Amy Ackerberg-Hastings (Iowa State University)
"Analysis and Synthesis in John Playfair's Elements of Geometry"

The philosophical methods of analysis and synthesis are often mentioned but rarely explored features of mathematics in the period from 1750 to 1850. John Playfair (1748-1819), professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Edinburgh and popularizer of James Hutton's Theory of the Earth, held specific opinions on the areas in mathematics and mathematics education in which analytic or synthetic approaches were of the most value. These views informed his influential 1795 geometry textbook, a revision of Robert Simson's edition of Euclid. Playfair also wrote extensively on the subject of analytics and synthetics in the Edinburgh Review. The paper explores Playfair's ongoing attempts to influence British geometry teaching through such published works. Both his pedagogical aims and philosophical concerns will be explained and evaluated in their mathematical, social, and cultural context.

Timothy L. Alborn (Harvard University)
"Wasted Work: Doctors and Bodies in Early Victorian Life Insurance"

In "Work and Waste," Norton Wise charted the rise of "secular economies" in the early nineteenth century, in which social philosophers like Smith and Malthus attempted to "project the eternal and perfect celestial order into the contingent terrestrial realm of good and evil, growth and decay." He then traced the appearance of a new type of economy based on the earth-bound model of the steam engine, which led to the revolutionary invention of thermodynamics. This paper addresses a different sort of early-Victorian brush between celestial order and earthly contingency, which appeared when life insurance companies tried to make money by applying "Newtonian" laws of human mortality to paying customers. In their efforts to promote the social good of thrift and prudence, actuaries initially overlooked the counterbalancing evil, namely the fact that unhealthy people had a stronger economic incentive than "average men" in insuring their lives. Recognizing this problem forced them to inquire far more closely into individuated bodies than their prior conception of statistical aggregates had ever demanded. To assist in this inquiry, insurance companies hired doctors: first to detect the "evil" of unhealthy bodies after the fact, by testifying at post-mortem lawsuits when companies refused to pay claims and later to detect unhealthy bodies at the time they applied for an insurance policy. This paper will examine the social and intellectual problems which appeared alongside this new partnership between actuaries and doctors. Socially, doctors forced actuaries to revise their traditional means of gathering useful information, which had relied on informal networks and good will. Doctors demanded to be paid for testing the actuaries' pristine tables against the narrow chests and swollen tongues of would-be insurance customers free advice, for them, was wasted work. Intellectually, doctors discovered that examining bodies for insurance companies required a different set of skills than they employed in their regular practice. To discover signs of illness in patients who claimed to be perfectly healthy, they needed to ask new questions and behave in new ways. In the process, they came to include their own bodies in the diagnostic equation: a doctor's tact, tone of voice, and other sorts of body language could make all the difference in extracting an accurate prognosis from an unco-operative customer. Examples such as these confirm Wise's insight about the transformative potential of "real-world" economies in the early Victorian period, in this case the unstable economy connecting customers' deceptive bodies with the law of large numbers. The case of insurance doctors also extends Wise's thesis, by suggesting that the movement from human economies to natural philosophy also worked in reverse: just as the fact of unhealthy bodies forced actuaries to rethink their commitment to statistical laws, the fact of life insurance changed the way doctors viewed the individual bodies of their patients.

Amir Alexander (University of California, Los Angeles)
"Geometrical Landscapes: Dee and Hariot on Empire and Mathematics"

John Dee and Thomas Hariot were near contemporaries and were active in closely related fields. Both were involved in promoting the imperialist project, and each was, at the same time, the leading English mathematician of his era. But while their fields of interest overlapped, their approaches differed radically. While Dee's imperial visions were mainly concerned with justifying Elizabeth's territorial claims through legal arguments, Hariot was promoting the invasion of undiscovered lands by daring and enterprising adventurers. In mathematics, whereas Dee remained faithful to the deductive Euclidean model, Hariot developed highly sophisticated infinitesimal techniques using a non-rigorous intuitive approach. This paper will argue that the contrasts are not coincidental: Both Dee and Hariot applied their vision overseas to their views on the nature and purpose of mathematics. Their respective vision of empire charted for them different geometrical landscapes.

B. Allart (Utrecht University)
"Perspectives on science and its social significance in the Netherlands, 1840-1920"

In the period 1840-1900 much effort was put into the improvement of the level and the status of Dutch science: the educational system-both of secondary schools and of universities-was modernized, laboratories of all kinds were founded, and the aims of the Royal Academy were redefined to improve the exchange of ideas between scientists and government and to stimulate international contacts among scientists. All these efforts resulted in a flowering period of the Dutch sciences from the 1870s onwards. In this period, a denominational segregation took place in Dutch society, which was reflected in all parts of life. Roman Catholics and Protestants founded their own schools, institutions, newspapers and periodicals. Around the same time social-political groups started to spread their liberal and socialist ideas. My Ph.D. research focuses on the ideas about science as they were presented to and perceived by a broad public in the nineteenth century. The main source of my research is found in general periodicals intended to be read by a broad spectrum of readers. As science was a popular topic to write on in the nineteenth century, I have chosen to focus on three debates: the introduction of scientific subjects in primary and secondary education the debate on the priority of pure or applied science and the debate on the social implications of science. I will compare the images of science in Catholic and Protestant periodicals, with those in liberal or socialist magazines. Among these groups different ideas circulated on questions as to what science is, what it should be, and which role science should have in society. Their respective expectations and fears of science, as well as their ideas about political or social regulation of science, will find their places in my research. In this paper, I shall give a reconstruction of one of these debates, and give an impression of several perspectives on science as they circulated in nineteenth-century Dutch society.

