Descartes is well known as a mathematician and natural philosopher. However, none of Descartes's biographers has described the invitation he received in 1633 to fill a chair in theoretical medicine at the University of Bologna, or the fact that he was already sufficiently known and respected for his medical knowledge that the invitation came four years before his first publication. In this note I authenticate and contextualize this event, which I refer to as the ‘Bologna affair’. I transcribe the letter written to the Bolognese Senate announcing efforts to bring Descartes to the university and explain the events that led to Descartes receiving the invitation. While many questions about the Bologna affair cannot be answered because of the paucity of the historical record, I conclude that the event invites us to consider again the larger historiographical issue of how best to integrate the history of medicine with the history of science and philosophy during the early modern period.

What does “life” become at a moment when biological inquiry proceeds by manufacturing biological artifacts and systems? In this article, I juxtapose two radically different communities, synthetic biologists and Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef crafters (HCCR). Synthetic biology is a decade-old research initiative that seeks to merge biology with engineering and experimental research with manufacture. The HCCR is a distributed venture of three thousand craftspeople who cooperatively fabricate a series of yarn and plastic coral reefs to draw attention to the menace climate change poses to the Great Barrier and other reefs. Interpreting these two groups alongside one another, I suggest that for both, manufacturing biological artifacts advances their understandings of biology: in a rhetorical loop, they build new biological things in order to understand the things they are making. The resulting fabrications condense scientific and folk theories about “life” and also undo “life” as a coherent analytic object.

The motivation for the publication of this lecture is my firm belief that any word that can even slightly clarify and advance the powerful and fruitful idea of the transmutation of species is of value.

First, I wish to put an end to the futile discussions which go nowhere since they ignore accumulated knowledge and always start from scratch. I want to proclaim that at the core of the Darwinian theory, regardless of its merit as a whole, lies the transmutation hypothesis, which is nowadays the only legitimate scientific hypothesis on the origin of organic forms. Therefore, future scientific discussions should focus on Darwinian theory alone, as its foundation is irrefutable.

This lecture has been printed completely unchanged and unavoidable necessary additions have been transferred to footnotes. This article was already completed when Moritz Wagner's The Darwinian theory and the migration law of organism1* was published. Wagner attempts to diminish the role of natural selection in Darwin's theory and I challenge this view in the appendix, which also addresses the factors Wagner emphasized as influencing speciation.

Freiburg im Breisgau, August 2, 1868

August Weismann

Dr. James Hansen's 1988 testimony before the U.S. Senate was an important turning point in the history of global climate change. However, no studies have explained why Hansen's scientific communication in this deliberative setting was more successful than his testimonies of 1986 and 1987. This article turns to Hansen as an important case study in the rhetoric of accommodated science, illustrating how Hansen successfully accommodated his rhetoric to his non-scientist audience given his historical conditions and rhetorical constraints. This article (1) provides a richer explanation for the rhetorical/political emergence of global warming as an important public policy issue in the United States during the late 1980s and (2) contributes to scholarly understanding of the rhetoric of accommodated science in deliberative settings, an often overlooked area of science communication research.

In his inaugural lecture, “On the Legitimacy of the Darwinian Theory,” August Weismann followed closely in Darwin's footsteps, but provided at the same time an outline of the essentials of his future theory of heredity, development, variation, and speciation. This was Weismann's first support of the evolutionary theory, and it shows his commitment to natural selection as the mechanism of evolution. For Weismann, “Darwin's Theory” meant natural selection. Natural selection, and more generally selectionism, became Weismann's major explanatory principle for evolutionary change and the most important element driving his thought.

In the theory-dominated view of scientific experimentation, all relations of theory and experiment are taken on a par; namely, that experiments are performed solely to ascertain the conclusions of scientific theories. As a result, different aspects of experimentation and of the relations of theory to experiment remain undifferentiated. This in turn fosters a notion of theory-ladenness of experimentation (TLE) that is too coarse-grained to accurately describe the relations of theory and experiment in scientific practice. By contrast, in this article, I suggest that TLE should be understood as an umbrella concept that has different senses. To this end, I introduce a three-fold distinction among the theories of high-energy particle physics (HEP) as background theories, model theories, and phenomenological models. Drawing on this categorization, I contrast two types of experimentation, namely, “theory-driven” and “exploratory” experiments, and I distinguish between the “weak” and “strong” senses of TLE in the context of scattering experiments from the history of HEP. This distinction enables identifying the exploratory character of the deep-inelastic electron-proton scattering experiments – performed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) between the years 1967 and 1973 – thereby shedding light on a crucial phase of the history of HEP, namely, the discovery of “scaling,” which was the decisive step towards the construction of quantum chromo-dynamics as a gauge theory of strong interactions.

This paper explores the links between the competing scientific, disciplinary, and institutional identifications of social scientists working for international organizations and the nature of the work produced in these establishments. By examining the case of UNESCO's Social Science Department from 1946 to 1955, the paper shows how the initial lack of organizational identification diminished the efficiency and productivity of the Department and slowed down the creation of an international system for research in the social sciences. It then examines how the elaboration of such identification resulted from a period of trial and error during which several national, academic, and scientific models were explored. The paper concludes that only the discourse of “moral sensitivity” kept the Department together at a time when disillusions regarding internationalism, the destabilization of the meaning of nation, and suspicion towards some Western disciplines rendered unacceptable the universalization of a single international social scientific identification.

The subject of the paper is the shift from an astrology-oriented astronomy towards an allegedly more objective, mathematically grounded approach to astronomy. This shift is illustrated through a close reading of Tycho Brahe's scientific development and the contemporaneous changes in his communicational strategies. Basing the argument on a substantial array of original sources it is claimed that the Danish astronomer developed a new astronomical discourse in pursuit of credibility, giving priority to observational astronomy and natural philosophical questions. The abandonment of astrology in public discourse is primarily explained by Tycho's social position and greater sensibility to controversial issues. Tycho's example suggests that the changes in rhetorical strategies regarding astrology (which happened earlier than changes in astrological belief) should be given more recognition in the history of astronomy.