scholarly journals Figural Co-Production

Author(s):  
María de los Ángeles Martini

The aim of this article is to provide a critical revision of the notion of “reception” of academic works in general and of the histories of the sciences in particular. This will broaden the scope of the notion in a way that can include the new and unexpected receptions of the history of science in Latin America. To achieve this, I propose the concept of “figural co-production”, which I understand as a set of situated practices where the available cultural resources are appropriated, and that allows for productive interactions between heterogeneous collectives that aim for the configuration of knowledge. This theoretical proposal enables me to analyze Verónica Tozzi Thompson’s appropriation of the works of Steven Shapin and Martin Kusch in her pragmatist approach to the philosophy of history. This appropriation, I contend, can be seen as a case of reception of the shapinian history of science in Argentina.

Author(s):  
Anik Waldow

From within the philosophy of history and history of science alike, attention has been paid to Herder’s naturalist commitment and especially to the way in which his interest in medicine, anatomy, and biology facilitates philosophically significant notions of force, organism, and life. As such, Herder’s contribution is taken to be part of a wider eighteenth-century effort to move beyond Newtonian mechanism and the scientific models to which it gives rise. In this scholarship, Herder’s hermeneutic philosophy—as it grows out of his engagement with poetry, drama, and both literary translation and literary documentation projects—has received less attention. Taking as its point of departure Herder’s early work, this chapter proposes that, in his work on literature, Herder formulates an anthropologically sensitive approach to the human sciences that has still not received the attention it deserves.


Author(s):  
María del Pilar Blanco ◽  
Joanna Page

The transnational transfers of ideas, technologies, materials, and people that have shaped the history of science in Latin America are marked, as in any region, by asymmetries of power. These are often replicated or even magnified in the narratives we have forged about that history. The journeys to Latin America of some of Europe’s most famous naturalists (Humboldt and Darwin, for example) are often depicted as the heroic overcoming by European science of savage local terrains and ways of life. Those epic explorers are recast, in other narratives, as the forerunners of (neo)colonial exploitation in the history of the ransacking of Latin America’s mineral riches to pay for European imperial ventures, repeated in the often-illegal plundering of the region’s dinosaur fossils to swell museum collections in Europe and North America. In such accounts, Latin America becomes the arena for European adventures, the testing ground for new scientific theories, or the passive victim of colonial profiteering, but rarely a place of innovation. It is certainly the case that over the centuries the flow of natural resources, data, and expertise from Latin America to more developed regions has generally been to the benefit of those regions and has not reduced an imbalance of power that dates back to the colonial period.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-339
Author(s):  
Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen

Abstract Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a classic, and it is certainly not forgotten. However, an essential aspect about it has been neglected. That is, Kuhn’s Structure is a book in philosophy of history in the sense that Structure attempts gives an account of historical events, focuses on the whole of the history of science and stipulates a structure of the history of science to explain historical events. Kuhn’s book and its contribution to the debates about the progress of science and the contingency and inevitability of the history of science shows why and how philosophy of history is relevant for the history and philosophy of science. Its successful integration of historical and philosophical aspects in one account makes it worthwhile reading also for philosophers of history in the twentieth-first century. In particular, it raises the question whether the historical record can justify philosophical views and comprehensive syntheses of the past.


The chapter authors detail local engagements with technology and the natural world in Latin America across time and reveal the social, political, and economic conditions that have led to the relative obscurity of such research in a world history of science. Comparative thinking is an important feature in this volume, as it helps situate the issue of Latin American scientific innovation within the global currents of science and understand the particular inequalities they produce and reproduce. The asymmetries that govern the global production of scientific knowledge have certainly affected the kind of science that is possible “at the periphery,” to use the term adopted by many Latin American historians of science. While examining a number of cases from the colonial times to the present, we propose a critical understanding of how such asymmetries have operated. To give an example, the history of science in Latin America has been bound up, since colonization, with that of Spain, sharing its peripheral status in the global history of science. This representation is now beginning to be challenged with greater attention to the “dynamic and multiple” exchanges that characterized the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge in the colonial era and to the particular forms taken by colonial science. A number of chapters in this volume contribute to this new thrust in scholarship on colonial Spanish and Latin American science.


Author(s):  
Marcela Renée Becerra Batán

In this work, I propose some notes for a current epistemological evaluation around Whiggism and presentism in the historiographical proposal of Guillermo Boido (1941-2013). In the first place, I will locate the topic proposed in the shared framework from the “Colloquium of Historiography of Science in Latin America (Argentina – Brazil – Uruguay): Reception, Reflection and Production.” Second, I will refer to some aspects of Boido’s academic career and I will place him in what I identify as a “second stage” of the history of science in Argentina. Third, I will dwell on some of Boido’s writings, particularly on those in which he addresses the questions of Whiggism and presentism. Fourth, I will recover some elements on the treatment of these issues in recent works carried out from the perspective of historical epistemology. Finally, in conclusion, I will propose a current epistemological evaluation of Whiggism and presentism between reception and reflection; an evaluation oriented to sustain a “critical” (Loison 2016) and “pluralist” (Chang 2021) presentism, in the face of the epistemological, ethical and political challenges of our current days.


2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cláudio Costa Pinheiro ◽  
Peter Schröder ◽  
Han F. Vermeulen

The devastating fire in the 200-year-old Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro on September 2, 2018, demonstrates the vital importance of the historiography of sciences and the arts. As most collections have vanished, it is left to the history of science to pick up the pieces and present past developments in their complexity and global entanglements. In this special issue we aim to do this for the work of German and German-speaking anthropologists in Latin America, with a special focus on Brazil, carried out between the 1880s and 1945.


Author(s):  
Allison Margaret Bigelow

Mining in colonial Latin America and the early modern Iberian empire has been studied from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including archaeology and archaeometallurgy; philosophy; art history, visual studies, and material cultural analysis; literary studies; social, labor, legal, and economic histories; and the history of science. This book adopts a language-centered approach that incorporates methods of all of these fields, especially discursive, visual, and historical analysis. The introduction reviews current scholarship in the study of mining and argues for the importance of a new approach to the history of metals – one that centers the knowledges of Indigenous, African, and South Asian miners, refiners, and mineralogists.


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