S. M. Amadae (University of California, Berkeley)
"From Deweyan public sphere democracy to Arrovian market democracy"

In the years preceding WW II, when communism and totalitarianism seemed pitted against freedom and democracy, public intellectuals such as John Dewey conceived of democratic societies as operating with the same norms as scientific communities. Both democracy and science were predicated on free and open exchange among equals who espoused the values of universalism and cosmopolitanism. However, in the post-war world, market logic engulfed the polis when Kenneth Arrow and other social scientists investigated democratic institutions as the product of self-interested rational actors. This paper explores the impetus behind and ramifications of this shift from an inter-dialogic public sphere account of democracy to a game-theoretic, mechanically equilibriating, market-oriented model.

Peder Anker (Harvard University)
"History of Ecology and Aviation Technologies"

This paper explores the entangled history of ecology and aviation technologies from the eve of the First World War till space exploration in the early 1960s. The focal point of entry is on the importance of aviation technologies in ecological research throughout this period. I argue that the history of ecological zones was closely related to the history of aviation through trading between ecological science and technological know-how. The first part of the paper explores ecological surveys of Africa by British and South African ecologists in the 1920s and 30s, with a special emphasis on the work of Ray Bourne. I will argue that the practical aspect of these surveys often was done by pilots with experience from surveying defense lines during the First World War, whose technological experience in handling aerial photography was crucial for scientific delineation of ecological life zones. The next part discusses the development of aviation technologies during the Second World War with a focus on how instruments for precise bomb-dropping improved aerial photography crucial to ecologists. The case in mind here is the trading of knowledge between a firm called the Hunting Aerosurveys Ltd. run by former members of the Royal Air Force and ecologists within the International Biological Programme. The final part of the paper focuses on how ultimately the image of the earth as one global ecological zone was made possible through human ecology in space flight research and photographs of the entire earth as seen from space.

Roger Ariew (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)
"Descartes, the Jesuits, and the Scotists"

I argue that the philosophical context in France during the early 1600s was predominantly Scotist and not Thomist. That fact has been obscured in part because Etienne Gilson, the great French Cartesian commentator, wrote as if all seventeenth century textbook authors were Thomists: Gilson's Index scolastico-cartésian compared Descartes with Thomas Aquinas, the Coimbrans, Francisco Suarez, Franciscus Toletus, Antonius Rubius, and Eustachius a Sancto Paulo-that is, Thomas, (Iberian and Roman) Jesuits, and Eustachius, a Paris doctor. Contra Gilson, an analysis of Eustachius' works quickly shows that every metaphysical/cosmological doctrine one would call Scotist was held by him: the univocity of being matter having being apart from form space a radically relational time as independent of motion the plurality of forms the theory of distinction, including the formal distinction individuation as haecceity, that is, a form being in general as the proper object of the human intellect; etc. It is clear that Eustachius was propounding common Parisian doctrines (with other, such as Charles FranŮois d'Abra de Raconis and Scipion Dupleix), that these opinions became dominant (even with later Jesuits such as Pierre Gaultruche), and that they were often issued self-consciously as anti-Thomist-that the categories, Thomist, Scotist, were actors' categories for seventeenth century scholastics. Finally, the essay suggests ways in which this knowledge might open up interpretive paths for understanding Descartes himself.

Eric H. Ash (Princeton University)
"Experience, Expertise, and Elizabethan Arctic Navigation"

Although Elizabethan merchants desperately wanted to find a dependable trade route to Asia, they were hampered by Iberian control of both the southeast and southwest routes. This necessitated either a long and hazardous overland route, or the discovery of a sea route to the northeast or northwest. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, numerous expeditions were launched with the discovery of such a route as their primary or secondary objective. These voyages were sponsored by merchants and bureaucrats, who held large financial stakes in the outcome but they were undertaken by professional officers and seamen, men who acquired their knowledge of navigation by practicing their trade on the waves. This paper will explore different expectations and strategies regarding arctic navigation, from the perspectives of both the mariners and the merchant adventurers who sponsored their voyages. The high financial stakes for the merchant adventurers led them to use every means available to prepare their navigators as thoroughly as possible, and toward that end they often employed the tutorial services of mathematicians and "theoretical navigators," such as John Dee. For some of the mariners, the mathematical lessons were of certain value, and at least a few went on to mathematical and theoretical prominence themselves. For others however, it must be doubted whether or not any value was gleaned from their lessons yet it may also be debated whether a lack of mathematical mastery disqualified one from navigational "expertise." What, indeed, does such a term mean? Is the expert navigator one who has a firm grasp of the mathematical concepts behind the science? Or is it simply one who is most adept at plying his trade, and arriving at his destination safe and sound? These questions are especially complicated for the actors in question here, as sailing in extreme northern waters presents special navigational problems, both mathematical and physical this led to increased concern and caution at all levels of a v enture. It is hoped that by examining a series of arctic voyages undertaken over many decades, the notion of the navigational expert in Elizabethan England might be better defined.

William J. Ashworth (University of Liverpool)
"Between the "Trader and the Public": Defining Measures and Markets in 18th-century England"

This paper looks at the impact customs and excise duties had in defining British measures and markets in the eighteenth century. To satisfy the State's insatiable thirst for revenue, techniques had to be found and institutionalized to legitimate and oil the wheels of revenue collection. This manifested primarily in the legal-defining of a commodity's constitution and in the practices utilized to ascertain the amount of duty a manufacturer, retailer, or merchant had to pay through a particular process of measurement. This meant a greater policing of both the ingredients a good contained and the way in which it was produced. In this way revenue demands came to impinge upon the make-up of taxed goods and therefore the market for that particular product. For the purposes of this talk I take the case of spirits and how the process of gauging changed and became more controversial as the taxes on spirits became more important and intricate.

