Zoologische Gärten in Stadtkultur und Wissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert

The foundation and administration of European Zoological gardens in the 19^th century is analized. It is significant of such new institutions, that they are founded in the large cities, and that most of the founders looked at the great models in Paris and London, which are described first. Further it is shown that the change from princely menageries to public Zoological Gardens is caused both by common interests in people's education and pleasure and by scientific aims which leaded to choose the name Zoological “garden” in analogy to botanical gardens. It seems to be characteristic of such public institutions created by citizens in the 19^th century that they are mostly supported by commercial or scientific local societies. This is exemplified by describing the administration of the Zoological gardens of Berlin (1841), Frankfurt (1856) and Hamburg (1863), which initiated also research for acclimatization of wild animals.     

„Siege der Freiheit,welche die Menschen durch die Erforschung des Grundes der Dinge errangen”︁ Wandlungen im politischen Selbstverständnis deutscher Naturwissenschaftler des 19. Jahrhunderts

“Victories of Freedom which Humans Achieved by Research in the Foundation of Things”. - This article analyzes the political self-conception of leading representatives of the natural sciences in 19th century Germany. It is argued that the main feature of this self-conception which remained constant over the time consisted in a strong “rationalization-imperative”, i.e. the postulate that state and society have to be reshaped on the basis of natural science. On the other hand, this imperative was put forward in very different forms and with different political content: it shifted from revolutionary aspirations in the period of 1848 to moderate and sometimes even reactionary positions in the last decades of the century.     

Galilei als Methodologe

Galileo did not develop a systematic methodology but rather a methodical form which represents an essential part of the development of modern scientific thought. Keywords to the methodical form of Galileo's thought are: 1) The geometrization of the sciences (‘mathematization of nature’) - this refers especially to the explication of the methodological priority of a theory of measurement. 2) Argomento ex suppositione, that is, the coupling of the originally proof-theoretical distinction between analysis and synthesis to elements of a methodology of empirical science. 3) The axiomatic structure of mechanics that corresponds to the modern semantic theory conception and to constructivist conceptions of the philosophy of science. 4) A constructive (or instrumental) concept of experience, which replaces the Aristotelian concept of a phenomenal experience in the construction of physics.     

Wissenschaftsgeschichte mit oder ohne System? Ein methodologischer Rückblick auf das DFG‐Projekt Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert

Among the more recent developments in the historiography of the sciences accounts involving the systems theory by Niklas Luhmann have shown quite prolific in terms of published results and sources. The article investigates the hold of the theoretical grounds of systems theory for the several applications in the field of the history of German literary Scholarship, i. e. the Germanistik, and for this reason expands on the related project conducted by the German Research Society (DFG). In the course of this examination several cruces of theory transfer, especially concerning systems theory towards historiography, will be addressed, such as a deficit in operational application, the essentially ahistoric design of systems theory and its questionable inherent presuppositions on the processes of science.     

Zytoarchitektonik und Revolution ‐ Lenins Gehirn als Raum und Objekt

The investigation of Lenin's brain by the German neurobiologist Oskar Vogt from Berlin and his Russian collaborators in Moscow is one of the most exciting and simultaneously oddest chapters in the history of medicine. With the bizarre claim to be able to detect the material substrate of genius it provoked as much unrealistic expectations in the public as strong criticism by the scientific community of brain researchers. The present paper deals in a brief survey with the history of collecting and measuring the brains of famous persons in general and particularly with the historical, political and social circumstances of the performed investigation of Lenin's brain. In this connection the epistemological and technical prereqisites of architectonical brain research and its means of the topographical representation of complex histo‐anatomical and physiological differences in the brain cortex are shortly discussed. The opening of Russian archives after the socio‐economic turn of the year 1991 brought up new background facts in Lenin's pathobiography; together with the sources from German archives a rather extensive reconstruction of the historical events between Lenin's death in 1924 and the final report of the Moscow Brain Research Institute (Institute Mozga) to the Politburo of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviki) in 1936 is possible now.