Körpergefühl und Raumvorstellung: Leonardo und Descartes

“Experience and the conception of the world in science in transition to modern times” is the general subject. There are two different points to be made clear, i.e. 1. That the conception of the world had to be made imaginable by art before it could be taken over by science. The central perspective dates back to about three centuries before the time Descartes developed the co-ordinate system. 2. Furthermore it should be taken into account that it was first of all due to the lead of the painters (especially in the Italy of the Quattrocento’) that the possibility of making experiences had changed. In a space opened by a perspective view and seemingly thus appearing as measurable even the painted figures acquire a new reality. Due to his anatomic studies Leonardo could treat the natural movement of the figures shown in his paintings. It was the artists who first of all investigated optics and anatomy before relations could be measured with the aid of scientific methods ami before quantities — instead of qualities — could become the base of unbiased science, as called for by Galilei in 1623.     

Bild und text: Mediale und historische perspektiven auf das alttestamentliche bilderverbot

This essay is trying to shed new light on the prohibition of cultic images in the Hebrew Bible. The first part shows the relationship between written texts and images when viewed as media of the divine or the divine will. It is important to note that the prohibition of cultic images in the Pentateuch is closely related to the concept of Moses'/Gods' writing down the divine revelation. In the second part the paper is dealing with the main function of cultic images in the society's system of religious symbols, i.e. as representations of Gods in a full sense. The third part tries to outline how the written text more and more replaces cultic images as manifestations and media of God and his commandments. The fourth part concludes with the assumption that public reading, recitation and enactment of holy texts generate a new mystery - the mystery of the divine body and form.     

Chemische Laboratorien: Funktion und Disposition

In this essay laboratories are dealt with as symbolic spaces that structure social relationships and ways of knowledge in chemistry. The spatial vicissitudes of the nineteenth‐century research laboratory reflect, and at the same time direct, the way chemical knowledge is being produced, transmitted, and perceived.     

Geschlecht und Gesellschaft: Die ersten Ärztinnen und sozialpolitische Vorurteile

The objective mode of scientific inquiry has increasingly been called into question especially within feminist theory. I have tried to introduce two methodological approaches in examing a small area of medical opinion-making in the medical press at a period in which the question of women doctors was being discussed, but very few women doctors were actually practicing in Germany. Methodologically feminist history sees gender as a structural component used to ascribe sexual division of labour and to form concepts of “masculinity” and “femininity” in a society. It does not define “women's history” as a separate sphere additive to other traditional areas of historical writing including history of science. The second methodological approach is that of deconstruction: “objective” statements in medicine and the biological sciences are part of social and cultural preconceptions. I have examined the pattern of unreflected scientific statements about women's claims to want to become doctors. The pattern is one of preventive prejudice: representative doctors wrote about women in physiological and biological terms of being “weak” and “unfit”. This was an effective strategy for maintaining a status quo of dequalification. The historical examination of women entering the professions has not so much to do with their own capacities, but rather with socially conceived forms of argumentation indirectly applied: preventive statements in medicine about biological function, the “weaker” sex, intellectual denigration, physiological determinism. Some of the statements I found are amusing, but the humour becomes bitter when the consequences enter our social consciousness.     

环球调查:国外教科书里的中国

外国人的中国观是如何形成的?专家说,教育和媒体的影响最为重要。那么,国外历史教科书中怎么写中国?会不会颠覆我们过去所学?对这样的疑问,《环球》杂志记者求诸书本,一是为了解国外教育界灌输给学生的是怎么一个中国,二来也可寻找国外人对中国的各种看法由来的答案。     

Review Article: China in World Affairs

Wenguang Shao. China, Britain, and Businessmen: Political and Commercial Relations, 1949-57. London: Macmillan, 1991. Pp. xx, 257. £50.00

William O. Walker III. Opium and Foreign Policy: The Anglo-American Search for Order in Asia, 1912-1954. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Pp. xvi, 345. $39.95 (us)

Zhang Yongjin. China in the International System, 1918-20: The Middle Kingdom at the Periphery. London: Macmillan, 1991. Pp. xi, 262. £40.00.     

The China Hearings: America's Shifting Paradigm on China

This article attempts to fill a hole in rapprochement literature by examining the 1966 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the People's Republic of China. Historian Michael Lumbers contends that the China hearings served as a watershed in American attitudes toward China. This article explains how and why this change occurred. The China hearings contributed to Sino-American rapprochement in two different ways. One, the witnesses suggested to the public a new policy toward China, containment without isolation. The popularity of containment without isolation and the Johnson administration's use of it in their policy reorientation suggest that the China hearings had an effect. The hearings were not only a turning point, but also the culmination of a larger process. It demonstrated that American sentiment toward China had clearly moved away from hostility and toward cooperation. And during the 1960s, scholars of East Asian studies served as opinion leaders in this process.