Hans-Jörg Rheinberger as a Philosopher of Time**

When Hans-Jörg Rheinberger proposed the concept of epistemic things, he drew inspiration from the art historian George Kubler, who had considered the aesthetic object as resulting from problem-solving processes in The Shape of Time (1962). Kubler also demonstrated that a sequence of objects could retrace the progress that led to a solution that was afterwards accepted as the most classical. Parallel to Kubler, Rheinberger demonstrates how temporally extended activities of experimentation are condensed in the object, revealing the moments of innovation that lead to it. In the history of science as well as in art history, various trajectories can thus be grasped in the materially given. Rheinberger conceives of an object as a network of heterogeneous time strings. However, these are manifold: they cannot be thought of as making up a homogeneous temporality encompassing all the others as a temporal container and synchronizing them within it. Since the discovery of the Anthropocene, we no longer separate natural from cultural time, and no hegemonic historical narrative can be taken as unifying all the others. Historical epistemology as proposed by Rheinberger will be read as a contribution to constructing new models of natural as well as of cultural time.     

Geschichte ohne Kausalität. Abgrenzungsstrategien gegen die Wissenschaftssoziologie in zeitgenössischen Ansätzen historischer Epistemologie

History Without Causality. How Contemporary Historical Epistemology Demarcates Itself From the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. Contemporary proponents of historical epistemology often try to delimit their enterprise by demarcating it from the sociology of scientific knowledge and other sociologically oriented approaches in the history of science. Their criticism is directed against the use of causal explanations which are deemed to invite reductionism and lead to a totalizing perspective on science. In the present article I want to analyse this line of criticism in what I consider are two paradigmatic works of contemporary historical epistemology: Lorraine Daston's und Peter Galison's Objectivity and Hans‐Jörg Rheinberger's Toward a History of Epistemic Things. I first present their arguments against the sociological and causal analysis of scientific knowledge and practice and then try to defend sociological work in the history of science against their charges. I will, however, not do so by defending causal explanations directly. Rather, I will show that the arguments against sociological analysis put forward in contemporary historical epistemology, as well as historical epistemology's own models of historical explanation and narration, bear problematic consequences. I argue that Daston, Galison and Rheinberger fail to create productive resonances between macro‐ and microhistorical perspectives, that they reproduce an internalist picture of scientific knowledge, and finally that Rheinberger's attempt to deconstruct the dichotomy between subject and object leads him to neglect questions about the political dimension of scientific research.     

An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene

Abstract: Over Antipode's 40 years our role as academics has dramatically changed. We have been pushed to adopt the stance of experimental researchers open to what can be learned from current events and to recognize our role in bringing new realities into being. Faced with the daunting prospect of global warming and the apparent stalemate in the formal political sphere, this essay explores how human beings are transformed by, and transformative of, the world in which we find ourselves. We place the hybrid research collective at the center of transformative change. Drawing on the sociology of science we frame research as a process of learning involving a collective of human and more‐than‐human actants—a process of co‐transformation that re/constitutes the world. From this vision of how things change, the essay begins to develop an “economic ethics for the Anthropocene”, documenting ethical practices of economy that involve the being‐in‐common of humans and the more‐than‐human world. We hope to stimulate academic interest in expanding and multiplying hybrid research collectives that participate in changing worlds.     

An Epistemology of Scientific Practice: Positioning Hans-Jörg Rheinberger in Twentieth-Century History and Philosophy of Biology**

In this article, I first outline the professionalization of the history and philosophy of biology from the 1960s onward. Then, I attempt to situate the work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger with respect to this field. On the one hand, Rheinberger was marginal with respect to Anglo-American philosophical tradition; on the other, he was very influential in building up an integrated history and philosophy of the life sciences community at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and beyond. This marginality results, I suggest, from three main sources: his use of concepts coming from continental traditions in the study of the life sciences, which are foreign to Anglo-American philosophers of science; his focus on practices instead of theories; and his research trajectory as a molecular biologist, which led him to be critical of disciplinary boundaries. As a first step in situating and historicizing Rheinberger's trajectory, this article invites comparative studies and calls for a history of “continental philosophy of biology” in the twentieth century.     

HISTORY/PHILOSOPHY/SCIENCE: SOME LESSONS FOR PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Rheinberger's brief history brings into sharp profile the importance of history of science for a philosophical understanding of historical practice. Rheinberger presents thought about the nature of science by leading scientists and their interpreters over the course of the twentieth century as emphasizing increasingly the local and developmental character of their learning practices, thus making the conception of knowledge dependent upon historical experience, “historicizing epistemology.” Linking his account of thought about science to his own work on “experimental systems,” I draw extensive parallels with other work in the local history of science (the ideas of Latour, Pickering, Rouse, and others) and consider the epistemological implications both for the relation between history and philosophy of science and between history and theory more broadly. In doing so, I suggest that the long‐standing gap between the natural sciences and history as a “human science” has been significantly bridged by the insistence upon the local, mediated, indeed “historicized epistemology” of actual science.     

