety of social functions, either implicit or explicit. Therefore, it is important to protect and transfer sacred texts in many cultures. For this reason, in many societies, it has become necessary to memorize these texts after they have been written down and to transfer them orally to the next generations. Thus, over time, various structures related to the memorization of these sacred texts have emerged. Being Ḥāfiẓ is (...) an important activity that emerged for the purpose of memorizing the Qur'an and transferring it in this way when necessary and gained historical and social qualities. People who are Ḥāfiẓ are respected Islamic societies. For this reason, many people make an effort to become a Ḥāfiẓ. In this process, reasons contributed to the spread of becoming Ḥāfiẓ, such as the Prophet Muhammed’s encouragement, and the accepting the memorization of the Qur’an as a virtuous activity for Muslims. The research is based on the lives and experiences of visually impaired Ḥāfiẓes. First of all, it aims to contribute to the relevant scientific literature. In addition to its academic contribution, it also aims to be a source for various social policies in order to reveal new options in line with the inclusion of visually impaired individuals in social life. The research is a qualitative descriptive study. It was conducted on the basis of the phenomenology design, which is one of the qualitative research designs. In this direction, it has been tried to understand how visually impaired hafizes ascribe meaning to their lives and how they evaluate the world, society and relationships. The study group of the research consists of twelve visually impaired Ḥāfiẓ residing in the provinces of Bingöl, Elazig, Diyarbakir and Mardin. During the interviews, it was concluded that the sample reached the saturation point due to the repetition of the data, and so the number of participants was limited to twelve. Snowball sampling technique was used in the research. The interviews were conducted with a semi-structured interview form created within the scope of the research. The interviews were conducted in places such as houses, parks, association offices and mosques. The study was carried out with the permission of Bingöl University Scientific Research and Publication Ethics Committee. Various results were obtained by analyzing the data obtained during the research process. Becoming Ḥāfiẓ is accepted as an important element that directly affects the lives of visually impaired participants. For the participants, it has features that make them at peace with themselves, the world and society, illuminate their dark world, and take them out of living within four walls and include them into life. Being an Ḥāfiẓ, playing role in condolences, reciting hymns in mawlids and similar religious ceremonies, giving voluntary Qur'an trainings in mosques or courses are important examples of social activities provided by the Ḥāfiẓes. The participants stated that being a Ḥāfiẓ provided them an important status in the social context and thus they gained respectability. It has been determined that some visually impaired Ḥāfiẓes are employed informally. Many of the participants earn income by reciting mawlids, hymns and eulogies in various religious ceremonies. They also recite the Qur'an in condolences and on some special days. Being Ḥāfiẓ is an important resource for visually impaired individuals to be included in social life. For this reason, the achievements of the visually impaired due to being a Ḥāfiẓ are an example of a model life for both the disabled and the parents with disabled children. In this direction, the visually impaired individuals should be supported in religious music-supported organizations, religious music associations should be established, and courses like mawlidhan, etc. should be organized. (shrink)

This article takes stock of the seeming wealth of visual and material sources concerning stars and numbers that has come down to us from early imperial China (221 BCE–755 CE) and their minimal impact on how we write the history of astronomy and mathematics in this period. My goal is to offer ideas about how we might better engage with these sources and work across ancient and modern disciplines. I begin by outlining the conceptual categories into which (...) our historical subjects divided these sciences, followed by an overview of those visual and material sources we know from textual sources to have once existed versus those that are currently extant. The historiographic disconnect, I argue, is due in part to an inherent disconnect in the sources that have survived and, in some degree, to terminological and categorical confusion between those working in the history of science, divination, and art. Pointing to what are, in my opinion, good examples of how we might move forward and beyond the limits imposed by our sources and disciplinary boundaries, I then end on a list of questions I think fruitful to explore. What, for example, do we mean by “accuracy” when speaking of how constellations are represented in technical literature and tomb murals? (shrink)

This article examines the potential of art and archaeological remains for the study of women's social history in early Christianity. Part I considers important sources for art and archaeological data; the received method and classification criteria for the discipline of early Christian art and archaeology; and the types of problems both earlier and contemporary approaches to the material remains present for scholars. Part II proposes an approach to understanding early Christian art and material culture as part of a larger (...) ongoing social discourse in the ancient Mediterranean world where cultural representations take part in the lively social and aural culture of life lived in close proximity to others. This approach places art and archaeological evidence in the foreground and documentary sources in the background as corroborative evidence. (shrink)

