Since the last decade of the twentieth century the number of international and transnational judges has burgeoned. There are now in excess of 100 international courts and tribunals, with thousands of international judges who sit on them. They come from all corners of the globe and bring with them the experience of many systems of justice.

The Scopes trial (1925) fuelled discussion in the United States on the social and political implications of Darwinism. For the defenders of the 1925 Tennessee law – which prohibited the teaching of Darwinism in schools – Darwinism was, amongst other things, responsible for the German militarism which eventually led to the First World War. This view was supported by İsmail Fennî, a late Ottoman intellectual, who authored a book immediately after the trial which aimed to debunk scientific materialism. In it, he claimed that Darwinism blurred the distinction between man and beast and thus destroyed the foundations of morality. However, despite his anti-Darwinist stance, İsmail Fennî argued against laws forbidding the teaching of Darwinism in schools, and emphasized that even false theories contributed to scientific improvement. Indeed, because of his belief in science he claimed that Muslims should not reject Darwinism if it were supported by future scientific evidence. If this turned out to be the case, then religious interpretations should be revised accordingly. This article contributes to the literature on early Muslim reactions to Darwinism by examining the views of İsmail Fennî, which were notably sophisticated when compared with those of the anti-religious Darwinist and anti-Darwinist religious camps that dominated late Ottoman intellectual life.

It is well known that Newtonian philosophers such as Johan T. Desaguliers defined their authority in contradistinction to the ‘projector’, a promoter of allegedly impractical and fraudulent schemes. Partly due to the lack of evidence, however, we know relatively little about these eighteenth-century projectors, especially those operating outside learned networks without claims to gentility, disinterest or theoretical sophistication. This paper begins to remedy this lacuna through the case of a ‘chymical’ projector, Moses Stringer (fl. 1693–1714). Instead of aspiring to respectability, this London chymist survived by vigorously promoting new projects, thereby accelerating, rather than attenuating, the course of action that rendered him dubious in the first place. The article follows his (often abortive) exploitation of medicine, metals and empire, and thereby illuminates the shady end of the enlightened world of public science.

This paper investigates Margaret Cavendish's characterization of experimental philosophers as hybrids of bears and men in her 1666 story The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World. By associating experimental philosophers, in particular Robert Hooke and his microscope, with animals familiar to her readers from the sport of bear-baiting, Cavendish constructed an identity for the fellows of the Royal Society of London quite unlike that which they imagined for themselves. Recent scholarship has illustrated well how Cavendish's opposition to experimental philosophy is linked to her different natural-philosophical, political and anthropological ideas. My contribution to this literature is to examine the meanings both of bears in early modern England and of microscopes in experimental rhetoric, in order to illustrate the connection that Cavendish implies between the two. She parodied Hooke's idea that his microscope extended his limited human senses, and mocked his aim that by so doing he could produce useful knowledge. The bear-men reflect inhuman ambition and provide a caution against ignoring both the order of English society and the place of humans in nature.

Historiographic discussions of the universality and regionality of science have to date focused on European cases for making regional science universal. This paper presents a new perspective by moving beyond European origins and illuminating a non-European scientist's engagement with the universality and regionality of science. It will examine the case of the Japanese botanist Nakai Takenoshin (1882–1952), an internationally recognized authority on Korean flora based at Tokyo Imperial University. Serving on the International Committee on Botanical Nomenclature in 1926, Nakai endorsed and acted upon European claims of universal science, whilst simultaneously unsettling them with his regionally shaped systematics. Eventually he came to promote his own systematics, built regionally on Korean flora, as the new universal. By analysing his shifting claims in relation to those of other European and non-European botanists, this paper makes two arguments. First, universalism and regionalism were not contradictory foundations of scientific practice but useful tools used by this non-European botanist in maintaining his scientific authority as a representative Japanese systematist. Second, his claims to universality and regionalism were both imperially charged. An imperially monopolized study of Korean plants left a regional imprint on Nakai's systematics. In order to maintain his scientific authority beyond its region of origin he had to assert either the expanding regionalism of ‘East Asia’ or universalism.