GLADSTONE, DEVELOPMENT, AND THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORY, 1840–1896

Between 1885 and 1891, the Liberal statesman William Ewart Gladstone debated the scientific status of the Book of Genesis with the natural historian Thomas Henry Huxley in a series of articles published in the Nineteenth Century. Viewed in isolation, this episode has been seen as a case of a professional scientist dismissing an amateur interloper. This article repositions this familiar dispute as one chapter in Gladstone's lifelong engagement with the concept of historical ‘development’, the unfolding or evolution of Providence to human reason over time, a concept which came to prominence in the 1840s, in both Tractarian theology and in natural history. Gladstone consistently advocated an accommodation between transmutation and natural theology based on a probabilist ontology derived from the eighteenth-century Anglican churchman Joseph Butler (1692–1752). That understanding of historical truth to which Gladstone credited his ability to discern when political issues became ripe for agitation demanded a humble, Christian moral temper that embraced doubt and salutary suffering, rather than certainty and whiggish celebration of progress.

The ice as leitmotif of a life: Erich von Drygalski, writings and photographs

Professional scientist-geographer Erich von Drygalski led the first German expedition to Antarctica in 1901–1903. The expedition saw itself as purely scientific, which turned out to be at odds with the expectations of Imperial Germany at the time. It was one of the first to use photography extensively and effectively to document and record scientific activities and to shape the public’s image of the work that was being done in this remote and unknown part of the world. Ice was the leitmotif of Drygalski’s life. He had prior experience in the Arctic, and the year spent in Antarctica confirmed his nuanced way of viewing the ice: on the one hand, and foremost, scholarly and objective, while still appreciating its aesthetic qualities; on the other, infused with feelings of human vulnerability. Using discourse analysis, this article examines Drygalski’s published work and photographs he chose to illustrate it, in order to investigate what the ice meant to him. In his writings, it was the scholarly, objective attitude which predominated and this may have contributed to the generally lacklustre reception of his Antarctic achievements. The photographs he chose to illustrate his published work, however, were many and varied, often capturing the awe-inspiring beauty of the ice and contributing to good sales of his narrative of the South Polar Expedition.

COMPETENCE APPROACH IN THE FORMATION OF EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS (IN THE EXAMPLE OF THE PHD PROGRAM IN PHILOSOPHY)

This article discusses the main positions and orientations of the European approach to education and the Ukrainian realities of their implementation. The PhD program in philosophy and the main "competence" requirements of the Decree of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine on the procedure for the preparation of applicants for higher education, Ph.D. and Doctor of Science degrees in higher education institutions are analyzed. The importance of forming general and professional competences in philosophy is emphasized not only for the formation of a professional scientist, but also for a highly developed person who is able to study during whole his or her life and easily overcome the social challenges of our time.

Popularizers, participation and the transformations of nineteenth-century publishing: From the 1860s to the 1880s

Focusing on the editors, journalists and authors who worked on the new ‘popular science’ periodicals and books from the 1860s to the 1880s, this piece will discuss how they conceived of their readers as co-participants in the creation of knowledge. The transformation of nineteenth-century publishing opened up opportunities for making science more accessible to a new polity of middle and working class readers. Editors, journalists and authors responded to the communications revolution, and the larger developments that accompanied it, by defining the exemplary scientist in opposition to the emerging conception of the professional scientist, by rejecting the notion that the laboratory was the sole legitimate site of scientific discovery and by experimenting with new ways of communicating scientific knowledge to their audience.

Art in Science?

Here are two manuscript pages from articles I’ve written. And there are the ways they appeared in print, in the Journal of the Chemical Society: Dalton Transactions and Inorganic Chemistry, two magazines you are unlikely to have read recently. The context of these images is the following: I’m a theoretical chemist. What you see is the initial draft and final printed version of fragments from two of the >500 articles I’ve written. Articles are the stock-in-trade of the professional scientist. By and large we do not write books; our achievements, such as they may be, are judged by these scholarly articles. In general they’re written in English (well, really in a jargon that has some vague relationship to English), printed in journals with limited circulation (these, among the world’s best chemistry journals, have circulations near five thousand each), glanced at only by other chemists, and read carefully by a few hundred people. On the basis of these articles my work is evaluated and I make a living. That explains circumstantially Figure 19-2, the final printed pages. What about the manuscripts, Figure 19-1? Clearly these are collages. There are samples of writing in two hands on them; one is my own, the other that of the graduate student (David Hoffman) or postdoctoral fellow (Kazuyuki Tatsumi) who has worked with me on this research. In science there is much, much collaboration. My papers typically have two or three coauthors. I pose the question, my coworkers and I discuss an approach to a solution, they do most of the tough work, we talk further, a presentation of intermediate results is made, they’re off to test various unreasonable suggestions I make, they write a draft, and I revise it into a final paper. In what you see in Figures 19-1 and 19-2, each a page of the manuscript of the final paper, I’ve pasted in photocopies of a piece of my collaborator’s draft that I decided to keep. The actual drawings that the scientific journals print are reproduced from India ink originals on tracing paper. These are masterfully done by Jane Jorgensen and Elisabeth Fields, two illustrators who worked with me for many years.

The curious incident of the missing cleaner

ABSTRACTThe first woman to work as a professional scientist in Antarctica was Mariya Vasilyevna Klyonova, during the first Soviet Antarctic Expedition of 1955–1957. Other women were crew members on the icebreakers Lena and Ob’. There is an outside possibility that there was more to one of them than meets the eye. But we shall never know.