David Aubin (Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques, La Villette)
"From Catastrophe to Chaos: Topology and Modeling, 1960-1975"

During the 1960s and early 1970s, a few renown pure mathematicians suggested they could use some of their concepts and skills to model natural phenomena. Most of these mathematicians were specialists of heretofore abstruse theories of topology. The creator of catastrophe theory, French mathematician René Thom from the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES), near Paris, was one of their inspirational figures. This paper will describe the modeling practices of these applied topologists, and the way they were adopted and adapted by physicists in order to form essential ingredients of chaos theory. This process took place at a peculiar institution (the IHES), devoted to the pursuit of "fundamental research" while depending on the big industry for its funding. This paradoxical situation led the Institut to promote the development of general languages potentially applicable to many areas-a characterization that no doubt applies to catastrophe theory. The most intriguing feature of the story is that the modeling practices of catastrophe theory, for which Thom mobilized an abstract philosophical discourse, were transformed by his colleague, physicist David Ruelle, into a new explanation for the onset of turbulence, based on the notion of "strange attractors." The paper will show the parallels between the modeling practices of "applied topologists" and the ideology of fundamental research promoted by the IHES. It will moreover pay attention to a political context in which the social role of mathematics is increasingly called into question and present catastrophe theory (as well as chaos?) as a possible solution to the problem posed by many mathematician: how to do a mathematics directed towards "socially-positive goals," to use an expression of Steve Smale, one of the "applied topologists" whose work will be examined. Finally, the evolution of the meaning and uses of "mathematical models" will be examined in context.

Dolores L. Augustine (St. John's University)
"The Role of Technical Experts in the Early East German Semi-Conductor Industry: Innovators, System Critics or Drones?"

This paper focuses on the role of engineers, physicists, and other technical experts and administrators in research and development in the early semi-conductor industry of Communist East Germany. It looks at major issues facing the semi-conductor industry, Particularly those issues which led to discussions and disagreements between these technical experts, enterprise administrators, and central government officials. These issues include the following: To what extent did the Soviet Union provide technological assistance to the East Germans? Could a small country like the GDR try to develop and produce the full range of electronic components? Should a small country like the GDR always try to keep up with top technologies, or should the GDR make do with less high-tech solutions? How should resources be divided between production and basic research? Were technical experts highly motivated? What impact did the brain drain and the building of the Berlin wall have on experts in the semi-conductor industry? Research for this paper was conducted in the following archives: Party and Party Organizations archives of the Federal German archive (SAPMO) in Berlin, Provincial Archive of Berlin, Provincial Archive of Brandenburg.

Andrew Backe (University of Pittsburgh)
"The Origin of John Dewey's Views on the Reflex Arc"

In an 1896 paper entitled "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology," John Dewey noted that the reflex arc idea employed in psycho-physical experimentation mistakenly presupposed that stimulus and response are distinct physical existences. Dewey argued instead that stimulus and response receive their meaning only through their function in a unified activity, an idea which served as the foundation for the functionalist movement in American psychology at the turn of the century. Historians have generally argued that Dewey's views on the reflex arc originated in the naturalistic psychology of William James. In my paper, I cite an unpublished letter from Dewey to James along with two of Dewey's comprehensive course syllabi to argue that Dewey's ideas were very different from and quite critical of James' naturalistic views. I trace Dewey's views instead to Hegel's holism, noting that Dewey's discussions of the reflex arc explicitly advanced the Hegelian position that truth manifests itself only in a unified and whole activity, the distinct phases of which emerge only for the sake of the activity's development.

Daniela Barberis (University of Chicago)
"Philosophy and the autonomy of sociology in fin-de-siecle France"

Long at the summit of the hierarchy of knowledge, philosophy found itself challenged by pretensions to autonomy of the sciences morales (sociology and psychology) at the turn of the century. This opened the question of what was philosophy's true realm of competence. In this paper, I will place Durkheimian sociology in the context of these debates and show that while it is true that sociology gained partial autonomy from philosophy at the turn of the century, its institutionalization remained incomplete. Philosophy remained the source of legitimation of the objects and methods of the sciences of man, as is witnessed by the concern shown by sociologists and psychologists to publish in philosophical journals, even when they were already equipped with their own disciplinary journals, in principle better adapted to their project. It is even doubtful that Durkheim's goal was to sever sociology from philosophy. Rather, it is arguable that he wished to offer a new, sociological basis for philosophy. His attempt to show the sociological origins of the categories of thought certainly supports this contention.

Richard Beyler (Portland State University)
"Teaching Outside the Comfort Zone of One's Disciplinary Expertise"

Half of my appointment at Portland State University is in the University Studies Program, a comprehensive general education program for undergraduates. Specifically, I teach in a year-long (three quarters) interdisciplinary, team-taught course for first-year students, Understanding Our Pluralistic Society. As this class is intended as an overarching introduction to the college experience, and deliberately NOT as an "Introduction to ..." any particular discipline, the pedagogical challenge I face is to teach good writing, research, and/or skills that are not specifically historical writing, research, or other skills. What is the "college" experience, abstracted out from any particular disciplinary perspective? I also face the challenge of being regarded as the team's "expert" on all matters historical as well as all matters scientific-almost always a stretch. What is the proper approach to take towards teaching content that is outside one's comfort zone?

Marvin Bolt (Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum)
"John Herschel's Natural Philosophy-Habits for a Scientific Hobby "

John Herschel's natural philosophy, as summarized in his Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830), has long been considered a continuation of Francis Bacon's New Organon. Commentators have frequently interpreted both as promoting a naive, inductivist methodology. I argue rather that Herschel promotes the rules of induction, more well-known in their sanitized version as Mill's Methods, as the means by which sciences begin, the most appropriate approach employed by amateurs, and as good habits for scientific investigators. A careful reading of the Discourse and of Herschel's more specialized essays reveals also that Herschel explicitly encourages and defends the use of hypothetical reasoning. Herschel promotes this methodology, the one he used in his own extensive investigations, as an important technique used by experts. Herschel's central role in the rise of science and of the philosophy of science in the nineteenth century make it imperative that we obtain a more accurate understanding of the doctrines he disseminated to practitioners of science, philosophers of science, and to popular audiences of the Victorian era. This paper summarizes a dissertation providing the beginning of this broader task.

