Search results for "Philosophy of Science"
showing 10 items of 808 documents
Die Embryologie im Spannungsfeld zwischen Tradition und Empirie.
1991
Already in classical antiquity people dealt with the principle of formation, developing different theories. Researchers in the renaissance, working in the conflict zone between tradition and experience, tried to prove one or the other of these theories by the means of new observations, especially of chicken development. Aldrovandi was the first to see the real principle of formation of the hen's egg, i. e. the blastodisc, but he didn't recognize the importance of his discovery due to his close adherence to Aristotle in the theoretical field. Fabricius even thought that traditional knowledge was of more importance than his own excellent observations. Parisano was the first to succeed in maki…
Rationalitäten der Wissenproduktion: Über Transformationen von Gegenständen, Technologien und Information in Biomedizin und Lebenswissenschaften
2009
Rationalities of Knowledge Production: On Transformations of Objects, Technologies and Information in Biomedicine and the Life Sciences. Since decades, scientific change has been interpreted in the light of of paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions. The Kuhnian interpretation of scientific change however is now more and more confronted with non-disciplinary thinking in both, science and studies on science. This paper explores how research in biomedicine and the life sciences can be characterized by different rationalities, sometimes converging, sometimes contradictory, all present at the same time with varying ways of influence, impact, and visibility. In general, the rationality of obj…
Not Race, but Grace: Presbyterian Missionaries and American Indians, 1837-1893
1980
Race, writes George W. Stocking, Jr., was "a characteristically nineteenthcentury phenomenon." Historians of articulate racial thought in America generally believe that the optimism of the eighteenth century gave way in the nineteenth to pessimism in matters of race. Growing numbers of scientists, and perhaps nonscientists too, came to believe that certain races were innately inferior, retarded by inherited qualities that were unchangeable or changeable only over long periods of time, and that cultural manifestations were the product primarily of biological endowment. By late in the century, according to Stocking, "race and culture were linked in a single evolutionary hierarchy extending fr…