scholarly journals Early Days of the History of Science in Uruguay

Author(s):  
María Laura Martínez

In this article, I provide an initial approximation to the establishment and the early stages of the history of science in Uruguay. To do so, I focus on the first courses on the subject dictated in Uruguay and the first figures—both local and foreign—that took part in the process. With this objective, first, I examine the introduction of the discipline into the Río de la Plata—and into Argentina more particularly—via the arrival of European historians. I then analyze the role played by some of the first most significant figures in the history of science in Uruguay in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Finally, I explore and briefly describe the first courses dictated at the Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias (School of Humanities and Sciences) of the Universidad de la República (University of the Republic) during the mid-twentieth century.

Author(s):  
Brent A. R. Hege

AbstractAs dialectical theology rose to prominence in the years following World War I, the new theologians sought to distance themselves from liberalism in a number of ways, an important one being a rejection of Schleiermacher’s methods and conclusions. In reading the history of Weimar-era theology as it has been written in the twentieth century one would be forgiven for assuming that Schleiermacher found no defenders during this time, as liberal theology quietly faded into the twilight. However, a closer examination of this period reveals a different story. The last generation of liberal theologians consistently appealed to Schleiermacher for support and inspiration, perhaps none more so than Georg Wobbermin, whom B. A. Gerrish has called a “captain of the liberal rearguard.” Wobbermin sought to construct a religio-psychological method on the basis of Schleiermacher’s definition of religion and on his “Copernican turn” toward the subject and resolutely defended such a method against the new dialectical theology long after liberal theology’s supposed demise. A consideration of Wobbermin’s appeals to Schleiermacher in his defense of the liberal program reveals a more complex picture of the state of theology in the Weimar period and of Schleiermacher’s legacy in German Protestant thought.


Author(s):  
Anna Kołos

The article addresses the issue of one of the more intense and captivating European scientific disputes, likewise common to Poland, in the era of the seventeenth-century transformation of knowledge formation, which centered around the possibility of the existence of vacuum, and which culminated in 1647. The fundamental aim of the article comes down to an attempt to determine a position in the scientific-cognitive debate, from which the pro and anti-Polish and European representatives of The Republic of Letters (Respublica literaria)  could voice their opinions. In the course of the analysis of the mid-seventeenth century scientific discourse, the reflections of Valeriano Magni, Torricelli, Jan Brożek, Wojciech Wijuk Kojałowicz, Blaise Pascal, Giovanni Elefantuzzi, Jacob Pierius, and Pierre Guiffart are subjected to close scrutiny. From the perspective of contextualism in the history of science, experiments demonstrating the existence of vacuum are perceived as anomalies that fall into the crisis of normal science, largely based on Aristotle’s physics. The conflict between the old and the new is not, however, presented as a battle of progression with epigonism, but merely as a contest between opposing individual views and the concept of science, which before the formation of the new paradigm was accompanied by ambiguous verification criteria.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3-1) ◽  
pp. 11-34
Author(s):  
Svetlana Neretina ◽  

The purpose of this paper is to show how the thought and speech of people holding and defending directly opposite positions affect the change in the thought and speech of people of their own and subsequent generations, with different life orientations, and to find ways of this influence. The author describes the situation that arose at the end of the sixties of the twentieth century, known as the ideological dispersal of philosophical, historical and sociological trends that ran counter to the policy of the CPSU, which became especially fierce in the fight against opponents after the USSR’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in August, 1968. One of the results of such an ideological battle was the defeat of the sector of the methodology of history of the Institute of General History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, headed by M. Ya. Gefter, who published a series of books in which the so-called laws of historical development (formational approach) were questioned and the fundamental provisions of the classics of Marxism-Leninism were criticized. The subject of analysis is Gefter’s article “A Page from the History of Marxism in the Early 20th Century”, published in the book “Historical Science and Some Problems of the Modernity”, dedicated to the analysis of Lenin’s tactics and strategy development which changed the views of many, especially young, historians on the historical process, and most importantly - on the methods of seeking and expressing the truth. The differences were expressed primarily in the fact that the proponents and defenders of the Soviet regime, which was based on their own established norms of Marxism-Leninism, fearlessly used all means of pressure on unwanted opponents. Professionals, however, who tried to understand the true sense of the historical process, the sense of judgments about it, especially the sense of the revolutionary struggle against the autocracy, unfolding at the beginning of the twentieth century, were forced to use the Aesopian language, which also provoked a distortion of this sense in many ways: due to the nebulous and veiled expressions, which give the impression of theoretical blackmail, causing such consequences as speech irresponsibility.