Tactile Vision,Epistemic Things and Data Visualization**

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger constructed his historical epistemology of epistemic things by analyzing experimental practices in molecular biology during the 1970s and 80s. With genetic sequencing and multi-omics approaches, data has become a new resource in the life sciences, questioning the applicability of his concept of experimental system. By historicizing Rheinberger's epistemology, the paper focuses on its relatedness to Ludwik Fleck's notion of an aviso of resistance and points to a gradual shift in Rheinberger's emphasis, moving from an initial focus on writing and its differentiality to work on materials, preparations, and representations. By anchoring visualization in these material practices, Rheinberger also sheds new light on the changing conditions of experimentation in the life sciences due to big data, where visualization emphasizes patterns and correlations rather than substrates.     

STORY MAKES HISTORY,THEORY MAKES STORY: DEVELOPING RÜSEN'S HISTORIK IN LOGICAL AND SEMIOTIC DIRECTIONS

This essay will argue that the traditional opposition between narrative and theory in historical sciences is dissolved if we conceive of narratives as theoretical devices for understanding events in time through special concepts that abridge typical sequences of events. I shall stress, in the context of the Historical Knowledge Epistemological Square (HKES) that emerged with the scientization of history, that history is always narrative, story has a theoretical ground of itself, and scientific histories address the need for a conceptual progression in ever‐improved narratives. This will lead to identification of three major theoretical levels in historical stories: naming, plotting (or emplotment), and formalizing. We revisit Jörn Rüsen's theory of history as the best starting point, and explore to what extent it could be developed by (i) taking a deeper look into narratological knowledge, and (ii) reanalyzing logically the conceptual strata in order to bridge the overrated Forschung/Darstellung (research/exposition) divide. The corollary: we should consider (scientific) historical writing as the last step of historical research, not as the next step after research is over. This thesis will drive us to a reconsideration of the German Historik regarding the problem of interpretation and exposition. Far from alienating history from science, narrative links history positively to anthropology and biology. The crossing of our triad name‐plot‐model with Rüsen's four theoretical levels (categories‐types‐concepts‐names) points to the feasibility of expanding Rüsen's Historik in logical and semiotic directions. Story makes history, theory makes story, and historical reason may proceed.     

Death at St Bernard's: Anti-vivisection,Medicine and the Gothic

Displaying a Gothic fascination with the misapplication of science, Edward Berdoe's St Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student (1887) was one of a number of novels in the 1880s that repackaged the horrors of vivisection for public consumption. Although the novel can be dismissed as derivative, it departed from standard themes found in other anti-vivisection texts. Through the device of a hero struggling with the moral implications of science and the reckless treatment of patients, St Bernard's challenged the legitimacy of the teaching hospital. The present article moves debate about the Gothic, literature and science beyond well-known texts by Stevenson and Wells to examine how St Bernard's combined ‘the methods of science with the methods of romance’ and shifted the anti-vivisection narrative into the hospital. In locating the novel within anti-vivisectionist uses of fiction and late-Victorian anxieties about experimental medicine and the teaching hospital, the article explores the novel's relationship with other anti-vivisection texts and Gothic fiction, and examines what it says about scientific practices and mentalities. St Bernard's fashioned a very different hospital from existing representations to warn readers of how brutish students and cruel doctors tortured patients. In doing so, the novel recast the teaching hospital as an uncanny and dangerous place.     

Precision Medicine: Historiography of Life Sciences and the Geneticization of the Clinics**

In 2013, Hans Jörg Rheinberger proposed that Mendelian genetics and molecular biology were “scientific ideologies,” that is, for him they are systems of thought whose objects are hyperbolic; they are not, or not yet, in the realm of and not, or not yet, under the control of that system. This article proposes that precision medicine today is a scientific ideology and analyses the implications of this statement for historians of biology, genetics, and medicine.     

“A new science”: Yeats's A Vision and relativistic cosmology

In this essay I will place Yeats's enigmatic text A Vision in the context of contemporary science, challenging constructions of Yeats's career as committedly anti-scientific. As I will show, Yeats's philosophy is in fact merely anti-Newtonian and anti-positivist, as relativistic science was not incompatible with his occult interests. I will offer an alternative reading of this text, explaining key aspects of its construction in relation to the post-Einsteinian revolution in cosmology, which, I will argue, was ultimately creatively enabling for him.     

