Argument

In the sixteenth century, several Central European Jews argued, with greater emphasis than their forebears, that the realm of nature and the realm of the divine are largely independent. This argument was expressed in three related claims. First, nature itself came to be seen as indifferent to creed. Though Jews may have assumed that they enjoyed an elevated status in the supernatural realm, the notion that their status and characteristics differed in the natural realm was, for some at least, discredited. Second, once nature was divorced from creed, natural philosophy and allied disciplines too came to be seen (by some) as a theologically neutral discipline. Third, once nature and natural philosophy were seen as insensible to differences in religious belief, discourse about natural philosophy came to be seen as a scholarly pastime that might be shared companionably by peoples of different beliefs. In short, among certain early modern Jews, nature, the discipline of natural philosophy, and the profession of natural philosophy all came to be seen as drained of religious particularity. These views bear an interesting and sometimes paradoxical relationship to secularization. On the one hand, the distancing of nature and creed may have been a harbinger of the actual secularization that portions of European – especially Ashkenazi – Jewish culture later experienced. On the other hand, these same attitudes may also have deterred interest in the physical world itself, discouraging the sort of “this-worldliness” that Max Weber and many others have associated with secularization.

Argument

This paper examines Paracelsus and Paracelsianism in the light of the ideas of Max Weber concerning the social consequences of the Reformation, with special reference to his theories of Entzauberung and secularization. He linked these tendencies both to the rise of capitalism and the growth of experimental science. The detailed case study of Paracelsus' account of diseases linked with saints, in common with his interpretation of many other conditions, demonstrates that he self-consciously extended the boundaries of medicine and eroded the role of magic and witchcraft associated with the church. On the other hand, Paracelsus adopted the Neoplatonic worldview, was immersed in popular magic, and evolved a system of medicine that self-consciously revolved around magic. These factors seem to place a distinct limit on his role in the demystification of knowledge. However, the magic of Paracelsus entailed a decisive break with the entrenched elitist and esoteric tradition of the occultists and hermeticists. It is argued that this reconstructed magic re-establishes the credentials of Paracelsus as a significant contributor to the disenchantment and secularization of the worldview.

John Playfair (1748–1819), professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, is a relatively obscure figure today, best known as the popularizer of James Hutton's theory of geology. However, Playfair was also involved in mathematics for most of his active career, with his most widely distributed publication, Elements of Geometry (1795), shaping the mathematics education for at least thirteen thousand British students during the nineteenth century. This study focuses on the mathematical context surrounding Elements of Geometry. Specifically, after recounting the background of the text, the paper explores the ways in which Playfair's presentation of elementary geometry reflected three understandings of the terms ‘analysis’ and ‘synthesis’, which were intrinsic components of mathematical culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. In one sense, the words denoted differing styles of mathematical practice in Great Britain and in France. In a second sense, the terms evoked contemporary appeals to ancient methods of proof. Finally, ‘analysis’ and ‘synthesis’ were understood in reference to separate approaches to mathematics education. Playfair's appeals to these understandings help reveal how he viewed himself as a mathematician. Overall, then, this study enriches the standard portrait of a professor who straddled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Argument

During the nineteenth century, physicians either discovered or invented a variety of clinical autobiography called “traumatic memory.” Freud produced two versions of this memory, the final version in the 1920s. A revolutionary nosology (DSM-III), adopted in 1980, promised to extirpate Freud and the concept of neurosis from American psychiatry. However, it made a tacit exception for Freud’s concept of traumatic neurosis, renaming it “posttraumatic stress disorder.” The following decades have been a period of intense clinical and scientific interest in this disorder. An influential research program has investigated traumatic neurosis and its brain through variations in cortisol excretion. I describe the history of this program and examine its distinctive knowledge product: its running narrative of its achievements. The narrative’s structure is analyzed and found to resemble a crossword puzzle constructed from heterogeneous kinds of inference, recalling The Interpretation of Dreams. My conclusion is that, far from extirpating Freud’s neurosis, biological research has secured a place for it in today’s post-Freudian psychiatry.

Argument

When electricity became a commodity in 1900, it furnished Germany with new attractions and revolutionized everyday life with all kinds of tools and gadgets; it also opened up a new space for investigating psycho-physical interaction, reviving ideas of a close linkage between psychic life and electricity. The paper traces the emergence of this electro-psychological framework beyond “electroencephalography,” the recording of electrical brain waves, to “diagnoscopy,” personality profiling by electric phrenology.

Diagnoscopy opens a window onto the scientific and public cultures of electricity and psychical processes in Weimar Germany. It garnered enormous attention in the press and was quickly taken up by several institutions for vocational guidance, because it offered a rapid and technological alternative to laborious psychological testing or “subjective” interviewing. Academic psychology and leading figures in brain research reacted with horror; forging counter measures which finally resulted in this technique being denounced as quackery. A few years later, the press celebrated electroencephalography as a mind-reading device, whereas the neuroscientists remained initially skeptical of its significance and the very possibility of an “electroencephalogram” (EEG) before they adapted electroencephalography as a tool for representing various neuro-psychiatric conditions in patterns of recorded signals.

The blending of psychophysiology and electrical engineering marks the formation of an electric epistemology in scientific as well as public understanding of the psyche. The transformations of electrodiagnosis from diagnoscopy to the EEG are indicative of a cultural shift in which electricity changed its role from being the power source for experimental apparatuses to becoming a medium of psychic processes.

Argument

Recent writers in the brain sciences and the philosophy of mind contrast modern biological theories of consciousness with a mind-body dualism supposedly dominant half-a-century ago which they regard as scientifically sterile. Reference to C. S. Sherrington often signals the rejected dualism. This paper re-examines Sherrington’s highly qualified position and links it to the arguments of British scientists for whom he was a figurehead in the 1930s and 1940s. I interpret the mind-body literature as ancillary to debates about cultural values. From this perspective, dualism represents a defense of a threatened conservative culture. Dismissal of scientists’ supposed “dualism” does little to illuminate the tension in their thought between defense of values traditionally associated with mind and hope for an integrated mind-body science. This leads to comments on Sherrington’s own concept of integration. The conclusion relates these points to the new research in the brain sciences evident by the end of the 1940s.