Philosophy and history of science

According to the historian and sinologist Joseph Needham, Piyo Rattansi is "one of the most profound students of the English world of the scientific revolution". In this interview, Rattansi addresses several topics including historiography, history and philosophy of science, history of Kenya, history of 17th-century England, Isaac Newton, among other themes.

Editorial: https://revistas.pucsp.br/circumhc/article/view/43321/28799

The paper examines ontological presuppositions and epistemological branches of Peace and Conflict Studies. It describes the narrower use of the concepts ‗ontology‘ and ‗epistemology‘ as sub-branch and branch of philosophy respectively and later focus on their meanings in the context of particular areas of inquiry. It highlights the most basic of the core field definition and distinction issues in Peace and Conflict Studies—what peace is; the nature, causes, outbreak, and dynamics of conflict; and the means for resolving conflict and building sustainable peace. It presents and offers answers to key ontological questions: what exist, in what form do they exist, what are the conditions under which they exist, what is their relationships with other things that are said to exist regarding the field of Peace and Conflict Studies. Furthermore, the paper reviews ways of knowing, understanding, explaining and justifying the ontological presuppositions. Thus it discusses the three epistemological branches of Peace and Conflict Studies proposed by Johan Galtung—empirical peace studies, critical peace studies, and constructive peace studies—and their implications for values, empirical data and theory. In light of this epistemology, the author posits that values, followed by data, take preeminence in the applied Social Sciences field of Peace and Conflict Studies.

Lorraine Daston arrived in Montevideo in the last carnival holidays. Although it was her first time  not  only  in  this  city  but  in  Latin  America,  her  books  are  well  known  among  historians and philosophers of science from this part of the world. In her visit, she gave a Seminar about
Historical Epistemology – the historical practice that she develops in the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in Berlin –, a way to understand scientific past in order to comprehend the science of the present. She also offered a lecture at the National Museum of Arts named “Big Calculation and the History of Intelligence”, where she presented – for a big audience – what the roots of nowadays fashioned studies in machine learning and artificial intelligence are. Finally, she  participated  in  the  reunion  of  the  General  Archive  of  the  Universidad  de  la  República  de 
Uruguay  [the  academic  Department  of  the  archive  was  the  main  responsible  for  her  visit  to  Uruguay], and discussed the role of archives in the constitution of future science.

In this essay, we aim to provide an overview of the periodic table’s origins and history, and of the elements which conspired to make it chemistry’s most recognisable icon. We pay attention to Mendeleev’s role in the development of a system for organising the elements and chemical knowledge while facilitating the teaching of chemistry. We look at how the reception of the table in different chemical communities was dependent on the local scientific, cultural and political context, but argue that its eventual universal acceptance is due to its unique ability to accommodate possessed knowledge while enabling novel predictions. Furthermore, we argue that its capacity to unify apparently disconnected phenomena under a simple framework facilitates our understanding of periodicity, making the table an icon of aesthetic value, and an object of philosophical inquiry. Finally, we briefly explore the table’s iconicity throughout its representations in pop art and science fiction.

Something very profound is happening in science, the paradigm is changing. Consciousness as a fundamental, particularly nonlocal non-physiological consciousness, is beginning to attract the interest of a growing number of researchers and physicians because the worldview of materialism is increasingly inconsistent with the reported experimental data in a spectrum of disciplines, as any search of PubMed, Academia.edu, or Researchgate will quickly reveal. I think it is time to retire the limitation and go where the data goes. This paper is a discussion of this process within Kuhnian terms

The paper discusses Aristotelian organicism and the yin yang theory from the view-point of their overall adequacy to provide a comprehensive conceptual context to aspects, at least, of our contemporary representation of reality. The context may refer to specific fields of scientific research, to our everyday mode of thinking and acting, or to both. As the survey goes on, it is increasingly made clear that we deal with two different types of conceptuality. The yin yang bipolarity may be defined as a pattern of change with a practically unlimited field of applicability. The Aristotelian organicism outlines a model of change which stirs our rational faculties to search for a purpose amidst the accumulated data. In the first case the pattern may be creatively used within a vast variety of contexts. In the latter, the theory creates a conceptual context based on the four causes as first principles.

This study deals with Peirce's writings on topology by explaining key aspects of their historical contexts and philosophical significances. The first part provides an historical background. The second part offers considerations about Peirce's topological vocabulary and provides a comparison between Peirce's topology and contemporary topology. The third part deals with various relations between Peirce's philosophy and topology, such as the importance of topology for Peirce's philosophy of space, time, cosmology, continuity, and logic. Finally, a lexicon of Peirce's main topological concepts is provided.