How Much Knowledge is Worth Knowing? An American Intellectual Historian's Thoughts on the Geschichte des Wissens

This essay investigates the origins and assesses the advantages and disadvantages of the new field known as Wissensgeschichte from the perspective of an American intellectual historian. It argues that while some historians of science may be ready to embrace a new identity as historians of knowledge, this terminology remains baggy and invites facile applications of Foucauldian theory. The essay concludes with the hope that the history of knowledge approach may instead open up new avenues for conversation and collaboration between historians of science and garden variety historians.     

Decontextualized Knowledge,Situated Politics: The New Scientific–Local Politics of Rice Genetic Resources in Thailand

Recent practices of scientific–local knowledge interaction in Thailand surrounding rice genetic resources have led to a new phenomenon, which this article calls knowledge inclusion. This study explores several forms of knowledge inclusion —participatory science, localized science, scientized knowledge and hybridized knowledge— as new loci of political practices among government rice breeders, non‐governmental officials and farmers. Ethnographic studies are used to reveal that, through selectively incorporating elements of each other's knowledges, these scientific and local knowledge practitioners have drawn on the discourses of scientific–local knowledges to their political advantage. The ramifications of this new politics vary according to different political arenas in rice genetic resource management. Based on these findings, the article argues that recent practices of knowledge inclusion should not be obscured by the notion of situated knowledge, but should be understood as situated politics of decontextualized knowledge in genetic resource management. The argument reconceptualizes the new scientific–local politics as a synthesis between the power–knowledge relation and the power–structural context in which genetic resource management takes place.     

Genauigkeit — was ist das? Wandel des Konzeptes zwischen Antike und Neuzeit

Since the concept of reality has been dominated by the methods of modern natural science, the criteria of precision have been restricted to exact measurement, i.e. quantification required by experimental science and technology. In premodern times, however, the paradigm according to which reality was conceived, designed a universal correspondence of substances and processes by the construction of analogies. These had a kind of ‘semantical’ precision, though different from mathematical, nevertheless in the end leading to mathematical proportionality. This premodern type of precision is explained by examples from Anaximenes and Plato.     

Shelley’s Jingling Food for Oblivion: Hybridizing High and Low Styles and Forms

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that there was a sense in which Shelley actively approved of “jingling verse.” His poetic energy was sustained by a substratum of popular and tuneful versifying, such as impromptus, bouts-rimés, anagrams, enigmas, ballads, Mother Goose rhymes, proverbs, hymns, and drinking songs. He hybridizes the registers and meters of these humble forms with elevated, sublime, and erudite ones. This hybridization is, arguably, connected to the characteristic coexistence of the direct and clear with the knotty and puzzling in his poetry. After a brief account of Shelley’s submerged youthful reading, noting in passing that Shelley’s lyrics proved amenable during the early twentieth century to recycling as Shelleyesque jingles, the essay illustrates its thesis from unfamiliar fragments in Shelley’s notebooks, such as the late lyric fragment “Time is flying,” and from more familiar matter such as “Dirge for the Year,” “Mont Blanc,” “The Cloud,” “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci,” “The Sensitive Plant,” “Song: to the Men of England,” “Ode to the West Wind,” and Peter Bell the Third.     

VALIDITY NOW

This review essay offers an extended analysis of Martin Jay's Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History, highlighting Jay's emphasis on the need for intellectual historians to address the question of the present-day validity of ideas. In this volume of essays on twentieth-century philosophy and historiography, Jay contends that the perennial tension between historicism and truth value is integral to intellectual history; however, it is establishing the latter that is the most crucial, and perhaps most difficult, part of our practice. In thirteen separate but related pieces, Jay explores subjects such as the common ground shared by Quentin Skinner and Hayden White, the “styles” of thought represented by Walter Benjamin and Isaiah Berlin, and recent French theories of the historical sublime and the “advent” of ideas. This review essay discusses these pieces and compares Jay's essay on historical truthfulness to ancient rhetorical discussions of the many forms of lying about history. Its final section deals with the ways in which insights from the history of science might help us to connect genesis and validity by examining the practices of idea- or knowledge-making, and it argues that validity is also, and perhaps most importantly, something we need to embrace in our roles as teachers. What makes ideas valid is the next generation of thinkers, and to make wise and well-informed life choices, they need to have a full range of older and newer ideas about the human condition from which to choose.     

