Book notice Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-2 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9588-3 Authors Nicolas Rasmussen, School of History and Philosophy, University of NSW, Sydney, 2052 Australia Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Gerontologists have proposed different concepts for ageing well such as ‘successful ageing’, ‘active ageing’, and ‘healthy ageing’. These conceptions are primarily focused on maintaining health and preventing disease. But they also raise the questions: what is a good life in old age and how can it be achieved? While medical in origin, these concepts and strategies for ageing well also contain ethical advice for individuals and societies on how to act regarding ageing and old age. This connection between gerontology and (...) ethics is overlooked by both schools of thought. We thus develop this research programme for a systematic geroethics in four steps. First, we analyze ‘successful ageing’ as put forward by Rowe and Kahn as a paradigmatic example of a gerontological conception of ageing well. Then, in a second step, we move from criticisms within gerontology to an ethical perspective; in particular, we want to clarify the problem of the claim of universal validity of conceptions of the good life. In a third constructive step, we explain how the ‘capabilities approach’ could be applied in this context as a normative foundation for the implicit normative assumptions of gerontological conceptions of ageing well, such as a particular choice of functionings, the ethical relevance of human agency, and the resulting claims of individuals towards society. Finally, using a concept developed by the German philosopher Ursula Wolf, we systematically develop the different aspects of the connection between ageing well and the theory of the good life in their full complexity and show their interconnectedness. (shrink)

The human being’s mastery of itself, on which the self is founded, practically always involves the annihilation of the subject in whose service that mastery is maintained, because the substance which is mastered, suppressed, and disintegrated by self-preservation is nothing other than the living entity.

Some of the recent criticisms published during and after the last revision process of the Declaration of Helsinki are directed at its basic legitimacy. In this article we want to have a closer look at the two criticisms we consider to be the most fundamental. The first criticism questions the legitimate authorship of the World Medical Association to publish a document such as the Declaration. The second fundamental criticism we want to examine argues that the last revision process failed to (...) meet the standards for fair, democratic procedures. Although both criticisms deny the formal legitimacy of the Declaration in the most fundamental way, they have never been addressed in detail in a single article. We refute most of the related arguments. However, acknowledging some of the points made, improvements for future revision processes and versions of the Declaration of Helsinki are outlined. (shrink)

The vast majority of empirical research on stakeholder management has traditionally focused on multinational corporations. Only in recent years, scholars have begun to pay attention to the stakeholder management concept in relation to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The few existing studies in this area, however, discuss SMEs as a context free category or remain focused on single country analysis. This cross-national empirical research investigates SME owner-managers' perceptions of stakeholder management in six European countries. The comparative analysis is followed by (...) a discussion of how institutional, cultural and linguistic contexts can influence owner-managers' sensemaking of stakeholder management. Our study questions the universality of specific management terms and proposes that more attention should be paid to the institutional, cultural and linguistic environments that shape economic activity in different parts of Europe. (shrink)

in a nervous system of a given species. This chapter provides a critical perspective on the role of connectomes in neuroscientific practice and asks how the connectomic approach fits into a larger context in which network thinking permeates technology, infrastructure, social life, and the economy. In the first part of this chapter, we argue that, seen from the perspective of ongoing research, the notion of connectomes as “complete descriptions” is misguided. Our argument combines Rachel Ankeny’s analysis of neuroanatomical wiring diagrams (...) as “descriptive models” with Hans-Joerg Rheinberger’s notion of “epistemic objects,” i.e., targets of research that are still partially unknown. Combining these aspects we conclude that connectomes are constitutively epistemic objects: there just is no way to turn them into permanent and complete technical standards because the possibilities to map connection properties under different modeling assumptions are potentially inexhaustible. In the second part of the chapter, we use this understanding of connectomes as constitutively epistemic objects in order to critically assess the historical and political dimensions of current neuroscientific research. We argue that connectomics shows how the notion of the “brain as a network” has become the dominant metaphor of contemporary brain research. We further point out that this metaphor shares (potentially problematic) affinities to the form of contemporary “network societies.” We close by pointing out how the relation between connectomes and networks in society could be used in a more fruitful manner. (shrink)

Epistemology, as generally understood by philosophers of science, is rather remote from the history of science and from historical concerns in general. Rheinberger shows that, from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth century, a parallel, alternative discourse sought to come to terms with the rather fundamental experience of the thoroughgoing scientific changes brought on by the revolution in physics. Philosophers of science and historians of science alike contributed their share to what this essay describes as an ongoing quest (...) to historicize epistemology. Historical epistemology, in this sense, is not so concerned with the knowing subject and its mental capacities. Rather, it envisages science as an ongoing cultural endeavor and tries to assess the conditions under which the sciences in all their diversity take shape and change over time. (shrink)

