A History of the Concept of the Stimulus and the Role it Played in the Neurosciences

The term stimulus, as it was used in science from its earliest appearance in the sixteenth century up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, shows a gradual progress in denotation from the physical object designed to produce nervous and muscular excitation to the generically conceived event or object that initiates sensory or motor activity. To this shift corresponds a shift in the understanding of sensory experience. Johannes Müller's law of specific energy of sensory nerves played a major role in the shift, and Hermann von Helmholtz gave the shift its most thorough philosophical explanation.     

Johannes Janssonius’s Map of Dalmatia and the Ottoman–Venetian Borderland (1650)

The paper presents a comparative analysis of the map of Dalmatia by Johannes Janssonius and maps by his contemporaries. Janssonius’s cartographical models and the sources of the printed text accompanying his map are identified. The roles of Croatian cartographers and Venetian and Ottoman reports dealing with the border are uncovered. The importance of Janssonius’s map in disseminating knowledge about the little-known geography and history of Dalmatia, and the ways in which the map influenced perception of that country in the Ottoman Empire borderlands in general, are assessed.     

Erfahrung und Vorurteil im naturwissenschaftlichen Denken Johannes Keplers

The change from ancient and medieval to modern natural science, called Wende (instead of ‘revolution’), must be associated with the work of Johannes Kepler and not that of Nicolaus Copernicus. Copernicus merely showed the way, introducing heliocentricity as the order of the planets. This Wende resulted from the synthesis of several disciplines formerly isolated from each other, namely mathematical (i.e. hypothetical) astronomy, new physics, mathematical harmony, astrology, new physical optics, and natural theology. Whereas Copernicus united mathematical astronomy and peripatetic (Aristotelian) physics, Kepler was first to see the necessity for providing a physical explanation and an ontological foundation to the heliocentric system. He was the first to consider and measure the movement of the planets in depth. The elements for his new physics Kepler obtained not from newly observed data, but from a harmonic archetypus of the regular polyhedra fitted in between excentric planetary spheres. On the basis of this archetypus (which he considered to be God's model in creating the universe) he accepted the new heliocentric planetary system as a physical reality. That is why astronomy, by way of taking into account stereometric quantities, is, in Kepler's eyes, a kind of divine worship. Later, the best empirical data had also to be taken into consideration as a means of proving this a priori archetypus (Vorurteil, preconception). The result was, on the one hand, a universal natural science able to explain natural processes in grater abundance than ever before or since in the history of science. Although accepted only in parts, it resulted in founding a new natural science with adherent mathematical and empirical methods. It also led Kepler to establish, step by step, the elliptical path of the planets, thereby overcoming, for the first time, the two axioms of ancient astronomy, requiring uniform and circular planetary motion. It has been shown that this Keplerian Wende was possible only within the Historischen Erfahrungsraum (‘historical field of experience’) of Renaissance Humanism (cf. this Journal 9/1986, p. 201), which came about itself as the result of reactivating the scientific and philosophical thinking of the ancient Greeks and was accomplished by three steps (phases) relating to the revival of (1) original ancient writings, (2) the ancient knowledge of natural facts and data, and (3) the ancient scientific and philosophical ideas and mentalities (Drei-Phasen-Modell).     

Ancients and moderns in medieval music theory: from Guido of Arezzo to Jacobus

ABSTRACT

Medieval discourse about both the theory and practice of music featured much debate about the views of moderni and antiqui from when Guido of Arezzo devised a new way of recording pitch in the early eleventh century to the complaints of Jacobus in the early fourteenth century about new forms of measured music in the ars nova. There was also a shift from a Boethian notion that practical music was a manifestation of cosmic music, towards a more Aristotelian model, that privileged music as sensory experience. That this could have a profound effect on human emotion was articulated by Johannes de Grocheio writing about music c. 1270 and Guy of Saint-Denis soon after 1300 about plainchant. Jacobus, writing in the 1320s, was troubled by this shift in thinking about music not as reflections of transcendent realities, but as sounds of human invention that served to move the soul. He argued that musical patterns should reflect a transcendent harmony that was both cosmic and celestial.     

Measuring Religious Preferences in Nineteenth-Century Urban Areas

The author applies David Galenson's work on the life cycles of modern artists to the study of the paintings of old masters, from about the early fifteenth to the late seventeenth centuries. Both the potential use of technical examination of paintings and the role of drawings for preconceiving compositions are explored as means for interpreting artistic behavior among pre-modern artists. Using a study of illustrations in texts to establish a list of canonical painters and the relative dates in which they are believed to have contributed their most important paintings, the author then analyzes a series of old master painters' working methods, demonstrating how their creative behavior corresponds to what their respective life cycles would suggest. Thus, the study of artists' life cycles could anticipate the use of optical and other mechanical devices for the production of premodern paintings based on such studies.     