The Double Legacy of Bernalism in Science Diplomacy

Recent debates in the history of science aimed at reconstructing the history of scientific diplomacy have privileged the analysis of forms of diplomacy coming from above. Instead, the objective of this paper is to raise awareness of these debates by looking at attempts at scientific diplomacy from below. Such a shift in perspective might allow us to observe the impact of marginalized social agents on the construction of international diplomatic choices. This article particularly focuses attention on how the legacy of Bernalism has fostered the emergence of two different types of science diplomacy. On the one hand, Bernalism has influenced the goals of organizations such as UNESCO and the World Peace Council, which are forms of science diplomacy I would term from above. On the other hand, Bernalism has also been at the origin of radical scientific movements that I propose to interpret as forms of scientific diplomacy from below. These have, in fact, played a cardinal role not only in raising public awareness of the social and political roles of science, but also in the more direct participation of scientists in defining the political objectives of their research activity. From this point of view, I analyze how an association like the World Federation of Scientific Workers proposed (at least in the beginning) greater democratic participation than the top-down structures of other forms of scientific internationalism.     

Hydrogeological Knowledge from Below: Water Expertise as a Republican Common in Early-Modern Venice**

This essay looks at early-modern Venice hydroculture as a case of episteme from below. The forms of water knowledge it developed were multilayered and collective in their essence and solidly rested on a social experiential basis that was rooted in labour (especially fishing) and practices (especially water surveying and engineering). In accordance with the city's republican esprit (and correspondent political values), its episteme emerged as the encounter and negotiation between various institutions and groups: the fishermen of San Niccolò in Venice, the practitioners of the water magistrature and political authorities. This essay explores the institutional settings of this water culture, seen as an instance of bottom-up epistemic construction. It especially addresses three historical instances: firstly, a seventeenth century program to map public waters in order to block their alienation for private fish farming; secondly, water officers’ interviews with fishermen aimed to assess the state of the lagoon hydromorphology and, thirdly, fishing regulations. Venice communitarian and circular forms of knowledge production are here contrasted to an opposite paradigm, which was embodied by the Galileian mathematician and Rome courtier, Benedetto Castelli. His interactions with the Republic of Venice on water management and his approach to hydraulic problems are revealing of an elitist and abstract understanding of scientific knowledge that guided political decisions from above without taking in any consideration the opinions of the ‘vulgar’. While his science was the expression of a top-down political epistemology, Venetian water knowledge was more egalitarian. It left room for exchange, inclusiveness and bottom-up codification; it valued the gathering of different experiences (including the fishermen's practical knowledge of their waters) and rested on a concrete and systemic (organicist) understanding of natural-anthropic processes.     

‘… that great swollen belly’: the abject maternal in some recent Northern Irish fiction

This essay will consider the representation of the maternal in some contemporary Northern Irish fiction written by men. It will examine, using feminist theories of embodiment and subjectivity, the power of the maternal image in Irish literary and critical discourse. The work of Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz and Mikhail Bakhtin will be employed in this argument. The pregnant body has the power to radically unsettle order, and this essay will explore the way in which men write their fears of this all-consuming imago. Northern Irish men write out their fears of all-consuming national ideology through infanticide and grotesque mother figures and this essay will trace how this figure is complicated through political ideology in Northern Ireland. The texts under consideration will be Ripley Bogle and Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson and Resurrection Man and The Last of Deeds by Eoin McNamee, as well as a glance towards the work of Glenn Patterson as a possible alternative to the hegemonic view of the grotesque or abjected maternal.     

Kaleidoscopism: The Circulation of a Mid-Century Metaphor and Motif

Abstract

This essay traces the mid-century revival of interest in a particular nineteenth-century optical technology – David Brewster’s kaleidoscope – following P. B. Shelley’s coining of the term ‘kalleidoscopism’ to describe the broad popular appeal and enthusiastic uptake of the device in the late 1810s. Through an examination of mid-nineteenth-century fiction, journalism, and scientific writing, this essay explores what it meant to be ‘kaleidoscopic’ in this period and demonstrates how the mechanical structure and physical manipulation of the device informed this meaning. Controlled by the hand of the user, its display offered regulated surprise: a visual environment that did not overwhelm but rather enthralled viewers through its creation of abstracted, symmetrical forms and harmonious colour palettes led by individual taste. Contemporary reference to the kaleidoscope’s display and operation reveals it was increasingly aligned with notions of a stable, controlled, and unified visual environment in which mobility was valued but digression was mechanically impossible; it signalled the mastery of sensory data and the creation of meaning from fractured forms. My discussion uncovers new contexts for its popularity c. 1840–1865 in Victorian fiction, journalism, physiological science, and the fine arts, and discusses two under-studied examples of the kaleidoscopic in the visual art of the Pre-Raphaelites. The essay concludes by exploring Brewster’s speculative application of the kaleidoscope as an early form of cinematic media, contending that this simple optical device provokes a reconsideration of the categorization of Victorian pre-cinematic technologies.