Si le xixe siècle fut le temps de l’émergence de la figure de la “ grande voyageuse ”, on ne saurait surestimer cette innovation. La hiérarchie des genres de récits de voyage, l’importance du contre-exemple britannique, la condamnation morale de la voyageuse solitaire manifestent assez le sentiment de l’illégitimité du voyage féminin. Pourtant, pèlerines, valétudinaires et touristes se multiplièrent dans un siècle qui fut aussi celui de l’invention du voyage de noces. Cet article tente de prendre la mesure de l’ensemble (...) des normes qui ont alors commandé les pratiques, nombreuses et variées, du voyage féminin. (shrink)

In 1889 Hugo de Vries published " Intracellular Pangenesis " in which he formulated his ideas on heredity. The high expectations of the impression these ideas would make did not come true and publication was negated or reviewed critically. From the reactions of his Dutch colleagues and the discussion with the famous German zoologist August Weismann we conclude that the assertion that each cell contains all hereditary material was controversial and even more the claim that characters are inherited independently of (...) each other. De Vries felt that he had to convince his colleagues of the validity of his theory by providing experimental evidence. He established an important research program which resulted in the rediscovery of Mendel's laws and the publication of "The Mutation Theory." This article also illustrates some phenomena that go beyond an interesting episode in the development of theories of heredity. It shows that criticism from colleagues can move a researcher so deeply that he feels compelled to set up an extensive research program. Moreover it illustrates that it is not unusual that a creative scientist is only partially willing to take criticism on his theories into account. Last but not least it demonstrates that common opinion on the validity of specific arguments may change in the course of time. (shrink)

One of the main features of Italian feminism of "difference," as seen from an international perspective, is its distinctly political vocation. This vocation is not only, nor especially, limited to the perimeter of a gender politics, but is to be found in the radical critique or in the rethinking of traditional political categories, in the invention of new practices, in the redefinition of the very sphere of politics and in the modes of its transformation. The Italian case, as far as (...) feminism is concerned, is also characterised by the fact that this feminist political critique has been carried on for more than three decades alongside a crisis of traditional politics. The aim of this essay is twofold: one the one hand I analyse the relationship between political crisis and a critique of politics as seen in the larger framework of the relationship between the demise of patriarchy and the end of modern politics; on the other, I examine the resources which may derive from a feminist thought and practice in the present season, which, in Italy, seems marked not only by a crisis but by the collapse of democratic politics. (shrink)

The origin and the development of scientific disciplines has been a topic of reflection for several decades. The few extensive case studies support the thesis that scientific disciplines are not monolithic structures but can be characterized by distinct social, organizational and scientific–technical practices. Nonetheless, most disciplinary histories of genetics confine themselves largely to an uncontested account of the content of the discipline or occasionally institutional factors. Little attention is paid to the large number of researchers who, by their joint efforts, (...) ultimately shaped the discipline. We contribute to this aspect of disciplinary historiography by discussing the role of women researchers at the Institute for Heredity Research, founded in 1914 in Berlin under the directorship of Erwin Baur, and the sister of the John Innes Institute at Cambridge. This paper investigates how and why Baur built a highly successful research programme that relied on the efforts of his female staff, whose careers, notably Elisabeth Schiemann's, are also assessedin toto. These women undertook the necessary ‘technoscience’ and in some cases innovative work and helped increase the prestige of the institute and its director. Together they played a pivotal role in the establishment of genetics in Germany. Without them the discipline would have developed much more slowly and along a divergent path. (shrink)

SummaryThis article addresses how and why the Dutch translation of Forbonnais's Elémens de commerce came about and the reasons for its lack of success. It explores the context in which the Utrecht printers and booksellers Spruit and Haanebrink in 1771 published a Dutch version of the first edition of the Elémens. In the preceding decades the deteriorating wealth and power of the Dutch Republic had become a major theme in the transnational debates on political economy. Recent research has established that (...) Dutch authors contributed to this debate as well, initially by propagating neutrality of trade in combination with an attempt reform the staple market system, but increasingly by arguing the necessity of another type of economy. Inspired by foreign examples, a movement of reformative patriotism emerged, advocating a more balanced economy in which international commerce stimulated mature agricultural and industrial sectors. This type of political economy could be found in Forbonnais's Elémens and may have triggered its rendering into Dutch. It was the first in a series of translations instigated by Hendrik van den Heuvel, the organiser of economic patriotism in the Dutch Republic. Spruit and Haanebrink dedicated the Dutch version of the Elémens to him and mentioned Van den Heuvel's recommendation of the French original. The fact that the intended buyers, economic patriots, were able to read the Elémens in French, may have precluded a big sale of the title, but the poor quality of the translation did not help either. However, one should not conclude that the Dutch reading public was not interested in the Elémens. In 1780 Van den Heuvel still recommended another edition in a better translation. Other sources, such as Dirk Hoola van Nooten's Dutch version of Condillac's Le commerce et le gouvernement considérés relativement l'un à l'autre, suggest that Forbonnais's ideas were acknowledged. (shrink)

Las tasas de producción y consumo de alimentos en el mundo se hacen insostenibles. Estados Unidos está a la cabeza de los países que exceden con creces su capacidad en esta materia. La causa principal es la incorporación de combustibles fósiles en la producción de alimentos desde 1950, tanto en forma de energía cinética, como también en los pesticidas y otros productos utilizados en su producción. Según el autor, literalmente nos estamos comiendo los hidrocarburos rápidamente y sin tener ninguna alternativa (...) con la cual reemplazarlos. Sólo un restablecimiento de un equilibrio entre capacidad productiva sostenible y consumo alimentario podría evitar la crisis que se avista en el horizonte. (shrink)