Francesca Bordogna (Northwester University)
"Philosophy and the Human Sciences in the Work of William James: James's "Temperament Thesis" in Context"

This paper offers new light on the controversial issue of the relationship between philosophy and the human sciences in the work of William James. Focusing on one example, James's "temperament thesis," I will argue that, at a time when the institutional and professional boundaries separating philosophy from psychology and the human sciences were being built, James emphasized the crucial importance of a close cooperation among those fields. I will also claim that some of the key aspects of James's pragmatism can be better understood by placing that kind of philosophy in the context of fin-de-siecle human sciences, in particular psychology. In his Pragmatism, James notoriously argued that a person's philosophical views depend and ought to depend on that person's temperament. While philosophers have long debated the epistemological implications of that claim, nobody ever asked what James meant by "temperament." In my view, this question can be answered only by reading James's texts in the background of late-19th-century psychology. Focusing on contemporary works in general psychology and in the so-called "new science of character"-a late-19th-century response to J. S. Mill's appeal for a scientific study of character-I argue that James drew a difference between "temperament" and "character": while he viewed the latter as a moral construct in the Kantian tradition, James understood temperament as a congeries of emotional, passional, and aesthetic factors rooted in the physiology of the nervous system. This contextual reading sheds some light on the role played by temperament within James's epistemology: by placing temperament at the root of a person's philosophical view, James was able to restate a psychological conception of knowledge as an intellectual as well as psychological and physiological process, in which the psycho-physiological make-up of the knower plays a crucial role. Furthermore, by showing that James's notion of temperament was rooted in the work of contemporary psychologists, this reading provides an example of a practice which I described at length in my dissertation: namely, James' free transference of notions and theories from psychology and the human sciences into philosophy. Indeed, temperament, lying at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics, enabled James to practice philosophy as a pursuit tightly linked to the human sciences.

Peter J. Bowler (Queen's University of Belfast)
"The "Gorilla Sermons" of Bishop E. W. Barnes: Evolutionism and Religion in Early Twentieth-Century Britain"

Historical studies of the relationship between evolution theory and religion tend to concentrate on the late nineteenth century, or on the rise of Fundamentalism in early-twentieth-century America. Yet there were still extensive debates in Britain continuing into the 1920s and 1930s. In the Anglican church, the Modernist movement hoped to produce a form of Christianity compatible with the latest developments in science, focusing in particular on a reinterpretation of Original Sin which eliminated the old belief in a Fall from a state of perfection. The "gorilla sermons" of Bishop E. W. Barnes attracted much attention in the popular press by arguing that many clergy had still not accepted the full implications of evolutionism. Barnes was trained as a mathematician and was in contact with some scientists, including R. A. Fisher. He absorbed some of Fisher's ideas about Darwinism and shared his support for eugenics. In this respect his views clashed with a rival interpretation of Modernism promoted by Charles Faven, which retained support for a teleological form of evolutionism.

Eric Boyles , Mark Largent , and Sally Kohlstedt (University of Minnesota)
"Enhancing a Course Using the WWW"

In the fall of 1997, we developed a completely new course on "The History of Science and Technology in 20th Century America" for the Honors Program at the University of Minnesota. The course was designed to meet the University's basic history requirement and an ethics requirement as well. Our pedagogical goals for using the computer included teaching students to "read" visual materials, enhancing their learning through writing and discussion, and increasing contact among them and with the instructors. We used eleven different on-line devices in order to see what worked best in conjunction with our otherwise standard lecture/discussion class. The presentation will highlight several features that worked well and mention those that proved either useless or unsatisfactory. We have the site still on-line and will have an updated version at the time of the HSS meeting next fall: http://www.umn.edu/scitech. NOTE: Doctoral candidates Eric Boyles and Mark Largent TAed the course Boyles designed the web site, Largent graded many of the on-line and in-class assignments. Sally Kohlstedt designed and taught the course.

Robert M. Brain (Harvard University)
"The Chaos of Value-Standards: Workers, Wastrels, and Webers in Wilhelmine Germany"

From 1903 to 1911 Max Weber published a series of papers and monographs challenging what he called "the world-image" of energetics, as promoted by such diverse figures as Wilhelm Ostwald, Ernest Solvay, and Emil Kraepelin. Weber insisted that the appearances of these laboratory sciences and their grip on the modern world represented the latest instantiation of the long historical themes described in his famous monograph, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," whose writing and defense coincided with his work on energetics. This paper shall examine Weber's critique, with particular reference to his attack on Kraepelin's attempt to institute a laboratory psycho-physics of industrial work. Weber's attempt to block the extension of the laboratory to the factory and school hinged particularly on the problem of the definition of the physical concept of work, the instruments used to measure it, and its extension to the specifically moral and social domain of human life. In place of the mechanisms of psycho-physiology, Weber sought to expand the definition of "life" in accordance with the views of German proponents of Lebensphilosophie and Historical political economy. Moreover, Weber sought to develop an alternative method of measurement adequate to his alternative ontology of labor: the questionnaire.

Stephen Bromage (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
"William Laurence and the Creation of Popular Consensus for Postwar Science"