This paper offers a novel interpretation of the 1890 British Ultimatum, by bringing to the front of the stage its techno-diplomatic dimension, often invisible in the canonical diplomatic and military narratives. Furthermore, we use an unconventional historical source to grasp the British–Portuguese imperial conflict over the African hinterland via the building of railways: the cartoons of the politically committed and polyvalent Portuguese artist and journalist Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro (1846–1905), published in his journal Ponto nos iis, from the end of (...) 1889 and throughout 1890. We argue that the Ponto nos iis cartoons played a so far overlooked role in the unfolding of British–Portuguese affairs, as they shaped at a distance a diplomatic exchange with the British satirical journal Punch. Attacking and counterattacking his fellow cartoonists in Britain, Pinheiro surged into the role of informal diplomat. This cartoon visual and public diplomacy unfolded in the pages of both journals and was tied to the two countries’ colonial conquests in Africa, where the Portuguese and British empires were competing to dominate the African hinterland through large technological systems. Hence the cartoons made visible to wider audiences the otherwise hidden role that technologies played in the two countries’ affairs. In turn, the cartoons aimed at persuading the Portuguese public and ruling classes alike that only regime change, from monarchic to republican, would restore the wounded Portuguese national pride. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis essay addresses the historiographical question of how to study scientific instruments and the connections between them without rigidly determining the boundaries of the object under historical scrutiny beforehand. To do this, I will explore an episode in the early history of the tachistoscope — defined, among other things, as an instrument for the brief exposure of visual stimuli in experimental psychology. After looking at the tachistoscope described by physiologist Volkmann in 1859, I will turn to the (...) gravity chronometer, constructed by Cattell at Wundt's Leipzig institute of psychology in the 1880s. Taking Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances as a methodological suggestion to travel from one member to another to find out just how members relate to one another, I will investigate part of the family to which both the tachistoscope and the gravity chronometer turn out to belong. A detailed analysis of these instruments, using both historical sources and historical accounts of psychological instruments, may demonstrate that the instrument is not a standard package that, if well applied, will simply secure good results. Each package needs to be assembled again and again; the particular package that is assembled may differ on different occasions. Thus an alternative is developed to an understanding of instruments as univocally functioning material means. (shrink)

Horst Bredekamp’s subject is the astute deployment and perennial resonance of the startling image of the body politic that dominates the frontispiece to Leviathan: a treatise on the psychology of the individual and the dynamic of the multitude, published in 1651 by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Affirming the centrality of such a figural device for this pioneering theorist of the state, Bredekamp goes on to address the art-historical dimension of the mesmerising etched title-page. In his central chapters he (...) explores the extraordinary range of sources – from socio-cultural tradition to scientific advances – on which the author and his artist-collaborator may have drawn. In conclusion, he reveals Hobbes to be no less passionate than shrewd in his belief that the constraints and amenities of a tolerable life in common attest to the potency of the visual. As appendices, two essays and catalogues explore the portraits made of Hobbes as well as illustrations that appeared in his other works, thus systematically completing the exploration of the images connected with this exceptional philosopher. (shrink)

The use of images in education has received little attention despite the dual role of images in school textbooks, one aimed at the acquisition of knowledge and the other at the transmission of attitudes, values and norms, that constitute a valuable source of historical, educational and communicative research. We will study, through the analysis of content, the characteristics of the catechisms, the legislation of the time related to the publication of school textbooks, the presence of images, types, the didactic (...) function and the transmission of social models and ideology. The research suggests that the images of school catechisms are not simply reflections of a reality that facilitates the learning of the contents taught in schools, but that they also become an effective tool in the transformation of the values and ideological thinking of the social context in which they are produced. (shrink)