Continental Philosophy of Science provides an expert guide to the major twentieth-century French and German philosophical thinking on science. A comprehensive introduction by the editor provides a unified interpretative survey of continental work on philosophy of science. Interpretative essays are complemented by key primary-source selections. Includes previously untranslated texts by Bergson, Bachelard, and Canguilhem and new translations of texts by Hegel and Cassirer. Contributors include Terry Pinkard, Jean Gayon, Richard Tieszen, Michael Friedman, Joseph Rouse, Mary Tiles, Hans-Jöerg Rheinberger, (...) Linda Alcoff, Todd May, Axel Honneth, and Penelope Deutscher. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

In this powerful work of conceptual and analytical originality, the author argues for the primacy of the material arrangements of the laboratory in the dynamics of modern molecular biology. In a post-Kuhnian move away from the hegemony of theory, he develops a new epistemology of experimentation in which research is treated as a process for producing epistemic things. A central concern of the book is the basic question of how novelty is generated in the empirical sciences. In addressing this question, (...) the author brings French poststructuralist thinking—notably Jacques Derrida’s concepts of “différance” and “historiality”—to bear on the construction of epistemic things. Historiographical perspective shifts from the actors’ minds to their objects of manipulation. These epistemological and historical issues are illuminated in a detailed case study of a particular laboratory, that of the oncologist and biochemist Paul C. Zamecnik and his colleagues, located in a specific setting—the Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital of Harvard University at the Massachusetts General Hospital of Boston. The author traces how, between 1945 and 1965, this group developed an experimental system for synthesizing proteins in the test tube that put Zamecnik’s research team at the forefront of those who led biochemistry into the era of molecular biology. (shrink)

This paper proposes an outline for a typology of the different forms that scientific objects can take in the life sciences. The first section discusses preparations (or specimens)—a form of scientific object that accompanied the development of modern biology in different guises from the seventeenth century to the present: as anatomical–morphological specimens, as microscopic cuts, and as biochemical preparations. In the second section, the characteristics of models in biology are discussed. They became prominent from the end of the nineteenth century (...) onwards. Some remarks on the role of simulations—characterising the life sciences of the turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first century—conclude the paper. -/- . (shrink)

A rich intellectual encounter, revolving around the hands of the experimenter and those of the artist, highlighting the relation between the sciences and the arts. This book is the first to explore in detail the encounter between Albert Flocon and Gaston Bachelard in postwar Paris. Bachelard was a philosopher and historian of science who was also involved in literary studies and poetics. Flocon was a student of the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, who specialized in copper engraving. Both deeply ingrained in (...) the surrealist avant-garde movements, each acted at the frontiers of their respective métiers in exploring uncharted territory. Bachelard experienced the sciences of his time as constantly undergoing radical changes, and he wanted to create a historical epistemology that would live up to this experience. He saw the elementary gesture of the copper engraver—the hand of the engraver—as meeting the challenge of resistant and resilient matter in an exemplary fashion. Flocon was fascinated by Bachelard’s unconventional approach to the sciences and his poetics. Together, their relationship interrogated and celebrated the interplay of hand and matter as it occurs in poetic writing, in the art of engraving, and in scientific experimentation. In the form of a double biography, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger succeeds in writing a lucid intellectual history and at the same time presents a fascinating illustrated reading of Flocon’s copper engravings. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger is Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany. Kate Sturge is a translator and editor based in Berlin, Germany, and Visiting Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at Aston University, United Kingdom. (shrink)

The concept of similarity plays a crucial role in biology, especially in natural history. Despite its apparent familiarity it has been subject again and again to reinterpretations — it may even be stated that the main streams of theoretical thinking in the life sciences are reflected and condensed in its ever changing meaning. The changing content of the concept is analyzed from Linnaean systematics through classical morphology and comparative anatomy to Darwinian evolutionary thinking. It appears that the meaning of similarity (...) is inseparable from the function of the concept in theory, viz. its operational determination. In addition a remarkable correspondence has to be recognized between the notion of similarity and the conceptualization of an organism as the basic unit of life. (shrink)

Ludwik Fleck, Edmund Husserl : on the historicity of scientific knowledge -- Gaston Bachelard : the concept of "phenomenotechnique" -- Georges Canguilhem : epistemological history -- Pisum : Carl Correns's experiments on Xenia, 1896-99 -- Eudorina : Max Hartmann's experiments on biological regulation in protozoa, 1914-21 -- Ephestia : Alfred Kähn's experimental design for a developmental physiological -- Genetics, 1924-45 -- Tobacco mosaic virus : virus research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes for Biochemistry and Biology, 1937-45 -- The concept of (...) the gene : molecular biological perspectives -- The liquid scintillation counter : traces of radioactivity -- The concept of information : the writings of François Jacob -- Intersections -- Preparations -- The economy of the scribble. (shrink)

