“Hungry for Knowledge”: Towards a Meso‐History of the Environmental Sciences

In recent years, cultural studies and cultural theory have experienced a new wave of ecological thought. Despite the engagement with the Anthropocene the history of ecology and the environmental sciences has remained somewhat of a puzzle. This goes especially for the 20^th century, a period when the sciences of the environment came to matter on a broader scale. Why do we actually know so little about the environmental sciences in the 20^th century? And what could a history of the environmental sciences in that period look like? This article answers these questions with two interrelated arguments. First, by reflecting on different approaches to write the history of ecology since the 1970s, it uncovers crucial entanglements between the history of science and ecological thought that created blind spots regarding the environmental sciences in the 20^th century. Second, it argues for a shift in scales of analysis—towards meso‐scales. With a more regional approach historians can engage with the often‐neglected aspects of the political and economic history of the environmental sciences in the 20th century and thereby also reveal their fundamental infrastructural dimension. Because at its core, the article claims, the environmental sciences were and are essentially infrastructural sciences.     

Les sciences naturelles à l’agrégation

Demandée dès 1840 par Siméon-Denis Poisson, une agrégation spécialisée pour les sciences naturelles est créée par Victor Duruy: elle établit une triple spécialisation (sciences mathématiques, physiques, naturelles) au concours d’agrégation pour les lycées et introduit conjointement dans chacune des agrégations une composition de méthode et d’histoire des sciences dans la spécialité concernée. L’évolution de ce concours est étudiée jusqu’au milieu duxx ^e siècle. D’autres types de concours d’agrégation (agrégation de l’enseignement spécial, agrégation féminine, agrégation des facultés) ont existé où l’histoire naturelle a trouvé place.     

Visualisierungen in der deutschen Geographie des 19. Jahrhunderts. Die Beispiele Robert Schlagintweit und Hans Meyer

Visualization in 19^th‐century German geography: Robert Schlagintweit and Hans Meyer as examples. – Visual representations of nature formed an essential part of 19^th‐century earth sciences. In particular, colonial photography – as a visual source, and as an instrument of the construction of national identities – serves essential research interests of current history and social sciences. The present paper is a case study on the role and function of photography in German geography of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It focuses on the work of the Munich geographer Robert Schlagintweit (1833–1885) and the Leipzig colonial geographer Hans Meyer (1858–1929); the early history of photography in India and the function of images in the geographical exploration of overseas territories are discussed. Although there is nearly half a century between the work of R. Schlagintweit and H. Meyer, their photography shows remarkable parallels. The ideas of both on the practice of visualization are rooted in pedagogic and didactic concepts as well as in popular science. For both geographers photography was essentially a technical help, which often needed graphic revisions. And they both preferred photography to depict people and buildings (compared, for instance, to landscapes). Concerning the more comprehensive question of how far their photography transmitted a specific German ‘image of abroad’, it is indicated that such a specific image should have its essential roots in a peculiar visual culture of German earth sciences in the first half of the 19^th century. Thus the paper offers a starting point for further studies discussing the change from a ‘Biedermeier image’ of foreign cultures to a more ‘colonial’ one in 19^th‐century German geography.     

Épistémologie 1900 la tradition Française

The paper reviews the French tradition on epistemology and the reaction of the philosophical milieu in the early XX^th century against the crisis of philosophical concepts induced by the development of science. The 1^st International Congress on Philosophy of 1900 in Paris shows that philosophy tries to confirm her hegemony on sciences, but for this, philosophers have to embark into history of science. History of science becomes for philosophy the means to keep the highest place in the whole realm of knowledge: philosophers become historians of science and supervise historical institutes. It is still possible to show quite a continuity between the philosophical questions of 1900 and some similar problems raised in the years between the two world wars, especially by Gaston Bachelard.     