PMLA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-163
Author(s):  
William G. Acree

Between November 1879 and January 1880, the argentine author Eduardo Gutierrez published a serialized narrative of the life of Juan Moreira in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Patria Argentina. Titled simply Juan Moreira, the heroic tale of the real-life outlaw went like this: Moreira was a good gaucho gone bad, who fought to preserve his honor against the backdrop of modernizing forces that were transforming life in this part of South America. His string of crimes and ultimate downfall resulted from his unjust persecution by corrupt state officials. The success of the serial surpassed all expectations. The paper's sales skyrocketed, and the melodramatic narrative soon appeared in book form. Enterprising printers produced tens of thousands of authorized and pirated editions to sell in the Rio de la Plata (Argentina and Uruguay), making Juan Moreira a leading example of everyday reading for the region's rapidly growing literate population and one of Latin America's pre-twentieth-century bestsellers (Acree, Everyday Reading; Gutiérrez, The Gaucho Juan Moreira).


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Noam Chomsky

By mid-twentieth century, a working consensus had been reached in the linguistics community, based on the great achievements of preceding years. Synchronic linguistics had been established as a science, a “taxonomic” science, with sophisticated procedures of analysis of data. Taxonomic science has limits. It does not ask “why?” The time was ripe to seek explanatory theories, using insights provided by the theory of computation and studies of explanatory depth. That effort became the generative enterprise within the biolinguistics framework. Tensions quickly arose: The elements of explanatory theories (generative grammars) were far beyond the reach of taxonomic procedures. The structuralist principle that language is a matter of training and habit, extended by analogy, was unsustainable. More generally, the mood of “virtually everything is known” became “almost nothing is understood,” a familiar phenomenon in the history of science, opening a new and exciting era for a flourishing discipline. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 7 is January 14, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.


1878 ◽  
Vol 23 (104) ◽  
pp. 611-612

On Friday, 2nd November, a deputation of asylum superintendents, members of district boards, and managers of Royal Asylums, waited on the Lord Advocate at his chambers, Edinburgh, with the view of bringing under the notice of his Lordship an omission in the Scotch lunacy law, there being no provisions at present for granting pensions to old and deserving officers in the Scotch district and parochial asylums, as in England and Ireland. The deputation consisted of Professor Balfour, Professor Maclagan, Dr. Fraser, ex-Bailie Miller, Mr. D. Scott Moncrieff, W.S., Mr. Cowan, of Beeslack, Dr. Cameron, Lochgilphead; Dr. Jamieson, Aberdeen; Dr. Anderson, Rosewell; Dr. Grierson, Melrose; Dr. Wallace, Greenock; Dr. Makintosh, Murthly; Dr. Rutherford, Lenzie; Dr. Ireland, Larbert; Dr. Clouston, Morningside; Dr. Rorie, Dundee; Dr. Howden, Montrose, &c. The deputation were introduced by Professor Maclagan, who strongly supported the views of the deputation. Dr. Mackintosh, addressing his Lordship, said—The reasons which have caused the medical and other officers of the public asylums of Scotland to come before you are, I think, fairly set forth in the petition which was placed in your Lordship's hands some months ago. I need not, therefore, refer to them in detail, but would only draw your attention to the anomalous (and at the same time, disadvantageous) conditions in which such officials are placed when contrasted with their brethren in England and Ireland. Most of us had hoped that the matter would, ere this, have been taken up by the General Board of Lunacy for Scotland, but the Board (who received a deputation last February in the most courteous manner) has no intention of moving in this or any other legislation at present. Moreover, the Commissioners thought that the best course was that now adopted—via., to bring the subject before you ourselves. The service which we have the honour to represent is as much a public service as the army and navy, or as the civil and parochial services, and perhaps it is not exceeded by any of them in the increasing attention which is necessary, or by the harassing nature of the duties. It therefore seems the more reasonable (besides being a simple act of justice) to place the service on a footing in regard to superannuation allowances similar to that occupied by the public asylums of England and Ireland. In urging upon your Lordship the great need for as speedy a solution of the question as possible, we do so in the knowledge that several special amendments of a similar nature have been made. Moreover, we are satisfied that the insertion of such a clause as that indicated in the petition as an amendment into the Act, will be an important day in the history of such institutions, both as regards the efficiency and stability of the staff, and the comfort of the inmates. Mr. Cowan, of Beeslack, as a member of a district lunacy board, also urged the injustice and impolicy of the present law. The Lord Advocate said that he would give the subject his most favourable consideration. It seemed a very proper matter to have been brought before him, the only question being when he could get an opportunity of introducing a clause to remedy the present defect.


