Abstracts Archive

The paper will revisit the history of conceptual change regarding the role of genes in development, by exploring the methodology of analyzing narrative practices in research publications. Historians of biology have analyzed the role of metaphors: “field”, “information”, “program” and oth...

Historians of science have recognised that scientists use narrative in many different fields and different domains - not just in the most obvious domains of the natural historical sciences, or in development stories, but in accounting for reactions, in describing mechanisms, in making sense out of s...

In this paper, I discuss the case study of the concept ‘synapse’, focusing on a debate that took place during the mid- to late- 20th century. The ‘war of the soups and sparks’, in which scientists attempted to determine whether synaptic transmission is electrical or chemical, had just ended....

The difficulty of integrating the history of chemistry into general narratives in the history of science recalls a historical (and historiographical) problem of how to deal with “Germany” within the general arc of European history. At most points of European history, defining where precisely “...

For some years, the field of STS has focused on the need to write transnational connected narratives, based on a reciprocal treatment of global and local contexts that describe the dynamics of scientific practices to explain the role of transnational exchange networks and the circulation of scientif...

Diagrams are ubiquitous today, and we learn already at school how to read and make them. Their epistemic status is, however, curiously ill-defined. This was already the case when the term was first introduced from ancient Greek into Renaissance Latin and into the vernacular languages. In the period ...

This roundtable explores several key issues relating to communicating the history of science beyond the community of historians. Historians of science typically report on scientific research, largely for an audience of other historians. Some have reached larger audiences, of course, but those w...

Throughout history, there have been strong connections between science and education, with the history of science very often being a history of students, teachers, instructional sites, and educational activities. Education - both formal and informal - plays an important role in the formation of scie...

In recent years, computer simulations have become ubiquitous in science. They work with huge sets of data, are technologies to study processes, events or behaviour and introduce ways of doing science other than through observation, experiment or theory.  In my paper, I will study the use of comput...

Papers in this roundtable explore the nature of “Early Science” as a term and a discipline that is ultimately defined and limited by its chronological boundaries, while at the same time wide-ranging in its scope. What exactly do we mean by Early Science? How early – and conversely how late –...

The Second International Congress of the History of Science, held in London in 1931, is chiefly remembered for the surprise appearance of the Soviet delegation and the lasting imprint that Boris Hessen’s Marxist reading of Newton’s Principia has left on the history of social constructivist thoug...

Historical memory has served as an important analytical category in social and political history. In contests over the meaning and memorialization of war, genocide, revolution, and national identity, rival groups have often constructed versions of history to advance competing agendas. Collective sto...

All historians of science engage in storytelling. But what about when the science we investigate is itself a science of stories? Examples of narrative abound in natural history, geology, psychology, and in knowledge practices common to many sciences, such as modelling or diagrams. Examining the terr...

Academic journal publishing faces more challenges and opportunities than ever before. This roundtable brings together editors from journals focusing on history and/or philosophy of biology to reflect on where journal publishing in these subfields is headed, how their outlets are contributing, and ho...

Economists developed the concept of ‘marginal utility’ in the late-nineteenth century within several different ‘schools’ of economics.  Their ideas have been seen as sufficiently similar that historians of economics have sometimes taken this to be a case of simultaneous discovery - by f...

2018 marks the 400th anniversary of the controversy over the comets between Orazio Grassi and Galileo Galilei. The appearance of three comets in 1618 initiated a scientific and polemical exchange between the two. A central issue of the debate was the location of the comets, either above or below the...

When is the right time to know something? What difficulties arise if knowledge is created prematurely or tardily? How do fears about the punctuality of knowing shape the tools applied to knowledge problems? And how is the historian's understanding of the past configured by her concepts of time? ...

This paper argues that the out of Africa hypothesis is an expression of Euro-American cultural beliefs that are, paradoxically, anti-social. These commitments can be traced back to the influence of Christian scholasticism on early modern naturalist thinking, where reverence for order and God's imper...

Hardly anything seems more ordinary than the extended, concrete bodies populating the world of experience.  Yet in explaining their manifest properties, physicists must appeal to entities radically unlike the bodies of our experience.  Medieval Aristotelians too struggled to resolve tensio...