William Laurence, New York Times science reporter and official scribe of the Manhattan Project, has been a fixture in the literature that describes and considers the development of the atomic bomb. In most accounts, scholars tell how Laurence, a gifted translator of complicated scientific ideas, wrote about the birth of the atomic age in fantastic, apocryphal terms-in articles, press releases, and speeches-promising that science would soon liberate mankind from war, disease, and want. In almost every account of his career and role in the bomb project, Laurence is portrayed one-dimensionally-and somewhat dimissively-as a shill for the military. Yet beyond his role as "Atomic Bill," Laurence established himself as perhaps the preeminent proponent and popularizer of postwar American Science, and demonstrated a lifelong commitment to educating both scientists and the lay public about the work going on within the science community. Laurence was much more complex than existing portraits reveal, as was his role in communicating science to the American public between 1930 and 1965. By accepting the interpretation that Laurence was simply an apologist for the Manhattan Project (whose writing, in effect, served to deflect criticism and attention from the military's use and control of atomic weapons) we reinforce oversimplified models of how politics, science, and the public interacted in postwar America and miss an important opportunity to consider how popular consensus for government-funded postwar science was forged. Closer study of Laurence's background and career suggests that his science writing was influenced more by the personal convictions about science, politics, and history he had formed as a young intellectual, first-generation American, atheist, well-respected Harvard tutor and finally (pre-MP) Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist that by his employment by the MP and the pressures that put on him. Further more, he came to the Manhattan Project as an established, recognizable, and independent voice of "objectivity" who-when the curtain of secrecy was lifted-gave the MP/government's part-line a certain credibility. In addition to evident skill and boosterism, Laurence brought extensive professional and personal relationships-with scientists, the press, and colleagues-to his MP work, the character of which reflected and shaped attitudes toward and reactions to science, before, during, and after the war.

Nathan M. Brooks (New Mexico State University)
"Academic Chemists and the Chemical Industry in Russia & the Soviet Union, 1900-1930"

Part of the problem related to the explosive growth in enrollments in higher educational institutions without a concomitant increase in staffing or resources for chemistry laboratories. One result was growing numbers of chemistry graduates without jobs upon graduation. Yet few Russian chemists made any attempt to find employment in industry and there was little contact between academic chemists and the chemical industry before 1914. Chemists made various proposals to create new institutions for chemistry, but little was accomplished before the outbreak of World War I. The war changed chemists' attitudes. The tsarist government could not cope with the demands of the war and as a consequence tsarist officials allowed an unprecedented level of participation in the war effort by non-governmental organizations and individuals. Chemists actively contributed by preparing medical supplies and other war-related chemicals. These and other activities brought chemists into direct contact with the chemical industry of the country for the first time. Chemists also began to put into effect the plans drafted before the war for new chemistry institutions which could help the war effort. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, many chemists supported the new regime because it allowed these plans to go forward and also permitted the creation of a whole series of new scientific research institutes during the 1920s.

Matti Bunzl(University of Chicago)
"From Positivism to Historicism: Historicizing the Crisis in Anthropology"

In this light, the interpretive, dialogical, and self-reflexive anthropology of today seems entirely divorced from the positivist paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s-a paradigm that stressed natural scientific precision, objective classification, and the ethnographer's textual invisibility. But while anthropologists frequently remark on the seismic shifts that have recently occurred in their discipline, scholars still lack systematic histories of these transformations. Concretely, I will draw on my research on such transitional figures as Johannes Fabian, Bob Scholte, and Deli Hymes to argue that the positions articulated during the crisis in anthropology represented the crucial turning point from the "anthropology of yesterday" (to use historian George Stocking's phrase) to the anthropology of today.

Joe Cain (University College London)
"Have I Wasted my Summer on this Web Site?"

Documents. Images. Downloads. Search engines. Frames. Java. Super Java. Super-jumbo Java. Sophisticated Web page design involves large investment of scarce resources: money, computers, and especially time. Are Web sites worth it? The promise is enormous. Links to content-based sites dramatically augment local resources. Access to course materials occurs without expanding contact time. Those outside university walls can sample. Colleagues can interlope. We can publish without the time delays and distribution limits of print. Yet the potential for basic and systematic failure looms large. Indulgence is the greatest risk. Add-ons and plug-ins to the basic technology seduce and dazzle. But these largely fail as cost- and time-effective means for reaching pedagogical ends. Cutting-edge sites sparkle, but do they do much educating? Effective, engaging, content-rich Web pages are remarkably simple to design and integrate into instruction. Two basic rules: (1) think--think A LOT--before acting, and (2) keep things focused in the simplest fashion. Start with the obvious: What's my audience? What are they supposed to SEE and DO with this stuff? When, where, with what tools are people accessing these screens? What's tacit about the interface? How much is this ultimately going to cost me (in money and time)? Is anyone really going to use this thing? Then ask the crucial: is it going to be worth THEIR trouble? If you're not sure, go back to the two basic rules.

Jimena Canales (Harvard University)
"The Intelligence Observatory: The Personal Equation in Astronomy"

This article traces the management of personal differences in observation in nineteenth-century astronomy. The solution to the problem of the "personal equation," which accounted for personal differences in observation, relied on theoretical explanations on the nature of the difference and technological innovations (especially telegraphy and photography) adapted for their elimination. The theoretical justifications for disciplining and mechanizing observations plagued by "personality" shaped the observer as a subject for investigation. The race for eliminating the personal equation in the observation of transit stars sharply outlined the concept of "personality" for its investigation by proponents of the new psychology. This article traces the interrelation of two parallel developments: mechanization, discipline and devaluation of observation, and second, the rise in the study of "personality" and its correlation to mental speed.

James G. Cassidy (Saint Anselm College)
"F. V. Hayden and Spencer Baird: Weaknesses in a Relationship"

In recent years historians of science have begun to re-examine the mechanisms and impact of patronage on the development of scientific practice. Their studies of patronage and science have clearly shown that the two more often than not had a complex and frequently changing relationship, as a result of the fact that patronage arises out of a conjunction of intersecting interests, serving the needs of both patron and client. From at least 1852, Ferdinand V. Hayden sought to make a career in natural history; to do so, he appealed for the support of several patrons, and finally won the attention and support of Spencer F. Baird, Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who became one of Hayden's most important patrons or power-brokers. With Baird's assistance Hayden succeeded in making a spectacular career, eventually becoming Director and Geologist-in-charge of the U. S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories from 1867-1878, and became a patron in his own right. As he did so, the relationship between Hayden and Baird changed, and Baird eventually decided to abandon one of his most successful proteges and clients. This paper examines some of the reasons why Hayden and Baird at first established a mutually beneficial client-patron relationship and how and why that relationship gradually fell apart, as a window into the nature of patronage relationships in mid-nineteenth-century American science, especially as they were played out in the context of the federal government.