To avoid molecular damage of biomolecules due to oxidation, all cells have evolved constitutive and responsive systems to mitigate and repair chemical modifications. Archaea have adapted to some of the most extreme environments known to support life, including highly oxidizing conditions. However, in comparison to bacteria and eukaryotes, relatively little is known about the biology and biochemistry of archaea in response to changing conditions and repair of oxidative damage. In this study transcriptome, proteome, and chemical reactivity analyses of hydrogen peroxide (H 2 O 2 ) induced oxidative stress in Sulfolobus solfataricus (P2) were conducted. Microarray analysis of mRNA expression showed that 102 transcripts were regulated by at least 1.5 fold, 30 minutes after exposure to 30 mM H 2 O 2 . Parallel proteomic analyses using two-dimensional differential gel electrophoresis (2D-DIGE), monitored more than 800 proteins 30 and 105 minutes after exposure and found that 18 had significant changes in abundance. A recently characterized ferritin-like antioxidant protein, DPSL, was the most highly regulated species of mRNA and protein, in addition to being post-translationally modified. As expected, a number of antioxidant related mRNAs and proteins were differentially regulated. Three of these, DPSL, superoxide dismutase, and peroxiredoxin were shown to interact and likely form a novel supramolecular complex for mitigating oxidative damage. A scheme for the ability of this complex to perform multi-step reactions is presented. Despite the central role played by DPSL, cells maintained a lower level of protection after disruption of the dpsl gene, indicating a level of redundancy in the oxidative stress pathways of S. solfataricus. This work provides the first ''omics'' scale assessment of the oxidative stress response for an archeal organism and together with a network analysis using data from previous studies on bacteria and eukaryotes reveals evolutionarily conserved pathways where complex and overlapping defense mechanisms protect against oxygen toxicity.

According to the received view, the transportation view, animal extrapolation consists in inductive prediction of the outcome of a mechanism in a target, based on an analogical mechanism in a model. Through an analysis of the failure of preclinical studies of TGN1412, an innovative drug, to predict the tragic consequences of its first-in-man trial in 2006, the received view is challenged by a proposed view of animal extrapolation, the chimera view. According to this view, animal extrapolation is based on a hypothesis about how human organisms work, supported by the amalgamation of results drawn from various experimental organisms, and only predicting the 'predictive grid', that is, a global framework of the effects to be expected.

In this chapter, I propose a historical equivalent of HPS (‘history and philosophy of science’) called HPH (‘history and philosophy of history’). I start with some brief comments on HPS – what it is and what it is not. Subsequently, I present four arguments in favor of HPH. Finally, I respond to some questions that my proposal might provoke, suggesting among other things that HPH is not something to be built from scratch, but a form of cooperation that is already among us, whether we call it by that name or not.

_The Physiology of Love and Other Writings_ is the first English annotated collection of Mantegazza’s selected works. In my extensive introductory essay, Mantegazza’s hybrid contributions from fiction, travel-writing, and ethnography to physiology, medicine, and politics are reevaluated as instances of a proto-cultural-studies approach attuned to the cross-fertilization of disciplines and the circulation of ideas in a period of European intellectual history that defied the notion of specialization.
Table of contents:
The Physiology of Love
And Selections from:
On The Hygienic and Medicinal Virtues of the Coca Plant and on Nervine Nourishment in General
One Day in Madeira
A Voyage to Lapland with my Friend Stephen Sommier
India
Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful
The Neurosic Century
The Tartuffe Century
Head: Or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds
Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament
The Year 3000: A Dream
The Psychology of Translation

"Monumental... an authoritative and disturbing morality tale."—Chicago Tribune

The strongest weapon against pandemic is the truth. Read why in the definitive account of the 1918 Flu Epidemic.

Over a year on The New York Times bestseller list

Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research, The Great Influenza provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon. As Barry concludes, "The final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that...those in authority must retain the public's trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best. A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart." 

At the height of World War I, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease.

Nutzenideale ändern sich. Was bleibt, ist die Einsicht, dass sich die Naturwissenschaften nicht allein an aktuellen Bedürfnissen ausrichten sollten.