1993 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 469-483 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludmilla Jordanova

The production of big pictures is arguably the most significant sign of the intellectual maturity of a field. It suggests both that the field's broad contours, refined over several generations of scholarship, enjoy the approval of practitioners, and that audiences exist with an interest in or need for overviews. The situation is somewhat more complicated in the history of science, since the existence of big historical pictures precedes that of a well-defined scholarly field by about two centuries. Broadly conceived histories of science and medicine were being written in the eighteenth century, when such an all-encompassing vision was central to the claims about the progress of knowledge upon which Enlightenment ideologues set such store. The Plato to Nato style histories, characteristic of the earlier twentieth century, were written largely by isolated pioneers, and while these were used in teaching as the field was becoming professionalized, recent scholars have preferred to concentrate on a monographic style of research. Despite the existence of the series started by Wiley, and now published by Cambridge University Press, it is only in the last ten years or so that more conscious attempts have been made to generate a big-picture literature informed by new scholarship. It is noteworthy that most of this is addressed to students and general readers, although there is no logical reason why it should not tackle major theoretical issues of concern to scholars. My point about maturity still holds, then, since as a designated discipline the history of science is rather new; it is still feeling out its relationship with cognate disciplines. Big-picture histories have an important role to play in these explorations since they make findings and ideas widely available and thereby offer material through which ambitious interpretations can be debated, modified and transformed.


1962 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-221
Author(s):  
Murdo J. MacLeod

The Republic of Haiti is not a country of the twentieth century. Plagued by questions of race and color, illiteracy, an exhausted soil, a population explosion, a history of ineffectual and corrupt governments, and the worst poverty of the hemisphere, little has been accomplished since independence in the welter of civil wars, coups d'état, and assassinations. An inevitably large body of social legislation, therefore, does not hide the fact that the Haiti of today is a poor, underdeveloped land, relying for its food on archaic and destructive agricultural methods, packed rather than inhabited by a cheerful but disease-ridden negro people.


2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA KRYLOVA

‘Modernity’ has long been a working category of historical analysis in Russian and Soviet studies. Like any established category, it bears a history of its own characterised by founding assumptions, conceptual possibilities and lasting interpretive habits. Stephen Kotkin's work has played a special role in framing the kind of scholarship this category has enabled and the kind of modernity it has assigned to twentieth-century Russia. Kotkin's 1995Magnetic Mountainintroduced the concept of ‘socialist modernity’. His continued work with the concept in his 2001Kritikaarticle ‘Modern Times’ and his 2001Armageddon Avertedmarked crucial moments in the history of the discipline and have positioned the author as a pioneering and dominant voice on the subject for nearly two decades. Given the defining nature of Kotkin's work, a critical discussion of its impact on the way the discipline conceives of Soviet modernisation and presents it to non-Russian fields is perhaps overdue. Here, I approach Kotkin's work on modernity as the field's collective property in need of a critical, deconstructive reading for its underlying assumptions, prescribed master narratives, and resultant paradoxes.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 467-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Hawkins

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the development of marketing practice in Britain from the ancient to the early twentieth century. It builds upon the author’s chapter in the 2016 Routledge Companion to the History of Marketing. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on a review of secondary history and archaeology literature supplemented by digitised historic newspaper and magazine advertising. The literature is frameworked using a modified version of Fullerton’s 1988 periodization which has been extended to include the medieval and Roman eras. Findings One of the significant findings of this paper is the key role the state has played in the development of marketing practice in Britain, the construction of pavements being a good example. Originality/value Apart from Nevett’s 1982 history of British advertising and the author’s Routledge Companion to the History of Marketing chapter, this is the first survey of the historical development of British marketing practice. It assembles and presents in a useful way important information. This paper will be of interest to marketing historians, especially students and researchers new to the subject.


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