Juliette Chung (Department of History, University of Chicago)
"A Comparative Study of the Structure of Disciplinary Deployment and Eugenics in China"

Taking on the earlier comparative study of the Japanese historian Suzuki Zenji on the American and Japanese eugenics development in 1900s-1920s, I complicate further the issue of this comparativism by bringing in the Chinese context from which derives a series of intriguing questions about different responses of geneticists toward the eugenics movement, and the interaction between eugenicists and geneticists within the transplanted disciplinary structure of science. As I probe into the scientific infrastructure of biology and medicine, I find two ramifying developments in the transplantation of science from the West. This ramification as being previously characterized "local science" was ingrained with its colonial legacy: 1) a concealed potency to become another colonial science, as seen in the Japanese context of imperialism 2) a hidden agenda to thoroughly root and ramify the transplantation into native soils in order to forestall any further colonial infiltration, as exemplified by the nationalistic expression in China. In order to encompass these two different expressions of local science and their interface with colonial science, I propose to frame them within "transnational science" which provides a more flexible and stable descriptive concept than does either colonial or local science, and yet embraces both and also other possible forms of international cooperation, competition and circulation of the sciences, which might be an outgrowth of colonial or local science. It is important to note that although local science can be regarded as reproducible experimentation with universalistic scientific methods, it should never be seen as a less developed phase as opposed to the well-developed western science in the same branch of knowledge. Rather, I see the local knowledge, metaphorically, as a species growing in its local habitat for its own aim of survival. That is what "transplantation" signified for the people of the host country, and I see this paper more or less a taxonomic study of Japanese and Chinese eugenics. As I perceive comparativism as a mode of writing to express the concept of simultaneity in order to locate intersubjectivity and better discern the conflictual development of Asian experiences of eugenics in particular and modernization in general, it is important to note that comparativism is not necessarily locating parallels when there are no symmetric developments in the contemporary global or historical contexts. Since the eugenics development in China is the principal object of my inquiry, the comparative perspective of the Japanese development illuminates our understanding of the Japanese impact in China, both in the form of linguistic and cultural influences and imperialism. This particular approach will evade a methodological difficulty of indefinitely evoking comparative parallels and their contexts, while trying to identify merely similarity in order to construct parallels.

David Clark and Catherine Myser (McMaster University and University of Vermont College of Medicine)
"Spectacular Bodies: On the Subjection of Conjoined Twins"

Building on two previously published studies, our paper explores how conjoined (or "Siamese") twins trouble our conceptions of embodiment, challenging normative expectations about the nature of the self and of the body. But this challenge is often met with a ferocious counter-blow in the form of pediatric surgeons for whom conjoined twins are automatically viewed as a medical "problem" that not only demands radical surgical intervention (in which one twin is often parasitized so as to ensure the independent life of the other), but also provides a spectacular opportunity to demonstrate various forms of medical high technology. The question of whether twins should be separated is superseded by the technical question of how they are to be separated. This substitution of one question for another, we argue, arises from a fundamental, if unacknowledged misperception, one that mistakes the bodies of twins (bodies characterized as fused but containing within themselves the potential for being split) for the far more complex phenomenon of the embodiment of twins, the irreducibly subtle ways in which their shared life resists straightforward notions of where one self "begins" and another "ends." Twins are thus subjected, i.e., simultaneously created as a "patient-subject" and compelled to adopt the normative expectations about individuality and corporeality. This process of subjection is especially evident in media representations of twins and their surgical separation, representations that work partly to reinforce and to rationalize for mass audiences the normalizing assumptions about the relationship between the body and the self. These media representations thus act as a kind of alibi for the medical establishment or regime, while also titillating the viewer with images of "exotic" bodies in a way that inherits and adapts the conventions of the freak show from earlier in this century.

Nani Clow (Harvard University)
"Imperial Science versus "the civilizing engineer": Reexamining the Practice versus Theory debates of 1888-1890"

Beginning with the September 1888 British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting and lasting through William Thomson's Presidential Address to the Institution of Electrical Engineer in 1890, an unusually vehement debate of "Practice vs. Theory" was carried out in the pages of England's technical scientific journals. The debate arose out of a controversial series of lectures delivered by the physicist Oliver Lodge in early 1888 which challenged engineers‰ standard notions concerning the design of lightning rods. Additionally, Lodge argued that only a "Maxwellian" interpretation of electromagnet phenomena would allow for the understanding of lightning and for the proper construction of lightning rods. This paper examines the confrontation between engineers‰ notions of practice and the perceived province of theoretical-based experimental physics in this debate. The fundamental issues behind the complex and highly mutable categories of Practice and Theory in this controversy reveals a series of multi-leveled concerns: the competition of authority and power in the emergent field of power engineering; struggles over the formation and identity of the nascent profession of electrical engineering; and the highly troubled boundaries between laboratory-based experimental physics and the experiential base experimental spaces of the engineer in the field.

H. Floris Cohen (University of Twente)
"The Legitimation of Early Modern Science: An Attempt at Conceptual Cleansing"

Like every other human activity, science, too, is in need of legitimation if it is to survive. [Faxed text unreadable here] . . . Scientific Revolution state has been a very special affair-its claim to inescapably universal validity makes it so. It was also, in the period of the Scientific Revolution, an especially complicated affair-shifting social relations in 17th century Europe made it so. In the "polemical" part of my historical/conceptual analysis I examine specific usages of the concept of legitimation was a number of pertinent authors (notably, Merton, Ben-David, Shapin, Biagioli) using Max Weber's broad notion of legitimacy and legitimation as a point of departure (though not as an infallible yardstick). Here we are to meet with some inconsistency and confusion which in their turn have led to surreptitiously promoting the idea that, in its need for legitimation, science in no way differs from other bodies of knowledge. In the "constructive" part of my analysis I indicate that the forward dynamics of the Scientific Revolution from c. 1630 onward is to be understood as made up of at least two motor drives. One corresponded to the claim (made on behalf of mathematical-experimental science, in particular) to universal validity; the other to a desperate need for such a by and large novel mode of understanding nature to gain society support of a novel kind. (NB I'll address a third motor drive I distinguish if time permits, as I doubt it will.)