Der Aufstieg der modernen Naturwissenschaften war getragen vom Glauben, dass sich das Wissen über die Natur stetig vermehren und sich über kurz oder lang für Mensch und Gesellschaft als nützlich erweisen würde. Wie diese Erwartungen das Selbstverständnis und die Entwicklung der Naturwissenschaften prägten, ist Thema dieses Buches.
Es zeigt sich, dass die Erwartungen sich wiederholt änderten: vom universellen Nutzenideal des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts bis zum technischen Fortschrittsversprechen, das heute bestimmend ist. Der unerschütterliche
Glaube an den Nutzen der Naturwissenschaften war aber immer schon von der Einsicht begleitet, dass der Erkenntnisfortschritt nur dann gewährleistet ist, wenn sich Forschung nicht allein an kurzfristigen Bedürfnissen ausrichtet.
Diese Geschichte des modernen wissenschaftsverständnisses schlägt den Bogen von der frühneuzeitlichen Naturforschung bis hin zu den Naturwissenschaften des 20. Jahrhunderts. Mit seiner Langzeitperspektive und seinem begriffsgeschichtlichen Instrumentarium leistet dieses Buch nicht nur einen wichtigen Beitrag zur neuzeitlichen wissenschaftsgeschichte, sondern bietet zugleich eine historisch fundierte Grundlage für aktuelle Debatten der Wissenschafts- und Innovationspolitik.

Werner Heisenberg’s 1925 paper “Quantum-theoretical re-interpretation of kinematic and mechanical relations” marks the beginning of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg famously claims that the paper is based on the idea that the new quantum mechanics should be “founded exclusively upon relationships between quantities which in principle are observable”. My paper is an attempt to understand this observability principle, and to see whether its employment is philosophically defensible. Against interpretations of ‘observability’ along empiricist or positivist lines I argue that such readings are philosophically unsatisfying. Moreover, a careful comparison of Heisenberg’s reinterpretation of classical kinematics with Einstein’s argument against absolute simultaneity reveals that the positivist reading does not fit with Heisenberg’s strategy in the paper. Instead the complain that electron orbits are unobservable should be understood as a criticism of the causal inefficacy of orbital electron motion in Bohr’s atomic model. I conclude that the tacit philosophical principle behind Heisenberg’s argument is not a positivistic connection between observability and meaning, but the idea that a theory should not contain causally idle wheels.

La experimentación y el desarrollo del pensamiento físico: un análisis histórico y epistemológico con fines didácticos se fundamenta en los aportes de la historia y la filosofía de las ciencias para discutir asuntos clave en la enseñanza de la física como son: la relación teoría-experimentación; el rol de los instrumentos y los procesos de medida; las formas alternativas de experimentación como la cualitativa, la exploratoria y la mental; la medición de magnitudes físicas como la temperatura; y las implicaciones didácticas de estos asuntos por medio de ejemplificaciones de situaciones en el aula. Esta obra, producto de la investigación del mismo nombre, adelantada por el grupo de investigación Estudios Culturales sobre las Ciencias y su Enseñanza -ECCE- de la Universidad de Antioquia, pretende contribuir a que los profesores de ciencias construyan puntos de vista alternativos de análisis y de procedimiento en la actividad experimental que les posibilite fundamentar la elaboración de materiales didácticos en cursos de ciencias de secundaria y en cursos introductorios de física de programas de formación de profesores, y en otros pregrados universitarios.

However, it is pertinent to note that, though society esteems science for its presumed quality of being based on objective facts, so that scientific research has more weight and authority than a personal opinion, the scientific enterprise has not claimed being circumcised with infallibility, so, those who criticize science on this ground not just make impotent and inept criticisms but as well confer on their criticisms, redundancy and error-animateness.

This paper is devoted to the nature and roles of sense impressions in Hume’s account of perception.  At first sight Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, a book written within the frame of reference of the Lockean ‘way of ideas’, is mostly devoted to the examination of ideas: ideas of memory and ideas of the imagination, general ideas, the ideas of space and time, the idea of cause and effect, etc.  And it is true that in p. 8 of the Treatise Hume declares sense impressions to be beyond the bounds of his discussion, and only goes back again to issues directly relative to sensory perception as a source of knowledge towards the end of Book 1, in the 30-page section devoted to what he calls the ‘scepticism with regard to the senses’.  Yet the pages of this work are full of vivid references to sense impressions: patches of colour such as a missing shade of blue, the purple surface of Hume’s own table, red and blue points, a hand spread against the blue colour of the firmament, the colours reflected in the clouds, a spot of ink, black characters on the white pages of history books—visual images prevail, but there are also the taste of a pineapple, the sweetness of a fig and the bitterness of an olive, the creaking of a door, a succession of notes on a flute, the warmth of the fire and the coolness of water, etc.  Sense impressions are major protagonists of Hume’s theory of knowledge.

