Aspects of the history of the nerves: Bell's theory, the Bell-Magendie law and controversy, and two forgotten works by P.W. Lund and D.F. Eschricht

The French physiologist Fran?ois Magendie showed, in 1822, that the anterior roots of the spinal nerves are motor and the posterior sensory. The English anatomist Charles Bell claimed the discovery, but his claim was based on republications of papers in which the wording had been altered to be consistent with Magendie's findings. Bell also appropriated Herbert Mayo's discoveries of the functions of the fifth and seventh cranial nerves. Bell repeated his claims in a number of influential publications, supported by his brothers-in-law John and Alexander Shaw. And for a century and a half, Bell figured as the discoverer in most references to the subject. During this period, several reviewers did go back to Bell's original papers, disclosing Bell's falsifications in the republished texts. But Magendie was not definitely acknowledged as the discoverer of the function of the spinal nerve roots until Cranefield's (1974) treatise. Cranefield, as did all other reviewers, overlooked accounts from 1825 by P.W. Lund and F.D. Eschricht. They critically reviewed Bell's early publications and reached conclusions similar to those of Cranefield concerning the roles of Bell and Magendie in the discovery of the function of the spinal nerve roots.     

Descartes' embodied psychology: Descartes' or Damasio's error?

Damasio (1994) claims that Descartes imagined thinking as an activity separate from the body, and that the effort to understand the mind in general biological terms was retarded as a consequence of Descartes' dualism. These claims do not hold; they are "Damasio's error". Descartes never considered what we today call thinking or cognition without taking the body into account. His new dualism required an embodied understanding of cognition. The article gives an historical overview of the development of Descartes' radically new psychology from his account of algebraic reasoning in the early Regulae (1628) to his "neurobiology of rationality" in the late Passions of the soul (1649). The author argues that Descartes' dualism opens the way for mechanistic and mathematical explanations of all kinds of physiological and psychological phenomena, including the kind of phenomena Damasio discusses in Descartes' error. The models of understanding Damasio puts forward can be seen as advanced version of models which Descartes introduced in the 1640s. A far better title for his book would have been Descartes' vision.     

Heidegger and Cassirer on Science after the Cassirer and Heidegger of Davos

Summary

The paper exposes the views of Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger on the dynamics of the sciences of their day, as both developed them in the two decades after the encounter of the two philosophers in Davos in 1928. It emphasizes points of common concern, and it compares their positions to those of contemporary philosophers of science Gaston Bachelard and Edgar Wind.     

LATE NEOLITHIC STENILDGÅRD GRAVE: RE-EXCAVATED,RE-ANALYSED AND RE-INTERPRETED

Occasionally, it becomes possible to re-excavate and re-analyse prehistoric monuments. Within the geographical area managed by Vesthimmerlands Museum, this happened in the case of the Late Neolithic Stenildgård grave on the western periphery of the town of Aars, Northern Danmark. The grave was excavated for the first time at the early 1930s and re-excavated in 2015 in connection with the construction of a ring road around the southern parts of Aars. In 2015, a series of state-of-the-art scientific analyses were conducted in relation to this grave. Following a detailed presentation of the original publication and later interpretations, this article presents the results of the new excavation and scientific analyses. The new results include identification of the human bones, the development of the stratigraphy, strontium isotope analysis, pollen analysis, macro-fossil analysis, and the analysis of pitch. Since the 1930s, the Stenildgård grave has been considered a burial, which, to a great extent, deviated from usual practice showing one of the earliest examples of cremation in prehistoric Denmark. Furthermore, the recent investigation revealed that the grave was equipped with a surrounding wooden structure and possibly influenced by West European Bell Beaker Cultures. Also, the grave seems to form part of an extensive Late Neolithic burial and settlement system, where complex rituals were carried out.     

Urban concentration and labour market linkages in the Norwegian ICT services sector

Building on research that emphasizes the dependence of services firms on the networks and experiences of individual employees, this paper investigates the urban concentration of information and communication technology services employment in Norway from the perspective of labour market linkages. It finds that urban regions generally provide firms with access to sector-specific expertise. Beyond this, intrinsic region characteristics determine the position of individual firms in national labour markets for expertise: Firms in the dominant university town have strong contact points to academic labour markets, whereas firms in the industrial stronghold of the Western Capital region exploit a broader range of recruitment channels than firms in any of the other urban and non-urban locations. The results illustrate how capability building through recruitment is influenced by local conditions, and imply that the industry will continue to concentrate in the large-city regions where surrounding organizations provide firms with priveliged access to expertise. Implications for research, innovation policy and societal development more generally are drawn.     

Cultural Heritage and Ecosystem Services: A Literature Review

During the last decade, we have witnessed an increased interest in Ecosystem Services (ES), including the so-called ‘cultural ecosystem services’ and its subcategory of ‘cultural heritage’. In this article, a review of academic literature of ES and cultural heritage is carried out. ES has primarily been developed by scholars from the ecological and economic disciplines, and in this article, we discuss how this impacts the way in which cultural heritage is used and conceptualised in ES literature. Based on the conceptual review, we initiate a discussion of what the implications for cultural heritage management could be if the heritage sector adopts the rationales in the ES framework.     

Resurrections and rebirths: how the Risorgimento shaped modern Italian politics

The Risorgimento was the process of independence and unification of the Italian nation between 1848 and 1860, and has remained a powerful symbol of Italian politics ever since. Elaborating on Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory, the article discusses the Risorgimento at crucial moments in twentieth-century Italian politics: the 1911 anniversary of unification, the elaboration of the Risorgimento during fascism, the re-appropriation of the Risorgimento by the left and by the Resistance during the 1930s and 1940s, the general semantic space carved by the post-war democratic forces on both right and left with reference to the Risorgimento, and the sudden return to the memory of the Risorgimento in the 1990s and afterwards. The aim of the article is to understand both continuities and changes in the reference to the Risorgimento in twentieth-century political discourse, and to put into perspective Italy’s ‘particular’ road to modernity within a comparative European frame.     

Criminalization of Homicide in Early Modern Denmark (16th–17th Centuries)

This article explores the criminalization of homicide in early modern Denmark, 16th–17th centuries. Criminalization is here defined, primarily, as the harshening of penalties for homicide in law and practice. The article shows that a process of criminalization took place that contributed to a pacification of the population (demonstrated by a decrease in homicides) but also engendered practices of resistance and evasion which were reminiscent of a medieval feud culture. The attitude towards homicide was for a long time ambivalent, not just among the lower classes but at all levels of society. Criminalization and pacification were mainly products of state-building through harsher punishment and the formation of a more reliable legal system. This top-down process meshed with the broader population’s demands for justice and security.     

The Conservative Critique of the Enlightenment: The Limits of Social Engineering

The conservative, mainly Anglo-Saxon, critique of “social engineering” in Enlightenment thinking, which goes back to Edmund Burke and David Hume, among others, has recently resurfaced in the works of Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton, and Friedrich Hayek. This article focuses on their conservative critiques and more specifically on two common issues: the unintended negative consequences of political planning, and the institutions in civil society that act as a positive counterpart to this form of engineering.