Estelle Cohen (Harvard University)
"Arguing about Ovaries in the Eighteenth Century"

This paper will examine contextually the diverse ways in which women's reproductive organs were represented in eighteenth-century scientific literature. In particular, it will investigate controversies about women's role in reproduction, highlighting the findings of a group of anatomists in the mid-seventeenth-century Leiden whose redefinition of the female "testicles" as ovaries was publicized by Reinier de Graaf. Their work supported a radically new theory of generation: an ovist hypothesis that argued that both parents contributed to conception and heredity. It is precisely this epigenetic version of ovism, reiterated in anatomy textbooks that circulated widely during the first half of the eighteenth century, that appears to have been lost, rejected, or more likely distorted by subsequent generations of scientific commentators. Controversies about ova and ovaries became especially heated during the early decades of the eighteenth century, and were characterized by a vehemence that is impossible to understand without considering the ideological consequences of assigning women an equal or active role in reproduction. This paper will identify the contestants, examine their grounds for contestation and the ways in which these disputes were communicated (whether they circulated in small-format vernacular books that women could read, for example). It will also seek to explain the particularly hostile accounts of Lamy and Mauquest de la Motte, who dismissed their adversaries as a band of "ovaristes."

Jamie Cohen-Cole (Princeton University)
"Cognitive Psychology and the (A)Political Ideology of Cold War Science"

In the years following World War II, the Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner gave experimental voice to Cold War views of science and society advanced by such men as Vannevar Bush and James Bryant Conant. Bush's vision, inscribed in Science the Endless Frontier and in the institutional architecture of the National Science Foundation, sought to make scientific research successful by maintaining its "purity" through separation from either direct practical concerns or electoral politics. Both Bush and Conant argued that this type of basic science was necessary for the production of defense technology. Conant argued in addition that basic research depended on intellectual freedom and thus could not be pursued by people handicapped by political ideology (such as Communism). Conant went on to suggest the practice of pure science as a model for free society in which citizens could enter into civil discourse and use the basic principles of rational thought, rather than situational specifics, to resolve disputes. These beliefs found experimental support in the cognitive psychology and pedagogical works of Jerome Bruner. Fighting against the dominant, behaviorist trend in psychology, Bruner's structuralist notion of mind held that the essential characteristics of thought rested on the acquisition and use of generic information. Bruner believed that learning occurred when people used such generic structures by extrapolating from the information they knew to acquire knowledge about unfamiliar situations. Thus, like Conant and Bush, Bruner lauded not knowledge of specific data, but the kind of abstract knowledge which would be useful in Conant's free society and produced by Bush's basic research. Bruner's psychology became closely bound to the Cold War views of science held by Conant, Bush and other in the science establishment when he was selected by the National Academy of Sciences to direct their efforts to develop high school science curricula for the National Science Foundation. Subsequently, with waning of Cold War, the rhetoric of pure, apolitical science waned in concert with the structuralist psychology that had supported it.

Martin Collins (National Air and Space Museum)
"Weapons and "Weak" States: RAND, the Air Force, and the Origins of Systems Analysis, 1945-1950"

By the end of World War II leaders from academia, industry, and the military accepted the notion that ongoing scientific and technological innovation were required to prepare for future wars. During the years 1945-1950 there were numerous initiatives for new institutions to promote such preparedness, including the Research Board for National Security, legislation for a National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the Research and Development Board. These efforts were designed, at least in part, to address what seemed to be a crucial problem: The production and use of modern weapons called for integration and coordination among American institutions, yet political tradition emphasized decentralized and pluralistic decision-making in the military and in national political forums. RAND was another yet distinctive institutional response to this challenge. This paper will examine the founding of RAND and its development of systems analysis. RAND hoped that science itself might provide a solution to the organizational conundrums posed by weapons and innovation. I will argue that RAND conceived systems analysis (a program to make a science of the study of air warfare) as a political tool: scientific claims derived from systems analysis could be used to organize political consensus and coordinate planning among the numerous bureaucratic sites involved in Air Force decision-making.

Nathaniel Comfort (Center for History of Recent Science, George Washington University)
"Making Sense of McClintock's Studies of the Races of Maize"

In 1958-59, geneticist Barbara McClintock left an extraordinarily productive-and, ultimately Nobel Prize-winning-line of research to study the races of maize native to Latin America. She found that chromosomal structures called knobs were good evolutionary characters and then-created phylogenies of the various races of maize based on the knobs' appearance and chromosomal position. This work seems a hiatus from the main line of her research as told in the standard McClintock narrative, which leads from her early work in establishing the sub discipline of maize cytogenetics, through her discovery of genetic transposition, to her Nobel Prize in 1983. The Latin American studies, however, were in fact closely connected to McClintock's enduring interest in chromosome structure. At the beginning of her career, McClintock had used knobs when she first distinguished among the ten chromosomes of maize. Knobs and other non-gene containing chromosomal structures were central to her research through the late 1940s, the early years of her work on controlling (transposable) elements. In the 1950s, controlling elements led her into strange theoretical territory, in which she speculated about the nature of gene action during plant development. This work took her increasingly outside the mainstream of genetic thought, which continued to ignore development as too complex yet to be addressed by genetics. After the Latin American studies she began to extend her thinking about developmental change in organisms to developmental change in subspecies and species, i. e., evolution. In moving from development to heredity, as well as in taking an interest in her model organism as a wild species, McClintock moved, almost certainly deliberately, further out of step with the predominant approach then in fashion in genetics, while remaining consistent within the trajectory of her own interests.