The history of "displaced persons" is one of the major historical context of the postwar period. On the European continent, it lasts throughout the second half of the 1940s in the territory occupied by Germany, Austria and Italy. From our point of view, the study of the problem has a very strong historiographical focus, which is associated with a number of national studies. Therefore, this article is dedicated to one of the main problems, which are common to all national (...) historiography: the problem of publishing the "displaced persons". The study is based on analysis of visual journalism as a historical source on the history of ordinary life DPs. The main source is regarded magazine "DiPiniada", which V. Ellis and V. Odinokov, published in a DPs camp Pasing-Munich. On the pages of the satirical magazine in 1946-1947 addressed many current topics of ordinary life of displaced persons. In general, "DiPiniada" is an important visual historical source. On the basis of press of displaced persons, ex-DiPi memories, the author makes two main conclusions. Firstly, "Dipiniada" magazine tells the story of ordinary life in the camps DiPi both artistic "language", and contextual "language". Secondly, the satirical nature of the publication is the reason for its historical authenticity, because humor is possible only in conditions of a familiar image. It is noted that the investigation has prospects both in methodological and in the objective aspects. (shrink)

Images have always stirred ambivalent reactions. Yet whether eliciting fascinated gazes or iconoclastic repulsion from their beholders, they have hardly ever been seen as true sources of knowledge. They were long viewed as mere appearances, placeholders for the things themselves or deceptive illusions. Today, the traditional critique of the spectacle has given way to an unconditional embrace of the visual. However, we still lack a persuasive theoretical account of how images work. -/- Emmanuel Alloa retraces the history of (...) Western attitudes toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. He examines how ideas of images and their powers have been constructed in Western humanities, art theory, and philosophy, developing a novel genealogy of both visual studies and the concept of the medium. Alloa reconstructs the earliest Western media theory—Aristotle’s concept of the diaphanous milieu of vision—and the significance of its subsequent erasure in the history of science. Ultimately, he argues for a historically informed phenomenology of images and visual media that explains why images are not simply referential depictions, windows onto the world. Instead, images constantly reactivate the power of appearing. As media of visualization, they allow things to appear that could not be visible except in and through these very material devices. (shrink)

One characteristic of the transition from the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic in Europe was the emergence of representational charcoal drawings and engravings by Aurignacian and Gravettian artists. European Neanderthals never engaged in representational drawing during the Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic, a property that might reflect less developed visuomotor coordination. This article postulates a causal relationship between an evolved ability of anatomically modern humans to throw spears accurately while hunting and their ability to draw representational images from working (...) memory. Unlike Neanderthals, archaic and anatomically modern humans in sub-Saharan Africa adopted longer-range hunting practices using hand-cast spears as a compensation for the emergence of increasingly wary game. For Neanderthals, paleoclimatic fluctuations likely precluded consistent hunting of cold-adapted game, a property making game more approachable for close-range hunting with thrusting spears. As evidence of less historical wariness of humans, many of the species hunted by Neanderthals were eventually domesticated. Due to strong sources of natural selection on archaic and anatomically modern humans for effective hunting, the parietal cortex that integrates visual imagery and motor coordination expanded progressively, yielding the globular shape of the human cranium that is not evident in Neanderthals. To characterize how the cognitive properties employed for throwing spears and drawing line work are similar, the Upper Paleolithic drawings of animals in Chauvet cave, France, are discussed in the speculative context of how these artists engaged simultaneously in overt attention to guide their hand movements and covert attention to their mental images during the drawing process. (shrink)

Although primary source work is a major component of undergraduate history degrees in many countries, the topic of how best to support this work has been relatively unexplored. This article addresses the pedagogical support of primary source work by reviewing relevant literature to identify the challenges undergraduates face in interpreting sources, and examining how in two courses carefully articulated course design and supportive teaching activities assisted students to meet these challenges. This fine-grained examination of the courses is framed within (...) a socio-cultural account of learning. The findings show how a skilful drawing of students into the interpretive/discursive practices of source analysis was associated with an epistemological reframing of historical knowledge and dialogical forms of teaching that helped the students to take forward a dialectical engagement with sources. The benefits of an ‘integrated’ approach to source work that fosters students’ affective and intellectual engagement with historical interpretive practices are highlighted. (shrink)