The aim of this study is to be able to discover methodological similarities between the emergence of new tactics in the context of tactical changes in football history and the theory of paradigm shifts related to scientific revolutions in the philosophy of science. In this context, it has been argued that whether the changes in football tactics can be regarded as paradigmatic changes or not, taking into consideration certain points, and the question of whether the changes in football tactics can be handled as paradigm shifts in the scientific framework, and it has been analysed whether changes in soccer tactics can be handled as paradigm shifts in the scientific framework. The work's philosophical framework is based on the views of Thomas Kuhn on the philosophy of science in his work titled "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". The paradigm shift in this context is explained in detail through the concepts such as the anomalies in the paradigm, the period of scientific crisis and the scientific revolution. In the second part of the work, it is examined whether the methods (tactics) created to gain success in the football can be taken as paradigm in detail through examples in football history. As a result, it has been shown that football tactics can be regarded as paradigms and tactical changes can be regarded as paradigm shifts. With this study, it was expected to open a new discussion area about the evaluation of sport - especially football - through philosophy.

While symbolic colour use has always played a salient role in science research and education, the use of colour in historic diagrams remains a lacuna within the history of science. Investigating the colour use in diagrams often means uncovering a whole cosmology otherwise not explicit in the diagram itself. The periodic table is a salient and iconic example of non-mimetic colour use in science. Famous is Andreas von Antropoff’s rectangular table of recurrent rainbow colours (1924); Alcindo Flores Cabral’s (1949) application of colour in his round snail form using the rgb scheme, Mazurs’ pine tree system (1967), speaking of warm and cold colours that he attributed to specific groups of elements – an attribution that we can relate back to humoralism and alchemy. From the first periodic tables in the 19th century on, individual researchers have used different colour regimes. While standardization may play an obvious role in chemistry and its diagrams, all the more impressive is the anarchistic use of colour in the respective diagrams up to today. This article focuses on periodical tables in chemical journals and text books and explores and compares the development of colour codes found in the few existing polychrome diagrams from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Metallic mining is a recurring debate in the province of Romblon. Even after a large Canadian mining company withdrew its exploration application in 2011, the issue persists with the on-going deliberation of the Romblon Environmental Code from which the phrase „banning open pit mining‟ is being argued to be deleted or retained. In this investigation, Post-Normal Science (PNS), an emerging problem-solving strategy that is employed in conditions when risks cannot be quantified and when possible damage is irreversible is introduced as a context from which the issue can be resolved. Essential to PNS is the creation of extended peer communities (EPC) as a consensus building model when authorities cannot see a way forward. A group of 49 student leaders were surveyed to determine their awareness and opinions on metallic mining issues. Results revealed that those who were willing to take action about the issues showed high degree of awareness. Awareness was positively associated with their opinions on issues not favoring metallic mining activities which can be used as inputs for policy decisions. Such legitimate opinions also deviated significantly from the binomial population from which they were drawn making them a potential addition to a number of extended peer communities that have been organized to help address the issue.

Henri Poincaré’s philosophy of science has been widely studied and has been related to other important scientific and philosophical figures such as Einstein, Hilbert, Helmholtz, Duhem, or even Bergson. Poincaré refers to many people in his works, but there is one name that appears repeatedly in his texts, in particular when Poincaré develops his general views on the value of science. That is Édouard Le Roy. There is a lack of secondary sources on Le Roy’s work and when compared to Poincaré, references are usually given to Poincaré’s interpretation of his works and not to Le Roy himself. When writing on the value of science Poincaré structures his discourse as a reply to Le Roy’s views. This paper aims at clarifying why it was so important for Poincaré to reply to Le Roy. In order to do that, we will discuss the figure of Le Roy in the context of the time, his philosophy named as ‘Nouveu positivisme’, and the relation between Poincaré’s philosophical position and Le Roy’s. This will make Le Roy’s work more familiar to contemporary audiences, but will also clarify some controversial aspects in Poincaré’s position.

The object of this work is the current debate regarding the concept of the gene. The aim is to understand the ontological status of the gene concept, considering it as a theoretical entity inside the framework of the debate about scientific realism.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

.....the double bind as constituting an entirely new, non-material, principle of evolution, major conceptual revisions may need to be made in our general understanding of evolution as contained within the “modern evolutionary synthesis”.