Federigo Enriques,Gaston Bachelard et Ferdinand Gonseth

The development and complexity of the debate about the conceptual structure of science in the XX^th century gave birth to a new discipline, the history of epistemology, with the aim of giving a critical history of our «epistemological heritage» with suitable methodologies of a historical and theoretical nature. A critical history of the philosophy of science on more «Wenden», besides the neo-positivistic and post-neo-positivistic ones; in Italy and France, in the first period of the XX^th century, developed a tradition of epistemological research in a neo-rationalistic sense with specific theoretical characteristics, particularly for the relevance assigned to the historicity of science. The Italian-French epistemology favored the study of the relationship between mathematical and physical thought, such as can be characterized as a really autonomous physical-mathematical epistemology; this different historical and epistemological approach, first elaborate by Federigo Enriques and then by Gaston Bachelard, Albert Lautman and Ferdinand Gonseth, allowed us to understand in the 30's the «implicit philosophy» in the works of Kurt Gödel and Hermann Weyl.     

Les lois de la nature à l'âge classique la question terminologique

Four propositions relative to the laws of nature in the classical period must be noted. 1. Certain regularities in phenomena had been discovered. 2. A concept of law had emerged. 3. Classical science is characterized by the introduction of the notion of the legality of nature. 4. New uses of the word «law» had appeared in scientific texts. This article is devoted to the analysis of only this last proposition, that is to say to a terminological problem. First we will describe the semantic uses of the word «law» that may have contributed to the constitution of its classical meaning: its specific usage, disciplinary usage, usage in physics, in mathematics, in metaphysics. Second we will analyze the various moments of the diffusion of the word in the sciences in the xvii^th century. The general thesis defended in the end is that if the term «law» had indeed been used in science with no reference to a law-giving God prior to the xvii^th century, only this reference, that is, the coming together of its physical and its metaphysical usage, allowed its generalization in the period between the xvii^th and xviii^th centuries.     

La réflexion Benthamienne sur les mathématiques

In 1814, Jeremy Bentham began to writeChrestomathia; this work is a presentation of what is useful to learn. However this text is, more generally, an entire organization of the knowledge of his time, through developing a «theory of fictions», which is a reflexion on concepts and a critics of nomenclatures. The following essay focuses on the fifty pages refering to mathematics in a work that considers the integrality of sciences at the beginning of the xix^th century and criticizes the FrenchEncyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert. A most singular idea expressed by the author, indirectly echoed by Gaston Bachelard through some books, is the conflict between concepts and their being designated by words. Signified, signifying entities and concepts are reciprocally adrift so that nobody, even the scholar, can keep control of these motions; what makes education unceasingly difficult.     

Charcoal in alluvium of mountain streams in the Bieszczady Mountains (Polish Carpathians) as a carrier of information on the local palaeoenvironment

Fragments of charcoal are present in floodplain alluvium of the San and Strwi?? rivers in the Polish part of the Bieszczady Mountains, Polish East Carpathians. They occur as single clasts or in lenses in the basal part of fine-grained alluvium, together with unburnt wood debris, or in the middle part of the vertical sequence of the floodplain alluvium. 14 samples of charcoal from the upper courses of the San (ca. 50 km) and the Strwi?? (ca. 10 km) were dated with radiocarbon. The obtained dates fall mainly in the 15^th through 19^th century interval; only one sample is markedly older (9^th–10^th century). Taxonomic composition of the charcoal source wood was also studied and compared with that of coeval forests. Correlation of the charcoal age with the history of economic development of the studied region indicates that charcoal is of anthropogenic origin: older charcoal from intense slash-and-burn deforestation, while younger charcoal was produced by local industries.     

La fabrique de la perpétuité

TheTrésor des chartes is probably one of the best preserved single collection of archives of the ancient French monarchy. Paradoxically, however, it was never part of a central record office in the modern sense. This large and confused mass of documentation slowly emerged as a records collection during the XIII^th century. Although it seemed to follow the construction of a State administration, it was already inactive by the middle of the XIV^th century. Its records and charters, prestigious and inaccessible, were kept in the Sainte-Chapelle of Paris, close to the relics of the Passion bought by Louis the Ninth. As a record of the past it played a crucial role in the social construction of a notion of «perpetuity» suitable to the domanial and dynastic ideals of the monarchy. The ambiguities of this medieval heritage became obvious in the early modern period. Although there were a large number of inventories and classifications of theTrésor des chartes, it was never able to incorporate the other State records. The Republic inherited a majestic sanctuary which can certainly be described as a piece of shared memory, but which is unable to summarize the genesis of the Nation.     

