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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2010
Fin-de-siècle Vienna continues to supply historians and the general public alike with a paradigm of the modernist subversion of rationality. From the birth of the unconscious, to the artistic expression of feral sexuality, to the surge of populist politics, Vienna 1900 stands as the turning point when a nineteenth-century ideal of rationality gave way to a twentieth-century fascination with subjectivity. In fact, we know little as yet about what rationality really meant to those to whom we attribute its undoing. Allan Janik writes that today the “‘big’ questions about Viennese culture” center on “just how ‘rational’ developments there have been,” and to answer these questions, Janik argues, we need research on the history of natural science in Austria. Indeed, as Steven Beller notes, the topic of science has been “strangely absent” from the animated discussions of fin-de-siècle Vienna over the past three decades.
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11 Palme, Sommerfrische des Geistes, 12.
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17 Palme, Sommerfrische des Geistes, 98.
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37 Sigmund Exner, “Betrachtung über die Atome” (1863), Manuscript 2061, Bibliothek für Geschichte der Medizin, Vienna. For the sociology of birdwatching, see Law, John and Lynch, Michael, “Lists, Field Guides, and the Descriptive Organization of Seeing: Birdwatching as an Exemplary Observational Activity,” in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Lynch, Michael and Woolgar, Steve (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 267–300Google Scholar. On scientists’ self-fashioning, see the special issue on “Scientific Personae” in Science in Context 16, nos. 1–2 (2003)Google Scholar.
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