KEYWORDS:
behavior, communication, context, contradiction, deutero-learning, double bind, epistemology, evolution, incompleteness theorum, kinesics, learning, logical type theory, metacommunication, metamessages, metatheory, mystification, paradox, relationships, schismogenesis, schizophrenia,  scientific elegance, symmathesy, teleology, temporality, transcontextual, transdisciplinary, trauma

Depuis quelques décennies, la question d'une compréhension historiquement correcte de la méthode de Diophante a attiré l'attention des chercheurs. « L'algèbre moderne (c'est-à-dire, post-viètienne) », « la géométrie algébrique », « l'arithmétique », « l'analyse et la synthèse » sont parmi les contextes proposés par certains historiens pour interpréter les procédures résolutoires de Diophante, tandis que la catégorie de « l'algèbre prémoderne » a été proposée récemment par d'autres dans la même finalité. Le but de cet article est d'argumenter contre l'idée de contextualiser le modus operandi de Diophante dans le cadre conceptuel de l'analyse ancienne et d'examiner les quelques exemples, dans les livres conservés des Arithmétiques, qui pourraient être considérés comme liés aux pratiques qui appartiennent au domaine analytique.

This paper summarizes the basic principles of the common-sense interpretation of quantum physics that we have been exploring over the past few years. We also touch on some areas we did not explore before. We note, for example, that the ring current model of matter-particles must also come with a dynamic view of the fields surrounding charged particles. Potential barriers -or their corollary: potential wells – should, therefore, not be thought of as static fields: they vary in time. They result from two or more charges moving around and creating some joint or superposed field. Hence, a particle breaking through a ‘potential wall’ or coming out of a potential ‘well’ probably just uses an opening which corresponds to a classical trajectory. This should offer a new perspective on the foundations of quantum mechanics.

(An Edition Open Access book. Here is the link to the official webpage:

http://www.edition-open-sources.org/sources/9/index.html)

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In the summer of 1704, Antonio Vallisneri (1661–1730), the preeminent Italian physician and natural philosopher of his time, traveled with a “daring soul” and “trembling feet” across the “silent horrors” of the northern Apennines: down the hills south of Reggio Emilia to northern Tuscany and the western edge of his native land, the Province of Garfagnana. He then wrote a report of this adventure, the Primi Itineris per Montes Specimen Physico-Medicum (“Physico-medical example of a first journey through the mountains), and sent it to the Royal Society of London, hoping for its publication in Philosophical Transactions. Unfortunately this did not happen and the manuscript disappeared from sight. The original draft, however, survived in the State Archive of the Italian city of Reggio Emilia where it was found in 2009.

With its exceptional array of geological, medical, geographical, technical, ethnographic, and historical data, the Primi Itineris Specimen is one of the earliest and most well-documented attempts to define a systematic approach to field research. Its frantically reworked pages and anxious marginal notes offer a new and precious opportunity to understand why and how experimental data and theories in the early modern period interacted and shaped the development of many crucial debates. These include the discovering of deep-time, the comprehension of geological phenomena (such as the hydrologic cycle and the origin of mountains and fossils), the perception of man’s place in nature, the constant search for new therapeutics, the tormented and charming relation between science and religion.

We propose to read Francis Bacon's doctrine of the idols of the mind as an investigation firmly entrenched in his mental-medicinal concerns and we argue that an important role therein is played by the imagination. Looking at the ways in which the imagination serves to pinpoint several crucial aspects of the idolic mind permits us to signal the explicit or implicit cross-references between what in Bacon's tree of knowledge appear as distinct branches: the various faculties and their arts; the mind, the body, and their league; natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of man. The consequence of this rich picture of the diagnosis of the mind is an equally rich conception of the cure, which comprises both epistemic and physiological aspects. We extract the features of this integrated view out of Bacon's epistemological and medical natural historical writings, which we propose to read in tandem. We also propose a number of sources for Bacon's views on the imagination, whose variety accounts for the multivalent, sometimes elusive, but surely pervasive role of the imagination in the Baconian diagnosis and cure of the mind.

