Biological generality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean- Gaël Barbara
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Microscopic Level ◽  
Anatomy And Physiology ◽  
Biological Objects ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
The One

This article examines generality in biology by focusing on two French schools of anatomy: the discipline of anatomie générale that was founded in France in 1800 by Xavier Bichat and the one developed in the 1870s by Louis Ranvier at the Collège de France by means of microscopy. The works of Bichat and Ranvier involved the disciplines of anatomy and physiology. Bichat’s work, especially his research on tissues, is of interest for understanding which kind of concept of generality gained favor in the life sciences at the start of the nineteenth century. Ranvier’s later career sheds light on the ways that generality was searched for at the microscopic level and its significance in the discovery of real and minute biological objects. Following a discussion of Bichat and Ranvier’s anatomie générale, this article explores the two men’s interests in generality as an actor’s category.

Heredity, evolution and development in their (epistemic) environment at the turn of the nineteenth century

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-113
Author(s):  
Federica Turriziani Colonna
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Research Facility ◽  
Evolution And Development ◽  
Family Wealth ◽  
Material Basis ◽  
Evolutionary Changes ◽  
The One ◽  
Anton Dohrn

During the early 1870s a young zoologist who worked as a Privatdozent delivering lectures at different Prussian universities invested much of his family wealth and solicited his fellows' contributions to establish a research facility by the sea. The young zoologist happened to be called Anton Dohrn. From the time it opened its doors, the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station – or Naples Zoological Station, as it was originally called – played a crucial role in shaping life sciences as it facilitated research aimed at explaining the mechanics of inheritance. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, zoologists attempted to explain how evolutionary changes occur within a population and become stabilized. In so doing, they looked at developmental processes as well as environmental pressure, coming up with different hypotheses to explain inheritance. In some cases, their research was highly speculative, whereas in other cases they conducted cytological observations to identify the material basis of heredity. Research on evolution and development has been carried out in different places, and zoological stations like the one in Naples have played a major role in this story. However, numerous biological institutions active at the turn of the twentieth century have not received much attention from historians.

James Thomas Marshall's correspondence (1887–1895) with Scotland's Alexander Somerville: practical, personal and controversial matters in conchology

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. G. MOORE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Taxonomic Revision ◽  
Marine Science ◽  
The One ◽  
Clyde Sea ◽  
Sea Area ◽  
Molluscan Species

Attention is drawn to the one side remaining of a nineteenth-century correspondence addressed to Alexander Somerville that is housed in the archives of the Scottish Association for Marine Science at Oban, concerning conchological matters. Previously unstudied letters from James Thomas Marshall shed new light on the practicalities of offshore dredging by nineteenth-century naturalists in the Clyde Sea Area; on personalities within conchology; on the controversies that raged among the conchological community about the production of an agreed list of British molluscan species and on the tensions between conchology and malacology. In particular, the criticism of Canon A. E. Norman's ideas regarding taxonomic revision of J. G. Jeffreys's British conchology, as expressed by Marshall, are highlighted.

Sea Urchins and Circuses: The Modernist Natural Histories of Jean Painlevé and Alexander Calder

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Sea Urchins ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Historian

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.

The Cloud‐Astrophysics of Xenophanes and Ionian Material Monism

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander P. D. Mourelatos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Standard Edition ◽  
The One

This article discusses Xenophanes' “cloud astro-physics”. It analyses and explains all heavenly and meteorological phenomena in terms of clouds. It provides a view of this newer Xenophanes, who is now being recognized as an important philosopher-scientist in his own right and a crucial figure in the development of critical thought about human knowledge and its objects in the next generation of Presocratic thinkers. Xenophanes' account has been preserved in Aëtius, the doxographic compendium (1st or 2nd century ce) reconstructed by Hermann Diels late in the nineteenth century mainly from two sources that show extensive parallelism: pseudo-Plutarch Placita Philosophorum or Epitome of Physical Opinions (second century ce); and Ioannes Stobaeus' Eclogae Physicae or Physical Extracts (fifth century ce). In the Stobaeus version, which is also the one printed in the standard edition of the Pre-socratics.

Sr. José, the Worker mélomane, or Opera and Democracy in Lisbon ca. 1850

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-105
Author(s):  
Gabriela Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Bel Canto ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
One Act ◽  
A Performance

Sr. José do capote, a worker and an opera lover, is the monad contemplated in this article. He is a theatrical figure, the protagonist of the one-act burlesque parody Sr. José do capote assistindo a uma representação do torrador (Sr. José of the Cloak attends a performance of The Roaster, 1855), but also an idea that expresses in abbreviated form the urban environment of nineteenth-century Lisbon, the theatrical and operatic sensibility of its citizens, and the politics of their engagement with the stage. This article is a history of Il trovatore and of bel canto claimed for a nascent culture of democracy in nineteenth-century Portugal.