Glen Cooper (Columbia University)
"Galen's Astronomical Theory of the Critical Days"

The observations in this paper are based on this author's recently completed edition of the Arabic translation of the De diebus decretoriis ("On Critical Days") of Galen, with translation and commentary, and are derived from close analysis of both Greek and Arabic versions of the text. This research has led to insights both into the history of medicine and the history and mode of textual transmission of scientific knowledge from Greek into Arabic. This intriguing Galenic treatise has not previously been critically examined by modern scholarship, nor has it been available for study to non-classicists. It is unique among all the works of Galen known to me, in that Galen presents a meticulously constructed and persuasively argued scientific theory, based both on empirical data from the Hippocratic treatise Epidemics, and on astronomical parameters from Hipparchus and Aratus. The result was the foundation of the widely practiced astrological medicine of the Middle Ages, in both the Latin West and the Arab East. The critical days were, from Hippocratic times, important among the physician's tools for prognosis, since by using them the physician could pre-determine on which days of the patient's illness recovery or relapse could be expected. In this treatise Galen places the doctrine of the critical days on firm scientific footing by employing an "astrological" argument that was acceptable to his scientific contemporaries. The appeal to "extra-terrestrial" causes was a respected practice in the formulation of scientific theory in Galen's day, and no less a figure than Aristotle had resorted to it in his explanation of change in the "sub-lunar" world. In discussing this "astrological worldview," recent re-assessments of its importance for authentic understanding in the history of science of ancient and medieval times will be referred to. If time permits, something will be said about the comparison of translation with original. This treatise is one of 129 books of Galen on various medical subjects which a re known to have been translated in the 9th Century, either by Hunayn ibn Ishaq or his school. In general, Hunayn is faithful to the scientific meaning of the Greek original, although the structural differences between the two languages preclude a word-for-word translation. There are many passages, however, where, after discounting the possibility of a variant Greek original, the Arabic text contains expansions and interpretations and amplifications of Galen's terse Greek.

Shelley Costa (Cornell University)
"Mathematics, gender and the periodical press in 18th-c. England"

The Ladies' Diary, or Woman's Almanack first appeared in London in 1704 and continued annually until 1840. By its second decade of publication the Diary was well established as a forum for the exchange of mathematical problems and solutions submitted by an avid readership of both men and women. This paper explores several characteristics of this popular almanac, including connections among class, gender, reader interests, editorial interests and the content of the magazine. The paper seeks to identify ways in which this web of relations contributed to the cultural construction of both mathematical authority and gender in eighteenth-century England.

Angela N.H. Creager (Princeton University)
"Models and Materials in Virus Research, 1930-1960"

What do biologists mean when they speak of models and model systems? How have biologists' modeling practices changed during the twentieth century? This paper will examine the way in which tobacco mosaic virus became a model virus in biomedical research, and what that meant for the activities and funding of laboratory research on viruses. The history of research on TMV illuminates two aspects of the virus as a model. The first is the modeling of one experimental system upon another in the laboratory. So, for example, Wendell Stanley's attempt to crystallize TMV in 1935 was inspired by John Northrop's chemical extraction of digestive enzymes like Northrop's enzymes, Stanley treated TMV as a protein. Stanley's subsequent success in producing TMV as a macromolecule served as an exemplar for several other virologists who began to place infected sap and serum in the ultracentrifuge to visualize a host of viruses as molecular agents. Subsequent chemical experiments on TMV emphasized the significance of its nucleic acid component, shaped by a particular reworking of the analogy between viruses and genes in the 1950s. The second usage has to do with how materials which are amenable to laboratory research begin to stand in as models of life processes or diseases. From the late 1930s through the 1950s, as biomedical researchers were mobilized in efforts to combat polio and cancer, both of which were viewed in terms of viral etiologies, laboratory models such as TMV and bacteriophages stood in for human pathogens in the pursuit of medical knowledge. Public funding of medical research often targets these "basic" research models what are the effects on understanding of the actual pathogens or processes of interest? The paper will conclude with some general reflections on the important role of non-mathematical models, serving as analogies, metaphors, or exemplars, in biological research.

Michael J. Crowe & David R. Dyck (U. of Notre Dame & Concord College)
"Calendar of the John Herschel Correspondence and John Herchel's Diary"

John Herschel (1792-1871), one of the leading British scientists of the nineteenth century, corresponded with many of the most prominent scientists of his day. Moreover, he preserved the letters he received. The presenters, along with a staff of sixteen, have prepared a Calendar summarizing and describing 14,815 letters to and from Herschel. This volume, entitled Calendar of the Correspondence of Sir John Herschel, will be published in 1998 by Cambridge University Press. The presenters are also preparing an edition of John Herschel's Diary. In this talk, the presenters will discuss their work on these projects.

Hunter Crowther-Heyck (Johns Hopkins University)
"Laboratories of the Mind: RAND's SRL and Carnegie Tech's Laboratory for Organizational Behavior"

How to study the mind, that most fascinating-and elusive-of subjects? How to bring its operations out into the open where they can be observed, categorized, measured? In short, how to make psychology an experimental, laboratory science? In the early 1950s, a small group of proto-cognitive psychologists influenced by information theory (and other systems sciences) and supported by the military, particularly the Air Force, developed a new approach to these age-old questions. This new approach was based on a new concept-using a system of humans and machines instead of the individual as the object of study-and oriented around a new technology-the electronic digital computer. In this paper, I first will explore the ways in which John L. Kennedy and others at RAND's Systems Research Laboratory (SRL) brought the mind into view in their panoptic Information Processing Centers. Then I will examine how Herbert Simon and his colleagues at Carnegie Tech's Laboratory for Organizational Behavior took what they saw at the SRL and reshaped it, using the computer as their model of the mind. Along the way, I will comment on the significance of defining humans as information processing systems and computer simulations as experiments.

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