Taxidermy is an organised craft which synthesises preserved animal skins with man-made materials to recreate a resemblance of living animals. As products of a cultural practice, displayed and interpreted in museums for the public, taxidermied animals are material manifestations of contingent value judgements. Despite the now widely held view in museum studies that the meanings of museum objects are constructed through their interpretation and reception, and therefore can have a multiplicity of meanings, many museums today continue to present and interpret taxidermied animals as objective species representatives. Although scientific themes continue to be privileged by many museums which maintain natural science as a discrete discipline, various social, ethical and political themes relating to the environment and to relationships between people have become more pronounced in recently redeveloped museums. Using Leeds City Museum, the Great North Museum: Hancock, and Museums Sheffield: Weston Park as case studies, this thesis investigates these changes to trace wider cultural shifts in politics, ethics, education and science. By analysing the frameworks within which museums and their staff operate, this investigation is concerned with the relationship between discourse and social practice in the form of museum exhibitions as a means of creating knowledge. It highlights how the public understanding of the natural world is more mutable than some of the enduring traditions of science may suggest, and how the discourses on science, and the objects through which they are articulated, are subject to cultural shifts which put their meanings in flux. This study is both part of, and a response to, an expanding field in museum studies and material culture studies which re-frames taxidermy objects as culturally contingent and therefore reflective of the subject positions of their makers, and the broader contexts of their making. In collating and investigating a diverse collection of archival material, this study recovers some of taxidermy’s histories, and contributes to the historical discourse on the display and interpretation of museum collections.

The effect of the individual analyst on research findings can create a credibility problem for qualitative approaches from the perspective of evaluative criteria utilized in quantitative psychology. This paper explicates the ways in which objectivity and reliability are understood in qualitative analysis conducted from within three distinct epistemological frameworks: realism, contextual constructionism, and radical constructionism. It is argued that quality criteria utilized in quantitative psychology are appropriate to the evaluation of qualitative analysis only to the extent that it is conducted within a naive or scientific realist framework. The discussion is illustrated with reference to the comparison of two independent grounded theory analyses of identical material. An implication of this illustration is to identify the potential to develop a radical constructionist strand of grounded theory.

Magic may be usefully defined as 'excluded practices depending for their effect on forces or powers in the world beyond human understanding'. The contrast is at once with technology : 'accepted practices based on powers within human understanding', and with religion : 'accepted practices depending on powers beyond human understanding'. What we label as magic are those acts which lie outside : outside our ken and outside the pale – that which is both taboo and mystery. What is labelled magic will therefore depend on who is labelling (Roman Catholics do not consider Transubstantiation to be magic, parapsychologists do not consider Extra-Sensory Perception to be magic). There is thus an opening for cognitive dissonance in studying early medical practices. Modern readers of Pliny, e.g., are struck by his firm rejection of magic ("HN" 30.1-20) coupled with his approval of (or at least failure to exclude) practices we would regard as clearly magical ("HN" 20-27). Moreover, Pliny himself reports native Roman magic with approval ("HN" 28.10-34). Thus the same sort of cognitive dissonance exists not only between ancient and modern, but within a single ancient author.

In fact, both Pliny and Galen claimed that they were recording rational recipes, and based that claim, at least in part, on allegedly experimental validations of efficacy. Yet to most readers, Pliny seems an uncritical compiler of stuff and nonsense, while his co-eval Dioscorides, and Galen as well, seem distinctly more rational. Indeed there is a tendency to view Greek medicine as wholly rational and free of all such contaminants as magic. In fact the picture is considerably more complex than that, and even Galen can be found agreeing that at least one amulet he has observed did work ("De simpl. med. fac." 6.10 [11.859-60 K]). Already in the Hippocratic corpus μάγος / μαγίη is used not of a fixed set of practices, but of what the writer disapproves – the foreign connotations no doubt were part of the attack ("Morb. Sacr." 2-4 [6.354-64 L.]). And although the author of "Sacred Disease" inveighs against his opponents' medical practices as being ineffective, his own dietary 'cure' for epilepsy is just as spurious. And what he excludes as not possibly useful against any disease, ablutions, are of course in fact effective preventative measures against a host of infectious diseases. (Ironically, he is thus hoist by his own petard.)

During the 18th century, analytic and synthetic methods—developed in ways that were influential in the natural sciences by Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and others—were transferred into disciplines concerned with the human subject. Among the most important proponents of this were David Hartley, Êtienne Bonnot de Condillac, and Charles Bonnet. However, critics such as Thomas Reid and Christian Gottfried Schütz raised objections to these methodological doctrines. By the end of the 18th century, appeals to this dual methodology and reflections concerning its potential and limits which had previously been more frequent, began to disappear from psychology and neurophysiology. I analyze the different versions of the methods as applied to the human sciences, as well as the main arguments brought to bear against them. In conclusion, I present some plausible explanations of why the methodological program did not achieve greater success. This contributes new aspects to the history of Newtonianism in these fields, and highlights both how multifaceted and how problematic the movement was.