Isis; an international review devoted to the history of science and its cultural influences
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Historical Article
Viewpoint: The History Manifesto and the History of Science. Editor's Introduction.
This "Viewpoint" section takes up the question of what, if anything, historians of science can learn from The History Manifesto, initially published in the fall of 2014. One summary, two essay reviews, and nine short comments are followed by remarks by the authors of the manifesto, Jo Guldi and David Armitage.
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Historical Article
Neural veils and the will to historical critique: why historians of science need to take the neuro-turn seriously.
Taking the neuro-turn is like becoming the victim of mind parasites. It's unwilled (although there are those who will it at a superficial level for various strategic reasons). You can't see mind parasites; they make you think things without allowing you to know why you think them. ⋯ But historically speaking, you are also inside a (broadly postmodern) culture and (broadly neoliberal) socioeconomic order that places the legitimacy of the neuro beyond critique. And the neuro-turn does more: it delegitimizes critique itself, at least as we have known it since Marx. This essay briefly explores how we got here, what the "here" is, and what its implications are for historical critique.
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Biography Historical Article
"You are here": Missing links, chains of being, and the language of cartoons.
Evolution cartoons served polemical and satirical purposes even before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and they proliferated afterward. Yet even though Victorian evolution cartoons often pictured Darwin himself as a personification of his theory, by the time of the Scopes trial controversy in the 1920s cartoons about evolution had come to popularize ironically non-Darwinian views of evolution. ⋯ Cartoons drew on old iconographic traditions, expanding them to fit changing historical circumstances, forming a lasting cartoon lexicon. Though adaptable and protean, the language of evolution cartoons, like any language, carries its history with it, and in them we can read the history of the cultural context of evolution controversies.
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Letter Historical Article
Anaximander in context: new studies in the origins of Greek philosophy (Isis, 2005, 96:422-424).
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Biography Historical Article
Foretelling the future. Arabic astrology and English medicine in the late twelfth century.