Is suicide wrong, profoundly morally wrong? Almost always wrong, but excusable in a few cases? Sometimes morally permissible? Imprudent, but not wrong? Is it sick, a matter of mental illness? Is it a private matter or a largely social one? Could it sometimes be right, or a "noble duty," or even a fundamental human right? Whether it is called "suicide" or not, what role may a person play in the end of his or her own life? This collection of primary (...) sources--the principal texts of ethical interest from major writers in western and nonwestern cultures, from the principal religious traditions, and from oral cultures where observer reports of traditional practices are available, spanning Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Oceania, the Arctic, and North and South America--facilitates exploration of many controversial practical issues: physician-assisted suicide or aid-in-dying; suicide in social or political protest; self-sacrifice and martyrdom; suicides of honor or loyalty; religious and ritual practices that lead to death, including sati or widow-burning, hara-kiri, and sallekhana, or fasting unto death; and suicide bombings, kamikaze missions, jihad, and other tactical and military suicides. This collection has no interest in taking sides in controversies about the ethics of suicide; rather, rather, it serves to expand the character of these debates, by showing them to be multi-dimensional, a complex and vital part of human ethical thought. (shrink)

An Introduction to the historical sources of the philosophy of Carl Stumpf.

This chapter evaluates the usefulness and reliability of the halakhic midrashim as a historical resource. It explains that the halakhic midrashim as commentaries on the biblical books of Exodus through Deuteronomy with a special emphasis on their importance for the halakhah or the religious law. It describes the manuscripts, printed editions, and translations of the halakhic midrashim. It concludes that the halakhic midrashim do not offer information on political history, they offer lot of details regarding daily life in Palestine (...) in the second and third centuries and the way the rabbis understood it. (shrink)

The seal of Prophethood (Khātamu al-nubuwwa) Sīra, Shamā’il, Khasā’is, Dalā’il, genres have been used and utilized within Islamic historical sources as testaments to the prophethood of Muḥammad. The Seal of the Prophethood as a sign has also been mentioned within the religious sources of the People of the Book. According to some narrative traditions, a number of the People of the Book have sought out this sign and consequently embraced Islam. There are Muslim traditions that mention the (...) Seal of the Prophet and also mention that it was seen by some of the Companions. These traditions can be found in Islamic historical sources, such as the works of Ibn Sa‘d, Ibn Isḥāq, and Ṭabarī, and within the topics that cover the birth of the Prophet, shaqq al-ṣadr (the splitting of the Prophet’s chest), bad’ al-waḥy (the beginning of revelation), Isrā’ wa Mi‘rāj (the Nocturnal Journey and Ascendence), and in the ḥadīth of Asmā b. Umays in the context of Prophet’s death. There have been those who have seen it as a hairy spot with a mole as well as those who attributed it miraculous properties. Even though there have been varying interpretations on the nature of the phenomenon of this Seal within the Muslim intellectual traditon, it ought to be taken as a distinctive feature of our Prophet and a distinctive physical sign of his prophethood; and the expectations of the People of the Book and the profusion of tradtions within various sources about the Seal of Prophethood have led us to conclude as such. (shrink)

The first appearance of the dragon in the Polish historical sources is rather precocious, since the motive of the fight against a dragon can be seen on a coin as soon as the second half of the 11th century, that is to say only a few decades after the realization of the oldest numismatic and textual sources of this country. During the following century, the oldest known Polish chronicle countains two fragments in which a protagonist is compared (...) to a dragon and the number of cases of dragons’ representations on numismatic sources increases; finally, at the beginning of the 13th century, the first trace of the legend of the Wawel’s dragon appears in the Chronicle of the Poles written by Vincent Kadłubek. (shrink)

Summary Music has been primarily conceived as a temporal art. However, over the last two centuries or so, researchers across different disciplines including musicology, psychology, and philosophy, have been intrigued by the spatial nature of music and sounds, using spatial concepts to define music. This paper aims to demonstrate that an understanding of music perception from a temporal perspective inherently implies a certain spatial dimension. To do this, first, I briefly examine some key arguments that lead to conceiving sound perception (...) in temporal terms. At the same time, I highlight some of the limitations of a purely temporal account of sound perception which necessitate the incorporation of spatial considerations into the conceptualization of sound perception. Consequently, I move on to consider prominent spatial accounts of musical sounds that have been elaborated by psychologists, musicologists, and music composers. In conclusion, I discuss some of the challenges arising from the analogy between music and space, whether conceived in perceptual or cognitive terms. (shrink)