The One-Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 515-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Heuer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Army ◽  
French Government ◽  
Interracial Marriages ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
The One ◽  
Ministerial Decree

In the early nineteenth century, an obscure rural policeman petitioned the French government with an unusual story. Charles Fanaye had served with Napoleon's armies in Egypt. Chased by Mameluks, he was rescued in the nick of time by a black Ethiopian woman and hidden in her home. Threatened in turn by the Mameluks, Marie-Hélène (as the woman came to be called) threw in her lot with the French army and followed Fanaye to France. The couple then sought to wed. They easily overcame religious barriers when Marie-Héléne was baptized in the Cathedral of Avignon. But another obstacle was harder to overcome: an 1803 ministerial decree banned marriage between blacks and whites. Though Fanaye and Marie-Héléne begged for an exception, the decree would plague them for the next sixteen years of their romance.

scholarly journals Evolution in the Brain, Evolution in the Mind: The Hierarchical Brain and the Interface between Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-377
Author(s):  
Leonardo Niro Nascimento
Keyword(s):  
Brain Evolution ◽  
The Other ◽  
Common Source ◽  
Evolutionary Models ◽  
Anatomy And Physiology ◽  
Psychodynamically Oriented ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Shed Light

This article first aims to demonstrate the different ways the work of the English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson influenced Freud. It argues that these can be summarized in six points. It is further argued that the framework proposed by Jackson continued to be pursued by twentieth-century neuroscientists such as Papez, MacLean and Panksepp in terms of tripartite hierarchical evolutionary models. Finally, the account presented here aims to shed light on the analogies encountered by psychodynamically oriented neuroscientists, between contemporary accounts of the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system on the one hand, and Freudian models of the mind on the other. These parallels, I will suggest, are not coincidental. They have a historical underpinning, as both accounts most likely originate from a common source: John Hughlings Jackson's tripartite evolutionary hierarchical view of the brain.

Invisible Architectures

2000 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Basic Problem ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Strategy I ◽  
The Invisible

The ArgumentIn this essay I will sketch a few instances of how, and a few forms in which, the “invisible” became an epistemic category in the development of the life sciences from the seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth century. In contrast to most of the other papers in this issue, I do not so much focus on the visualization of various little entities, and the tools and contexts in which a visual representation of these things was realized. I will be more concerned with the basic problem of introducing entities or structures that cannot be seen, as elements of an explanatory strategy. I will try to review the ways in which the invisibility of such entities moved from the unproblematic status of just being too small to be accessible to the naked or even the armed eye, to the problematic status of being invisible in principle and yet being indispensable within a given explanatory framework. The epistemological concern of the paper is thus to sketch the historical process of how the “unseen” became a problem in the modern life sciences. The coming into being of the invisible as a space full of paradoxes is itself the product of a historical development that still awaits proper reconstruction.

scholarly journals AN IMPERIAL APOSTLE? ST PAUL, PROTESTANT CONVERSION, AND SOUTH ASIAN CHRISTIANITY

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-130
Author(s):  
SHINJINI DAS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Imperial Ideology ◽  
The One ◽  
The Ideal

AbstractThis article explores the locally specific (re)construction of a biblical figure, the Apostle St Paul, in India, to unravel the entanglement of religion with British imperial ideology on the one hand, and to understand the dynamics of colonial conversion on the other. Over the nineteenth century, evangelical pamphlets and periodicals heralded St Paul as the ideal missionary, who championed conversion to Christianity but within an imperial context: that of the first-century Roman Mediterranean. Through an examination of missionary discourses, along with a study of Indian (Hindu and Islamic) intellectual engagement with Christianity including Bengali convert narratives, this article studies St Paul as a reference point for understanding the contours of ‘vernacular Christianity’ in nineteenth-century India. Drawing upon colonial Christian publications mainly from Bengal, the article focuses on the multiple reconfigurations of Paul: as a crucial mascot of Anglican Protestantism, as a justification of British imperialism, as an ideological resource for anti-imperial sentiments, and as a theological inspiration for Hindu reform and revivalist organization.

scholarly journals Dynamics of Continuity and Change: Shifts in Labour Relations in the Potosí Mines (1680–1812)

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (S24) ◽  
pp. 93-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossana Barragán Romano
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Sectors ◽  
Labour Relations ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
The One

AbstractLabour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.

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