Nur „Zweite Wahl”︁ oder Die Berufung Adolf Butenandts zum Direktor des KWI für Biochemie

The remarkable career of the nobel laureate Adolf Butenandt in Germany before 1945 and especially after the second world war is well known. But in recent years several publications have questioned his personal behaviour in the Third Reich. But all these articles interpreted Butenandts career and his attitude from our knowledge today about Nazi Germany. From archival sources this article will view on the situation in the 1930s and will show that Butenandt was originally not the first choice of the government for the position of director at the Kaiser‐Wilhelm‐Institute for Biochemistry. Finally it is shown, that Butenandt did knew what was going on behind the scenes, because through his close connections with officers of the Rockefeller Foundation he got several information on the selection.     

2. NOSTALGIA AND THE TURBULENCE OF TIMES

The concept of nostalgia has an invaluable advantage: In contrast to other cultural concepts, it has an exact date of birth. It was in 1688 when the medic Johannes Hofer published a thesis in which he described an illness he termed with the neologism “nostalgia.” But instead of following the academic and larger cultural discourses that evolved from this starting point until the present, the question that deserves some attention is which temporal setting goes along with the concept of nostalgia. Most of the experts on nostalgia as a sickness during the last three and a half centuries did not diagnose themselves but others, quite often patients from rural areas who had to leave home to work abroad, where they became nostalgic. With this diagnosis these experts also established a certain time‐model, because they separated a “modern” time‐model of irreversibility from a “nostalgic” time‐model of reversibility. If we take a closer look at the nostalgia diagnosis and its consequences, we might also gain some ideas for our thinking about the theory of history.     

Sleepwalking through History: Medicine,Arts, and Courts of Law

Somnambulism, or sleepwalking, has always been of interest to theologians, writers, philosophers, physicians, and others fascinated by unusual behaviors. This parasomnia, which was defined less precisely in the past than it is today, has long been featured in medical dissertations and books of medicine. Further, Shakespeare, Bellini, and Brown, among others, incorporated it into their plays, operas, and novels. Because some somnambulists turned violent and committed other acts detrimental to society, sleepwalking also demanded attention from legal systems, and guidelines were set for whether somnambulists could be held responsible for their actions. This historical review focuses on these developments pertaining to somnambulism through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.     

3. RADICALIZING TEMPORAL DIFFERENCE: ANTHROPOLOGY,POSTCOLONIAL THEORY,AND LITERARY TIME

This article is an attempt to address on a theoretical level an antinomy in postcolonial approaches to the question of temporal difference. Current scholarship tends both to denounce the way in which the others of the Western self are placed notionally in another time than the West and not only analytically affirm but indeed valorize multiple temporalities. I elaborate on the two problematic temporal frameworks—linear developmentalism and cultural relativism—that belong to a colonial legacy and generate the antinomy in question, and then proceed to discuss possible alternatives provided by a Koselleck‐inspired approach to historical time as inherently plural. I thereby make two central claims: (1) postcolonial conceptions of multiple temporalities typically, if tacitly, associate time with culture, and hence risk reproducing the aporias of cultural relativism; (2) postcolonial metahistorical critique is commonly premised on a simplified and even monolithic understanding of Western modernity as an ideology of “linear progress.” Ultimately, I suggest that the solution lies in radicalizing, not discarding, the notion of multiple temporalities. Drawing on the Brazilian classic Os sertões as my key example, I also maintain that literary writing exhibits a unique “heterochronic” (in analogy with “heteroglossic”) potential, enabling a more refined understanding of temporal difference.     

Caspar Vopel's Ventures in Sixteenth-Century Celestial Cartography

ABSTRACT

This paper concerns the undertakings in celestial cartography of the sixteenth-century Cologne cartographer Caspar Vopel. Copies of his printed celestial globe and of the celestial maps included on his world map are also described. Vopel's celestial mappings display his extraordinary interest in astronomical myths through a series of conspicuous iconographic features. In particular, Vopel's introduction of the images of Antinous and Coma Berenices is revealed to have been inspired by a humanist edition of the Ptolemaic star catalogue. Finally, a study of the celestial maps on the copies of Vopel's world map by Valvassore (1558) and by Van den Putte (1570) shows that these represent different editions of Vopel's world map and that the celestial maps on the world map of Matteo Pagano were in turn copied from those on the world map of Valvassore.