What was the impact of Lavoisier's new elementary chemical analysis on the conception and practice of chemistry in the vegetable kingdom at the end of the eighteenth century? I examine how this elementary analysis relates both to more traditional plant analysis and to philosophical and mathematical concepts of analysis current in the Enlightenment. Thus I explore the relationship between algebra, Condillac's philosophy and Lavoisier's chemical system, as well as comparing Lavoisier's analytical approach to those of his predecessors, such as Baumé and Bucquet. With reference to the aims of vegetable analysis, I show how the dominance of elementary analysis devalued a tradition that sought to isolate immediate principles (plant extracts), marginalizing the chemical practices of many doctors and pharmacists in the context of the new chemistry in France.

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This article depicts the emergence of the modern, secular Jewish intellectual in the eighteenth century as a process of intellectual seduction and irresistible attraction of young men to knowledge outside the boundaries of Jewish culture. In the rhetoric of the Haskalah (Enlightenment), the cultural conversion was often described metaphorically as sexual attraction to a forbidden woman. The passion for knowledge inaccessible within the traditional Jewish culture (mainly of the natural sciences, but also of Hebrew, European languages, and philosophy) and intense curiosity were the hallmarks of the early maskilim (Jewish Enlighteners). It is difficult now to assess the sense of audacity, the awareness of sin, of guilt, and of subversion entailed in the desire to enter the realms of extra-Jewish and extra-religious knowledge, as well as the barriers of language and social norms that had to be crossed. The encounter of the Ashkenazi elite in eighteenth-century Europe with extra-Jewish knowledge was a traumatic conflict that grew in intensity as the shelf of Hebrew books and the number of maskilim grew.

This essay is the first account in English to examine Franz Joseph Gall and the origins of phrenology. In doing so a host of legends about Gall and the beginnings of phrenology, which exist only in the English-language historiography, are dispelled. An understanding of the context of phrenology's origins is essential to the historicization of the movement as a whole. The first of two sections in the essay, therefore, introduces Gall's biography and the context in which his provocative science emerged. It is shown to what extent Gall borrowed from other thinkers of his time. I show that Gall's system was meant to be a certain science of human nature. In the second section I analyse the reactions of contemporaries to Gall's important two-year lecture tour of Europe. I conclude that although many critics dismissed Gall as a charlatan, there was no consensus about the proper way to disseminate scientific knowledge or the attributes necessary for the gentleman of science. For example, it was not clear whether science could be profitable, whether it should be shared with lay audiences or whether it could in fact be science at all if it was also entertaining. I argue that in any case Gall's aim was never really to impart science or to disseminate his system. His science and early means of disseminating it were meant to generate elite intellectual status. In this Gall was quite successful.

Argument

Changing conceptions of science at the beginning of the twentieth century questioned the link between science and secularism, thus contributing to the development of a process of desecularization.

Science was no longer viewed as automatically relating truth to reality. This development was in part a consequence of the influence of mathematics on conceptions of science. The mathematical “existence” of true yet “non-existent” worlds permitted the inference that the connection between the true and the real is contingent. Alongside this problematization of science's link to nature there also developed a quite different critique of the cultural effects of science, which viewed science as being some kind of threat to human capacities for decoding the self or the social environment. Vis-à-vis both nature and culture, science could no longer serve as the basis for a program of secularization.

One motive for the cultural significance of the non-rational has been the perceived lack of identity between consciousness and rationality. But the equivalence between consciousness and rationality was the essence of the project of modernity. Their perceived non-equivalence made modern secularism untenable.

Argument

Objectivity has been constitutive of the modern scientific persona. Its significance has depended on its excision of standpoint, which has legitimated the scientist epistemically and sociopolitically at once. But if the nineteenth century reinforced those paired effects, the twentieth century brought questioning of both. The figure of Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) puts the latter process on display. From the Kaiserreich to the Federal Republic of Germany, between quantum mechanics and interest group politics, his evolution shows an increasing openness to perspectival pluralism, together with an attempt to save some form of objectivity as discursive coherence. Heisenberg’s self-understanding and the reactions of his publics display the transmutation of the persona as objectivity was rethought. By the end of the day, speaking “as a scientist” would mean something different from what it had at the start.

Argument

How did Boyle’s religious concerns and views cause his experimental philosophy to differ from received views on the goals and methods of natural philosophy? I argue that Boyle predicated his experimental philosophy on two fundamental doctrines. The first claimed that attributing causality to natural entities was idolatrous, that is, intellectually and morally erroneous. The second doctrine claimed that causal relations in the natural world were the property of God’s benevolent government. Boyle’s experimental studies were accordingly intended to identify specific manifestations of this property, while philosophers traditionally construed experiment as an aid to observation of phenomena. Boyle rendered experiment a learning tool that enabled believers to accommodate themselves, theoretically and practically, to God’s benevolent rule. As a servant of the public good, this experimental philosopher formed an important turning point in the emergence of modern science and its role in the social division of labor.

Argument

Notwithstanding the preponderance of clerics among early modern scientific practitioners, only scant attention has been paid to the ramifications of their “calling” on their ability to engage freely in scientific studies. Indeed, the overall failure to calibrate the compatibility between full-fledged secular studies and a clerical vocation has led to misconceptions concerning the nature of the participation of ordained men in early modern science. It is not simply that ministerial duties imposed considerable demands on their time and energy; more significantly, the essence of this vocation was such as to impinge fundamentally on their ability to dedicate themselves to science or, most important of all, on their willingness to acknowledge publicly their contribution. A focus on the inner tensions that plagued practitioners in holy orders during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will both highlight the insurmountable challenges posed by the specialized and secularized nature of the “new science” on clerics – irrespective of denomination – and explain their eventual marginalization in the scientific endeavor.