Originally published in 1991, Origins and Species seeks to understand the historical origins of Darwinism. The book analyses the explanatory problem to which Darwinian theory was a response, while contrasting the Darwinian with two other traditions in the interpretation of organic diversity. The book looks in detail at both Charles Darwin's theories and Alfred Russell Wallace's theories of about plant and animal species and raises the question of the context of Darwinism and that of Plato's and Aristotle's understanding of (...) species. (shrink)

Evaluating the trustworthiness of sources is important in today’s society. However, research has shown that students struggle when applying this skill. This study in history education aims to gain insight into students’ procedural knowledge about evaluating the trustworthiness of sources and into the value students attach to learning this skill. Grade 9 students (N = 132) performed tasks and filled out a questionnaire. Students applied more correct criteria of trustworthiness than they reported knowing. They considered this skill somewhat (...) important and useful, but less interesting. Procedural knowledge and task value were significant predictors of students’ task performance. Therefore, it is important to make students aware of the knowledge they implicitly possess and to make learning this skill more interesting for students. (shrink)

This chapter reviews the historical evidence concerning the development of slavery in eastern Africa, the various forms found in societies on the coast and in the interior, the social and cultural consequences of enslavement, and its ultimate abolition. It then looks at the known and potential archaeological traces of the trajectories of these different systems of slavery, with particular reference to the area along the middle and lower Pangani River, Tanzania. The chapter concludes with a consideration of whether or (...) not it would be possible to discern slavery from the surviving archaeological remains alone, and the implications of this answer for future archaeological investigations of slavery elsewhere in the region. (shrink)

The first and more important section of this article lists all the known treatises in Arabic on Fine Technology – water-clocks, automata, pumps, trick vessels, fountains, etc. The ideas, techniques and components in these treatises are of great importance in the history of machine technology. For each treatise information is given on the provenance of MSS, editions in Arabic and translations, paraphrases or commentaries in modern European languages. In addition to treatises by Arabic writers, similar information is also given on (...) Greek mechanical treatises if these have survived only in Arabic versions. The second section deals with utilitarian machines such as mills and water-raising machines. The various sources of information about these machines is discussed, including Arabic works on geography and travel, iconography and archaeology. La première section de cet article et la plus importante énumère tous les traités connus en arabe portant sur la technologie d'agrément – horloges à eau, automates, pompes, ‘vases merveilleux’, fontaines, etc. Les idées, les techniques et les mécanismes que l'on rencontre dans ces traités sont d'une grande importance pour l'histoire de la technologie. Pour chacun de ces traités, des renseignements sont donnés concernant la localisation des manuscrits, les éditions en arabe et les traductions, paraphrases et commentaires existant en langues européennes. On trouvera en outre des renseignements similaires sur les traités de mécanique grecs qui n'ont survécu que dans des versions arabes. La seconde section traite des machines utilitaires telles que les moulins et les machines à élever l'eau. Les diverses sources d'information concernant ce type de machines sont discutées, y compris les livres de géographie et de voyages, l'iconographie et l'archeologie. (shrink)

“Gazeta Urzędowa Tomaszowska” (“Tomaschower Amtliche Zeitung”) was an organ of the Municipality of Tomaszów Mazowiecki. It appeared twice a week from December 1915 to June 1917. The magazine was printed in German and Polish. It contained ordinances and announcements of the occupying central and local authorities, as well as semi-official and private announcements. In total, 160 issues of the magazine were published. The article discusses the content of TAZ, emphasizing the undeniable historical value of the magazine for the history (...) of Tomaszów Mazowiecki during the First World War. (shrink)