Médecine et Discours sur L’Homme dans la Première Modernité

In the 16^th and 17^th centuries, medical knowledge was anthropological in so much as it produced a discourse on man whose ambition and legitimacy needed no justification. Underwritten by the belief that the body was an object of science, the epistemic horizons of a doctrina de homine emerged from the interaction of medical practice, particularly anatomy, with philosophy and theology in a specific framework - the reorganization of knowledge in Europe over the “long 16^th century”.     

“Gedankenaustausch über Probleme und Methoden der Forschung”. Transatlantische Gastprofessoren aus Emigrantenkreisen in Westdeutschland nach 1945

The history of the sciences and humanities follows cycles in some of which there is greater emphasis on the continuity of developments, in others on the breaks in continuity. In recent years the main focus of research for the 20^th century has been on the continuities extending beyond the boundaries of 1933 and 1945. The main aim of this study, however, is to examine the impulses for the internationalization of German universities provided by a transnational group of academic migrants. These migrants, whose origins were in the German academic community, represented an alternative continuity beyond the boundaries of this period: they were visiting academics who were the conveyors and interpreters of ideas from Germany into the USA and Britain and vice versa. The study of this group therefore combines remigration history and the history of universities as institutions, focussing on actors, networks and innovations in teaching, with the history of individual subjects and disciplines.     

Histoire et théorie du hasard à l'âge classique selon cournot

In a decisive article about the birth of the calculus of probabilities (1970), Ernest Coumet recalled Cournot's formula: the delay concerning the birth of the theory of chance is «a pure effect of chance». We suggest here submitting this judgement to the critical examination not of history but of Cournot's very thought; his philosophy of history and his representation of the history of science in the xvii^th century seems, at first, to denounce beforehand such a decisive judgement. To render an account of what can then appear on his part to be an inconsistency or even a blindness, we formulate the hypothesis that this statement constitutes an artefact of his internal conception of the history of science and scientific revolutions. In that sense, the article constitutes an illustration of theoretical necessity and of the difficulties of mathematical history as well.     

Über deutsch‐ungarische Beziehungen der Medizin im Zeitalter der Aufklärung ‐ zugleich ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Pestinokulation

The influence of German science and medicine on the development of Hungarian medicine in the age of Enlightenment has been extraordinary strong. Many Hungarian medical students staid in German medical faculties. The medical interrelationships between Germany and Hungary in the 18^th century are discussed in an overview according to following dimensions: education of protestant Hungarian medical students at German »Aufklaerungs‐Universitaeten«, practical and theoretical resonance, membership of scientific societies, personal contacts and correspondence. Outstanding personalities of this aera were Daniel Fischer, István Weszprémi, Abraham Vater. Special attention is given to a new idea: inoculation against plague as first described by A. Vater in his work Blattern‐Beltzen (1721). Thirty years later I. Weszprémi published his original conception ‐ independently from Vater ‐ in the Tentamen de inoculanda peste (1755).     

Combined dating methods applied to building archaeology: The contribution of thermoluminescence to the case of the bell tower of St Martin’s church,Angers (France)

St Martin’s church, Angers, is emblematic of the problems raised in pre-12^th century history of architecture.     

Le cosmopolitisme entre chaos et république

Sans résumé PierreHassner est agrégé de philosophie. Directeur de recherche émérite au Centre d'études et de recherches internationales (CERI) de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, il a publiéLa Violence et la paix. De la bombe atomique au nettoyage ethnique (Paris, Esprit, 1995; 2^e éd. remaniée Paris, Seuil, 2000)La Terreur et l'Empire (Paris, Seuil, 2003) et a dirigéTotalitarismes (avec JacquesRupnik et GuyHermet, Paris, Economica, 1984) etVents d'Est. Vers l'Europe des états de droit? (avec PierreGrémion, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1990). Il a réalisé de nombreux travaux de philosophie politique (en particulier sur Kant et Hegel) et en relations internationales (surtout sur le nationalisme, le totalitarisme et la guerre). Ce texte a été écrit à l'occasion d'une conférence, présentée en anglais, à un colloque de l'Institut Nexus à Tilburg (Pays-Bas) en 1998, puis actualisé pour une conférence à la New School of Social Research de New York en 2000.     

