From Organismic Biology as History and Philosophy to the History and Philosophy of Biology—the Work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger in the German Context**

In this paper, I ask about the broader context of the history and philosophy of biology in the German-speaking world as the place in which Hans-Jörg Rheinberger began his work. Three German philosophical traditions—neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and Lebensphilosophie—were interested in the developments and conceptual challenges of the life sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their reflections were taken up by life scientists under the terms theoretische Biologie (theoretical biology) and allgemeine Biologie (general biology), i. e., for theoretical and methodological reflections. They used historical and philosophical perspectives to develop vitalistic, organicist, or holistic approaches to life. In my paper, I argue that the resulting discourse did not come to an end in 1945. Increasingly detached from biological research, it formed an important context for the formation of the field of history and philosophy of biology. In Rheinberger's work, we can see the “Spalten” and “Fugen”—the continuities and discontinuities—that this tradition left there.     

Governing childhood through crime prevention: the case of the German school system

Over the last decade, numerous crime prevention programmes have been implemented across the German school sector. Although several serious violent attacks have happened in the last 12 years in German schools, the emergence of crime prevention programmes within the education sector cannot simply be conceived as a reaction to a rise in youth crime. Following Michel Foucault's writings on power and governmentality, and drawing upon extracts of a discourse analysis of crime prevention programmes and political speeches, we argue that crime prevention within German schools signifies a new mode of governing childhood. Although we focus on Germany, our findings may illustrate an international trend within education policy, which first tends to spatialise socio-structural problems and transform them into local solutions, and second seeks to create childhood subjectivities that cause children to feel responsible for their own safety, while simultaneously subjecting children and young people to wide-ranging social control via area-based networks.     

Reading the Cuban revolution from Bogotá, 1957–62

This article traces the evolution of Colombian responses to the early Cuban revolution. For the governing Liberal Party in particular, developments in Cuba only gradually came to be read in terms of the Cold War. Instead, Colombians primarily interpreted the revolution through the lens of their own recent post-authoritarian transition, as well as a commitment to inter-American diplomacy. Using Colombian, US, and UK government as well as press sources, the article challenges recent historiography on the Cold War in Latin America, to demonstrate how the Cold War was but one reading of Latin American politics in the era of the Cuban revolution.     

Quantification of Fracture Propagation Velocity Employing a Sample of Clovis Channel Flakes

Velocity-dependant lithic fracture surface features are employed to determine precursory loading rate. The methodology is applied to a sample of Clovis channel-flake scars revealing that some Clovis points were fluted using pressure-flaking techniques.