The essay draws on two case studies from the photographic archive of British social anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902-73) on a fieldwork expedition to Kenya and South Sudan in 1936. The case studies reveal how connections can be made within an archive to articulate new narratives around often well-known photographs. The case studies explore the relationship between two different practices of looking: that involved in the act of photography, and that of looking at archival photographs as historical sources. (...) Whilst the abundance of visual information in the archive reveals photography's endless potential for recodability, the essay argues that the photographic archive is also characterised by obscurity and limitation, and that the small dramas that are sometimes fleetingly glimpsed in the photographic hinterland will for the most part remain partial, unintelligible, and unarticulable by historians. Although there is a visual abundance in the photographic archive with which we might engage, what is shown to us is not abundantly clear. The essay argues that the important historical connections between the concepts of visibility and knowledge in a discipline such as anthropology often break down when the archive is recalcitrant, revealing its own limits as much as its bounty. (shrink)

The early phenomenologist József Somogyi was one of, if not the first to write a monograph specifically dedicated to the _history_ of the nascent phenomenological philosophy. The two letters written by him during his stay in Freiburg in WS 1923/24, which are hereby published and discussed for the first time, are, similarly, of interest first due to the rare, valuable insight they can provide – when combined with a detailed microhistorical reconstruction of the surrounding constellation – into the elaborate structures (...) of mid-1920s Freiburg phenomenology around Edmund Husserl (directly after Martin Heidegger’s departure to Marburg). Ranging from Husserl’s teaching style to interactions between phenomenology and Catholic thought and to preconditions of the extraordinary philosophical creativity that distinguished early phenomenology, they offer a snapshot that differs significantly from the established narratives of subsequent privileged members of the Phenomenological Movement. Somogyi’s letters thus exemplify the possibility of reclaiming the plurivocity and philosophical richness of the early Phenomenological Movement by virtue of democratizing the historiography, i.e., giving voice to neglected historical actors (often originating from the peripheries). What is at stake is, however, not merely a more nuanced historical understanding of a particular epoch of early phenomenology. Quite the contrary, as I am finally going to argue on the basis of an adjacent short episode from the reception history of Husserl’s (or Eugen Fink’s) selfinterpretation, Somogyi’s case also exemplifies the possibility of a transformation in our understanding of the history of phenomenology (inspired by the methodological revolutions which took place in other compartments of the historiography of philosophy): namely to make the intricate, simultaneously conceptual and historical phenomena of the history of phenomenology a genuine subject matter of contemporary phenomenological research. (shrink)

In this article, I will attempt to provide a historical case study, I suggest that the demarcation between perception and how a figure is ‘seen’ is the process of perpetual filtering between the levels of sensation and perception. I argue that this filtering operates through the basic visual principles, which may vary and have divergent functions in different paradigms. This historical case study will focus on the fifty-six plates featured in the influential work of the London surgeon (...) William Cheselden, to reveal the paradigm-based filtering in these prints by arguing that the sense data is organized in the simplest manner to view figures in their unity. Thus, I will focus on the visual principle of simplicity, which features the patterns of similarity, contrast and symmetry. An analysis of Cheselden’s usage of these patterns will demonstrate that he aims to show that every bone in human body is united to one another, which forms an organizing structure. I will conclude that these visual principles were used by Chelselden to achieve perfection by conveying right proportions and the correct number of scales of human body since his observations was laden with Newtonian paradigm. Finally, I will compare this usage to that of Ibn Sina’s, to disclose the paradigm-ladenness of scientific observations. (shrink)

Very little research has attempted to describe normal human variation in female genitalia, and no studies have compared the visual images that women might use in constructing their ideas of average and acceptable genital morphology to see if there are any systematic differences. The objective of the present work was to determine if visual depictions of the vulva differed according to their source so as to alert medical professionals and their patients to how these depictions might capture variation (...) and thus influence perceptions of ‘normality’. A comparative analysis was conducted by measuring (a) published visual materials from human anatomy textbooks in a university library, (b) feminist publications (print and online) depicting vulval morphology and (c) online pornography, focusing on the most visited and freely accessible sites in the UK. Post hoc tests showed that labial protuberance was significantly less (p<0.001, equivalent to approximately 7 mm) in images from online pornography compared to feminist publications. All five measures taken of vulval features were significantly correlated (p<0.001) in the online pornography sample, indicating a less varied range of differences in organ proportions than the other sources where not all measures were correlated. Women and health professionals should be aware that specific sources of imagery may depict different types of genital morphology and may not accurately reflect true variation in the population, and consultations for genital surgeries should include discussion about the actual and perceived range of variation in female genital morphology. (shrink)