Frank H. Knight le risque comme critique de l'économie politique

In this paper we try to throw some light on the Knightian distinction between risk anduncertainty attending to a number of previous contributions to philosophy and economics. On the economists' side, we propose to read Knight's distinction in the light of the distribution controversy that took place in theQuarterly Journal of Economics at the end of the xix^th century. On the philosophers' side, the pair risk/uncertainty can be analysed in view of Knight's epistemological sources, as opposing a sort ofprobabilistic positivism to anagnostic variety of positivism. His philosophical commitments can be of use in explaining why Frank Knight closes down the distribution controversy, proposing instead a reconstruction of economics as a rational choice science.     

La ragion di Stato in biblioteca

The Fondazione Luigi Firpo, based in Turin, houses the library collected by Luigi Firpo (1915–1989), one of the most distinguished European historians of early modern political thought. The collection includes around 6 000 16^th, 17^th and 18^th century books, among which one can find almost all European literature on the reason of State. The Foundation organizes international conferences, grants scholarships and publishes the research of young scholars. Therefore it has established itself as one of the leading research centres on political thought and on early modern and modern history.     

Quelques repéres historiques sur la théorie des jeux

Résumé  L'article s'attache à dégager le fil rouge qui relie les réflexions de Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz sur les jeux de société à la théorie des jeux, telle qu'on la trouve dans l'ouvrage de John Von Neumann et Oskar Morgenstern. L'itinéraire décrit passe par les travaux de plusieurs mathématiciens du XVIII^e siècle sur différents jeux de hasard, pour aboutir aux recherches de quelques-uns des fondateurs des mathématiques modernes, comme Ernst Zermelo pour la théorie des ensembles et émile Borel pour la théorie des probabilités. II montre comment une analyse mathématique des jeux de société a débouché sur l'élaboration d'une grille générale d'analyse des phénomènes sociaux. Son cheminement révèle, en outre, la longue parenthèse du XIX^e siècle où ce programme s'est trouvé abandonné et esquisse, en conclusion, quelques hypothèses pour l'expliquer. The paper strives to find the clue which links Leibniz' thoughts on parlour games to the mathematical theory of games in John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern.Magna opera the way goes through the works of several XVIII^th century mathematicians on various games of chance to reach the research of some of the modern mathematics founders, as Ernst Zermelo for the sets theory and émile Borel for the theory of probabilities. The paper shows how a mathematical analysis of parlour games ends at a general framework to study the social phenomena. Its development also reveals how this research program has disappeared, all along the XIX^th century, and suggests, in conclusion, some tentative explanations of this development. Une version préliminaire de cet article a été publiée dans la revue de l'Association historique des élèves du lycée Henri IV,Jeu et histoire, n^o spéc.:L'émoi de l'histoire, 25–26, printempsautomne 2002, p. 94–115.     

Paul Bernays et la rénovation des fondements philosophiques des mathématiques

The history of the foundations of mathematics in the XX^th century leads to a revision of the meaning of traditional philosophical notions such as «evidence», «experience» or «rationality». This paper focuses on the influence of Ferdinand Gonseth's «open philosophy» on Paul Bernays' philosophical interpretations of the technical results in the foundations. Familiar with the ideas of Jacob Friedrich Fries and Léonard Nelson, the logician Bernays turns at the middle of the century more and more towards Gonseth's ideas. Quite before Thomas Kuhn, Bernays considers the revisions under consideration not simply as a problem of truth and falsehood, but as a task requiring the introduction of a new conceptual system. Indeed, in opposition to Kuhn, according to Bernays, the necessary change is less the consequence from a change of paradigm and methodological incommensurability as a epistemological necessity.