François Jacob is known as one of the key figures in the history of molecular biology. His elaboration, together with Jacques Monod, of the operon model and the basic features of the regulation of gene expression in bacteria, as well as the concept of genetic messenger, won him the Nobel Prize in 1965. Both notions were decisive for the novel imagery of molecular genetics in which the notion of information came to stand central. From a close reading, this article tries (...) to reconstruct how the new language of molecular genetics took shape in the scientific writings of Jacob. In particular, it analyzes how the notions of regulation, information, and language came to be articulated, and how this articulation changed and underwent modulations over time. It shows that a scientific language consists of several layers and thus, as a rule, forms a hybrid structure. The time span covered reaches from the early experiments done together with Monod and Arthur Pardee between 1958 and 1960, also known as the “PaJaMo” experiment, to Jacob’s book on the history of heredity, The Logic of Life, which appeared in 1970. (shrink)

Sous ce titre qui rend hommage à la pensée de Derrida, sont rassemblées des conférences tenues par le biologiste Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. Six textes aussi brefs que denses, nourris de vie de laboratoire et de philosophie franco-allemande - de Gaston Bachelard à Bruno Latour en passant par Martin Heidegger et Jacques Lacan, qui donnent à voir un mouvement épistémologique sur le temps long. Tentant de faire dialoguer cet héritage philosophique avec la biologie moléculaire contemporaine, Itérations propose des variations sur (...) l'inconnu et l'insoupçonné dans la recherche scientifique, et sur les systèmes expérimentaux comme contextes déterminants de la production des savoirs - cernant toujours les manifestations de l'Etre comme écriture. Excellente introduction à l'épistémologie historique, Itérations présente également l'un des prolongements les plus féconds de la pensée de Derrida. (shrink)

Had anybody told me at the beginning of my university studies that I would end up as a historian of science, I would not only have shaken my head in disbelief, I would in all probability not even have understood the prophecy. When I left high school, my interests ranged from literary writing to the life sciences. After an initial attempt to study biochemistry, which I aborted after a year, my early university education was in philosophy, with an emphasis on (...) continental philosophy, from Descartes to Spinoza, from Kant to Hegel, from Nietzsche to Heidegger, pretty much the curriculum that would dominate the vast majority of the philosophical institutes in German universities in the mid-1960s. Having moved from Tübingen to Berlin, in addition I absorbed early on, as part of a group of students around Jacob Taubes, what came to be subsumed under the label of structuralism and post-structuralism: linguistics and semiotics from the Prague School through Noam Chomsky to Julien Greimas, grammatology from Ignace Gelb to Jacques Derrida, historical epistemology in its latest, Canguilhemian and Foucauldian versions, literary theory as practiced by Roland Barthes, to mention just a few names that formed the horizon of our student reading circles. (shrink)

This essay takes issue with an Allegory of Vision from the beginning of the 17th century. It is part of a cycle of five paintings on the five senses jointly produced by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens around 1617, and it belongs now to the permanent collection of the Museo del Prado. The description deliberately concentrates on the botanical elements of the painting. In the first and the last part of the paper, I offer an interpretation of (...) some of the construction principles of this allegory of the visual sense. Emphasis is thereby laid on the multiple facets ofrepresentation with which Brueghel played in rendering the diverse objects of this cabinet. In the middle part, a condensed view of the historical context of Jan I Brueghel’s flower painting is given. Baroque flower painting in Flanders and the Dutch provinces was nourished by the development of the science of Botany in the sixteenth century, by the establishment of an exquisite garden culture, and by a growing commerce with exotic plants. (shrink)

Infra-experimentality. Traces ; Models ; Making visible ; Grafting ; Protocols -- Supra-experimentality. Shapes of time ; Experimental cultures ; Knowing and narrating ; Thinking wild ; Eulogy of the fragment -- Postscript.

My paper draws on examples from molecular biology, the details of which I have developed elsewhere (Rheinberger 1992, 1993, 1995, 1997). Here, I can give only a brief outline of my argument. Reduction of complexity is a prerequisite for experimental research. To make sense of the universe of living beings, the modern biologist is bound to divide his world into fragments in which parameters can be defined, quantities measured, qualities identified. Such is the nature of any "experimental system." Ontic (...) complexity has to be reduced in order to make experimental research possible. The complexity of the research object, however, is epistemically retained in the rich context of an experimental landscape, where the eruption of "volcanic systems" can change the scenery dramatically as the result of particular, unprecedented findings. (shrink)

Integrating pragmatism and phenomenology with science and technology studies Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9484-2 Authors Hans -Jörg Rheinberger, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Boltzmannstraße 22, 14195 Berlin, Germany Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

