Reading Comte across the Atlantic: Intellectual Exchanges between France and Brazil and the Question of Slavery

Summary

This article looks at a specific case of intellectual exchange by approaching Luís Pereira Barreto (1840–1923), a Brazilian medic who, having studied in Brussels in the 1850s, came into contact with Comte's positivism and with the ideas of his disciples. While in Europe, Barreto established a long-lasting friendship with Pierre Lafitte, and became a convert to Comte's Religion of Humanity. Upon his return to Brazil in 1864, Barreto sought to apply Comte's principles to Brazilian society and politics. Although Barreto's use of positivism extends beyond the issue of slavery and slave work, I will focus on this priest of humanity's considerations about positivism, social evolutionism, and Brazilian slavery. This will allow me to extrapolate some qualified conclusions about the nature of the intellectual exchange that occurred between Barreto and the French positivists, and the development of Brazilian positivism as a political philosophy and social theory which had to address the problem of slavery in the 1870s and 1880s.     

From Organismic Biology as History and Philosophy to the History and Philosophy of Biology—the Work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger in the German Context**

In this paper, I ask about the broader context of the history and philosophy of biology in the German-speaking world as the place in which Hans-Jörg Rheinberger began his work. Three German philosophical traditions—neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and Lebensphilosophie—were interested in the developments and conceptual challenges of the life sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their reflections were taken up by life scientists under the terms theoretische Biologie (theoretical biology) and allgemeine Biologie (general biology), i. e., for theoretical and methodological reflections. They used historical and philosophical perspectives to develop vitalistic, organicist, or holistic approaches to life. In my paper, I argue that the resulting discourse did not come to an end in 1945. Increasingly detached from biological research, it formed an important context for the formation of the field of history and philosophy of biology. In Rheinberger's work, we can see the “Spalten” and “Fugen”—the continuities and discontinuities—that this tradition left there.     

In “Savage” Company: Sublime Aesthetics and the Colonial Imagination

Edmund Burke’s speeches and writings during the trial of Warren Hastings—from 1788 to 1795—remain one of the most comprehensive assessments of the effects of colonial trade and territorial expansion on Britain’s nationalist self. A rhetorical reading of his prosecution speeches reveals how they affected the public response to the trial by evoking the sublime and framing terror as the basic feature of Britain’s mercantile imperialist agenda in the colonies. Moreover, by associating Hastings’s governance of Bengal with sublime terror, Burke altered the interpretations of virtue and corruption, thus distancing both Britain and India from the rampant profiteering of the East India Company. Burke’s critique of the degenerative influences of commercial imperialism along with the reformulation of his ideas in subsequent colonial historiography is crucial for assessing how the aesthetics of the sublime conferred greater moral force to the sporadic and fragmented reports about the Company’s abuses of power in India.     

Structural ways to embed a research laboratory into the company: A comparison between Philips and General Electric 1900-1940

This paper compares the Philips Research Department and the Research Laboratory of the American company General Electric (GE). 1 It argues that it is, above all, the issue of the organization of industrial research, appropriate leadership and the embeddedness of a research department in the company as a whole that is important for an historical analysis of an industrial research department. The complex structures that Gilles Holst (the first Philips research director) and Willis Whitney (the GE research director during the first decades of the twentieth century) set up in their organizations enabled scientists to keep in touch with the resources provided by the universities, and made it possible for them to come up with articles, patents and devices for their respective companies. It enabled them also to strengthen their contacts inside and outside the laboratory's walls. However, more than his colleague Whitney at GE, Holst at Philips intended to integrate the research laboratory into the company as a whole. Holst's policy as a research director will be illustrated using the case of Philips' radio research. A comparative discussion of industrial research in the 1930s within both companies shows that the "successful" integration of research activities is context-dependent.