In 1857, a Statistical Society was founded in the Netherlands. Within this society, statistics was considered a systematic, quantitative, and qualitative description of society. In the course of time, the society attracted a wide and diverse membership, although the number of physicians on its rolls was low. The society itself was dynamic, discussing statistical and economic topics at its annual meetings, working to compile a ‘General Statistics of the Netherlands’, and publishing a yearbook. Although the lack of well-organised, official, state-generated (...) statistics played a role in the foundation and continued existence of the Statistical Society, this does not seem reason enough to explain why the society changed its name and stopped being engaged in statistical matters when a central official statistics organisation was finally created in the Netherlands in 1892. Explaining this transformation is important, as the abolition of that aspect of the society was crucial to the development of statistics in the Netherlands. In this paper, I sketch the foundation, history, and the demise of the Dutch Statistical Society and compare some of its characteristics with the English Royal Statistical Society. Through this examination, I try to answer the question why this 19th-century statistical society abandoned statistics. (shrink)

The theory of fiction is systematically locatedbetween different types of discourse, of which philosophy, literary criticism and psychology/psychoanalysis are perhaps the most important. Mythesis is thatempiricist, mainly British philosophical approaches provide fascinatinghistorical models for an analysis of the situation in which we seem caught today between tendencies towards panfictionalization (since Vaihinger) and towards fairly rigid distinctions between fiction and reality. In my perspective, empiricist philosophy is not so much concerned with what isgiven, but with thecontrol of distinctions between the real (...) and the imaginary under complex social conditions. In that sense, it constitutes striking anticipations of present discussions in evolutionary epistemology, cultural anthropology and psychoanalysis. Here the question is whether we can replace the semantics of fiction and reality by a series of distinctions between the experience of what might be called concrete and what might be called abstract. (shrink)

El escándalo mayor para Borges es el tiempo y ante ese horror, sólo cabe para él construir un universo apoyado en la intuición metafísica de que el tiempo es una ilusión. Si la verdad pertenece al mundo de las ideas como para Platón, el tiempo adquirirá su sentido en función de la enternidad, si no tendremos que pensar que la eternidad es sólo una imagen cuyo soporte es el tiempo. En el trabajo se analizan dos obras La muerte vivida, El (...) inmortal donde Borges pone de relieve el carácter dramático de su concepción del tiempo, como circularidad y se comenta Funes el memorioso en que se establece la relación entre ese tipo de temporalidad y la memoria. Borges presenta a Funes como un superhombre al estilo nietzscheano que cae en el mayor error que puede caer el superhombre, tener memoria. Un tiempo circular es un tiempo sin memoria, pero Funes no es un auténtico superhombre, para él, el recuerdo sigue manteniendo esa estructura temporal que se manifiesta en la descripción. (shrink)

This study aims to investigate the role of self-construal in sharpening reputation judgment on earnings management cases. This study involves a personality variable that can provide sharper insights into individual assessments, namely self-construal. The study uses an experimental case with involved participants to judge the ethics of earnings management done by other managers (the target managers). Participants of this study consist of 109 master’s degree students majoring in accounting and management who acts as fellow managers. Participants provide ethical judgment and (...) reputation judgment of the target managers. This study indicates that ethical judgment on earnings management behavior differs depending on the target managers’ self-construal. In addition, ethical judgment has a positive and significant effect on reputation judgment. The following analysis showed that ethical judgment mediates the effect of earnings management behavior that self-construal moderates on reputation judgment. Studies that highlight the impact of managers’ reputation engaging in earnings management are still limited. This study used a behavioral approach, especially involving self-construal, to scrutinize the behavior of individuals within the organization, which is previous studies have not yet involved that personality factor. This research’s results imply that a manager’s response to peer’s behavior is helpful to design an appropriate management control system for organizations. This study only used earnings management scenarios in order to increase earnings. Earnings management can be in the form of actions to increase or decrease earnings. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the interpersonal support, i.e., scaffolding, that agents provide to one another to share emotions. Moreover, the main target of this paper is to identify those scaffolds and their features that effectively function to boost, support, or enable emotional sharing interactions. To do so, I engage with the “multi-dimensional framework of environmental scaffolding” proposed by Sterelny (_Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences_ 9:465–481, 2010). This framework highlights various types of environmental resources, including social and interpersonal factors, that (...) serve as scaffolds for human cognitive agency. Furthermore, the model identifies the functional characteristics associated with these resources, which significantly contribute to scaffolding cognitive (and emotional) performance and skillfulness. Mainly concentrating on social interaction, I argue that individual, familiar social interaction behaviors, shared references, and shared bodily-affective and habitual patterns scaffold the interacting individuals allowing them to effectively share emotions. By examining the functional relationship between these particularly interpersonal scaffolds and shared emotions, I suggest that we can better understand the complex, situationally unfolding dynamics and the versatility of conditions that can boost emotional sharing. As a result, my analysis reveals that there are different types of social interactional scaffolds that vary in familiarity, predictability, robustness, individualization, and mutual adaptation. These features boost and trigger emotional sharing in degrees and different functions and different degrees of these functional features; therefore, different types of social interaction scaffolds are required depending on the situation to situation. (shrink)

Che gli esseri umani siano i soli animali capaci di ridere e piangere può essere messo in dubbio, ma che siano gli unici a sviluppare degli strumenti a questo scopo, non può esserlo. Tragedia e commedia, i due fronti dell’arte drammatica codificati da Aristotele nella "Poetica", sono proprio questi strumenti. La difficoltà a conferire un significato univoco a questi due magmatici termini, è sintomatica. In questo breve scritto tento di identificare la ragione di questa difficoltà e proporre un’ipotesi di lavoro (...) per risolverla, o per lo meno approcciarla. (shrink)