Religion naturelle et scepticisme religieux

In theHistory of scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, Richard H. Popkin presents Edward Herbert of Cherbury’s theory of truth as a heavy and unsuccessful weapon against the religious scepticism of the seventeenth century. This paper claims to show that this heavy conceptual device is not the very heart of the Cherburian response to scepticism but precisely the theoretical foundation of a religious perspectivism which is immediately corrected by a minimal credo which is universal and stable. In doing so, Cherbury fulfills the religious pragmativism’s program of Sextus Empiricus for he does not try to find the truest religion but the best one, the one which allows men to live in peace, in a mutual respect of their beliefs.     

Biophysikalisches Doppelleben, 1939–1946. Oder: Räume der Lange‐weile. Zur (Nicht‐)Zäsur des ‘Informationsdiskurses’

Biophysical Double‐lives, 1939–1946. Or: Spaces of Boredom. On ‘Information Discourse’ and (Dis)continuities in the Life Sciences. Arguably, few things have shaped the historiography of the mid‐twentieth century psy‐sciences (and indeed, of the life sciences and science/technology/intellectual life quite generally) more profoundly than the story of cybernetics. This essay aims to undermine this technofuturistic picture of epistemological upheavals, of cyborg regimes of knowing, and of the incipient post‐human, by reinserting back into the story the rather dull and unspectacular lives (and occupations) of the great majority of British, ‘diverted’ biologists during World War II. Instead of Ratio Clubbers or Macy‐Conference frequenters, this essay is concerned with a much larger population of would‐be biologists and their most pedestrian appropriations of, and exposures to, electronics. What I argue is that the prevalence and systematicity of such exposures in the course of the personnel‐hungry radio‐war points to a very different – low‐key – picture of the war/technology‐induced deflections of biological science at mid‐century. As an example of how deeply at odds narrations of cybernetic's ascent tend to sit with developments on ground level, special attention will be devoted to the physiologists‐turned‐radar‐scientists Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley, and their war‐time, or more properly, spare‐time investigations into the biophysics of nerve. The latter – technical, difficult, and utterly unphilosophical – while absent from the cyber‐theme‐focused historiography, provided the basis for the tremendous impact Hodkgin and Huxley would in fact have on the mainstream, disciplinarily conservative physiological sciences; the larger aim however is to weave these far from peculiar biographical trajectories into a somewhat bigger picture of the intersections between radar electronics and biological science: a picture which does not centre on sensational discourses but on mundane electronic practices; and thus, on the generational experience of those who were known at the time as “ex radar folk with biological leanings”.