In this personal note, I wish to recall my first encounters with Jean Gayon in the context of a conference of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of BiologyInternational Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology, an International Colloquium in honor of Marjorie GreneGrene, Marjorie and our collaborations at the Max Planck Institute for the History of ScienceMax Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin in the context of the Cultural History (...) of Heredity project. (shrink)

: The paper aims at an analysis of the oeuvre of the French historian of science and epistemologist Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962). Bachelard was the founder of a tradition of French thinking about science that extended from Jean Cavaillès over Georges Canguilhem to Michel Foucault. In the past, he has become best known and criticized for his postulation of an epistemological rupture between everyday experience and scientific experience. In my analysis, I emphasize another aspect of the work of Bachelard. It is (...) the way he conceptualizes the relation between scientific thinking and technology in modern science. Within this framework, the notion of "phenomenotechnique" is of crucial importance. It is one of the organizing concepts of Bachelard's historical epistemology, and it serves as the organizing center of this paper. (shrink)

The circumstances under which classical genetics became established at the turn of the nineteenth century have become an integral part of the standard narrative on the history of genetics. Yet, despite considerable scholarly efforts, it has remained a matter of debate how exactly the so-called 'rediscovery' of Mendel's laws came about around 1900. In this situation, unpublished research records can be invaluable tools to arrive at a more substantial and more satisfying picture of the order of historical events. This paper (...) makes extended use of the research protocols covering Carl Correns' hybridisation experiments with Pisum sativum between 1896 and 1899. The resulting reconstruction sketches the portrait of a scientist following a particular research question — xenia — struggling with his experimental material, and slowly building up an epistemic regime in which questions and observations could acquire a relevance which did not strike Correns when he first took note of them. The microhistorical gaze through the magnifying glass of research notes reveals the kind of delays that appear to be constitutive for empirically-driven thinking in general. The research notes of Correns help not only to make this point, they also display some of the intricacies and material peculiarities which characterise the experimental process of hybridisation and the particular type of inferences it allows one to make. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe paper is divided into the two parts. In the first, I examine the relations among molecular biology, gene technology, and medicine as some aspect of the consequences of these relations with respect to the human genome project of the consequences of these relations with respect to the human genome project. I argue that the prevailing momentum of early molecular biology resided in argue that the prevailing momentum of relay molecular biology resided in crating the technical means for an (...) extracellular representation of intracellular configurations. Assuch, its medical impact was rather limited. With the advent of recombinant DNA technology is based on the prospects of an intracellular representation of extracellular projects—the “rewriting” of life. Its medical impact is potentially unlimited. In the second part, I question the very opposition between nature and culture that implicitly underlies the notion of medicine as a “cultural system.” I argue that both on a macroscopic level and on a microscopic level, the “natural” and the “social” are no longer to be seen as ontologically different.In its uncanny oscillation between retrospection and foresight, between description and proclamation, and between assertion and hesitation, this essay translates an uneasiness that I have not been able to overcome while writing it. The essay conveys the tangled views of a hybrid author who himself cannot but oscillate between the perspectives of an actor in the field of molecular biology, a participant in the field of science studies, and a citizen. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Räume des Wissens" verfügbar.

There is a longstanding and ongoing controversy about whether Buffon is to be regarded as a forerunner of evolutionism in the eighteenth century, or even as one of the founders of transformistic biology. There are good reasons to deny this claim. There are good reasons even to deny that the question which is going to be answered negatively is of particular importance. The present paper addresses the issue from a different angle. It analyzes the concept of time operative in the (...) natural history writings of Buffon, and it delineates the articulation of the concepts of time, change, and history with its organizing impact on Buffon's discourse on earth and organisms. It is argued that although with his species concept Buffon tries to introduce the classical notion of a physical system into biology, in order to do so, he has to subvert it by an element of time. This guides him in considering various aspects of organic change, but by itself does not lead to a general perspective of transformation. On the other hand, in his Epoques de la nature, Buffon introduces a general law of geological change, thus arriving at something which could be called a physically intelligible history. The conquest of natural history by physics, in one and the same movement, leads to a subversion of physical geology by history, and prevents biology from becoming evolutionistic in the sense in which the nineteenth century understands this term. (shrink)

Cet article porte sur la collaboration entre le philosophe des sciences Gaston Bachelard et le graveur sur cuivre Albert Flocon durant la première décennie suivant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. De leurs échanges résultèrent plusieurs ouvrages dont le contenu est analysé ici.

The paper deals with the engraving hand of Albert Flocon and its poietic description by the pen of Gaston Bachelard. It proceeds by discussing examples of the group of collaborative works that emerged from the cooperation between Flocon, the copperplate engraver and theoretician of perspective and Bachelard, the philosopher of science and scholar of literary images in mid-twentieth century Paris.