Herbert Mehrtens' work and the implications of the historical ideas he advanced went beyond the history of any single discipline. The article therefore addresses three broad issues: (1) Mehrtens' reconceptualization of mathematical modernism, in his field-changing book (1990) and other works, as an epistemic and cultural phenomenon in a way that could potentially reach across and also beyond the sciences and also link scientific and cultural modernisms; (2) the extension of his work to the history of modernity itself via the concept of "technocratic modernism"; (3) his seminal contributions to the historiography of the sciences and technology during the National Socialist period, focusing on his critique of claims that mathematics, the natural sciences and technology were morally or politically "neutral" during or after the Nazi era, and on his counter-claim that mathematicians and other scientists had in fact mobilized themselves and their knowledge in support of Nazism's central political projects. Taken as a guide for understanding science-politics relations in general, Mehrtens' work was and remains a counterweight to the political abstinence adopted by many who have followed the "cultural turn" in history of science and technology. In the broadest sense, the article is a plea for the culturally relevant and politically engaged historiography of the sciences and humanities that Mehrtens himself pursued.

Epistemological issues associated with Cantorian set theory were at the center of the foundational debates from 1900 onward. Hermann Weyl, as a central actor, saw this as a smoldering crisis that burst into flames after World War I. The historian Herbert Mehrtens argued that this "foundations crisis" was part of a larger conflict that pitted moderns, led by David Hilbert, against various counter-moderns, who opposed the promotion of set theory and trends toward abstract theories. Among counter-moderns, L.E.J. Brouwer went a step further by proposing new foundational principles based on his philosophy of intuitionism. Meanwhile, Felix Hausdorff emerged as a leading proponent of the new modern style. In this essay, I offer a reassessment of the foundations crisis that stresses the marginal importance of the various intellectual issues involved. Instead, I offer an interpretation that focuses on tensions within the German mathematical community that led to a dramatic power struggle for control of the journal

Of Euclid's lost manuscripts, few have elicited as much scholarly attention as the , of which a couple of brief summaries by late-Antiquity commentators are extant. Despite the lack of textual sources, attempts at restoring the content of this absent volume became numerous in early-modern Europe, following the diffusion of ancient mathematical manuscripts preserved in the Arabic world. Later, one similar attempt was that of French geometer Michel Chasles (1793-1880). This paper investigates the historiographical tenets and practices involved in Chasles' restoration of the porisms, as well as the philosophical and mathematical claims tentatively buttressed therewith. Echoes of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, and of a long-standing debate on the authority and usefulness of the past, are shown to have decisively shaped Chasles' enterprise-and, with it, his integration of mathematical and historical research.

This article discusses two approaches to save the European white stork populations from extinction that emerged after 1980. Despite the shared objective to devise transnational, science-based conservation measures, the two approaches' geographical focus was radically different. Projects by the World Wildlife Fund and the International Council for Bird Preservation focused firmly on the stork's wintering areas on the African continent. Interventions by a second group of ornithologists at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell concentrated on the Middle East as a migration bottleneck. Based on archival research, interviews and correspondence with involved ornithologists, the article examines stork representations as an important lens for investigating the professional politics of ecology and conservation. It shows that representations of white storks, the birds' ecology, and derived conservation hotspots became part of the boundary work used by European ornithologists in the creation of changing scientific and institutional identities.

When Japan faced the world after the collapse of its feudal system, it had to invent its own modern identity in which the Tokyo Cherry became the National Flower. Despite being a garden plant, it received a Latin scientific species name as if it was an endemic species. After Japan's colonial conquest of Korea, exploring the flora of the peninsula became part of imperial knowledge practices of Japan. In the wild, a different cherry was discovered in Korea that was proposed as the endemic parent of the Tokyo Cherry, supporting imperialist policies. Following Japan's defeat after the Pacific War, South Korea in turn entered its search for cultural identity. The supposed parent of the Tokyo Cherry was now successfully acclaimed as the parent species of the colonial oppressor's Tokyo Cherry and named the King Cherry. Such scientific practice into cherries smoothly intertwined with nationalism and its legacy continues to interfere with research today.

In this article we examine how a leading Israeli hospital gradually became a large biomedical research facility, resembling a huge laboratory. For Chaim Sheba (1908-1971), the founder and first director of Tel-Hashomer Hospital, the massive immigration to Israel in the 1950s was a unique opportunity for research of diverse human populations, especially Jews who had arrived to Israel from Asia and Africa. The paper focuses on the way research and medical practices were integrated and their boundaries blurred, and studies the conditions under which an entire hospital became a research field. Using the case of one of Israel's prominent medical institutes, we explore and expand upon the idea of "the hospital as a laboratory," arguing that, for Sheba, it was not only the hospital but the that functioned as a great research site-a vast laboratory that "had no walls."

This article discusses the conditions that lead to the autonomy of scientific disciplines by analyzing the case of zoology in the nineteenth century. The specialization of knowledge and its institutionalization in higher education in the nineteenth century were important processes for the autonomy of scientific disciplines, such as zoology. The article argues that autonomy only arises after social and political power is mobilized by specific groups to acquire appropriate conceptual, physical, and institutional spaces for a discipline. This is illustrated through the case study of the Lisbon Polytechnic School, a higher education establishment that was created in 1837, in Portugal. The case shows that autonomy in zoology can arise before the consolidation of a community of experts in the discipline, which may have been a common feature of the discipline in other countries.

The sociological study of knowledge infrastructures and classification has traditionally focused on the politics and practices of classifying things or people. However, actors' work to escape dominant infrastructures and pre-established classification systems has received little attention. In response to this, this article argues that it is crucial to analyze, not only the practices and politics of classification, but also actors' . The article has two aims: First, to make a theoretical contribution to the study of classification by proposing to pay analytical attention to practices of escaping classification, what the article dubs . This concept directs our attention not only to the practices and politics of classifying things, but also to how actors work to escape or in practice. Second, the article aims to increase our understanding of the history of quantified and statistical health surveillance. In this, the article investigates how actors in health surveillance assembled a knowledge infrastructure for surveilling, quantifying, and detecting unknown patterns of congenital malformations in the wake of the thalidomide disaster in the early 1960s. The empirical account centers on the actors' work to detect congenital malformations and escape the dominant nosological classification of diseases, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), by replacing it with a procedural standard for reporting of symptoms. Thus, the article investigates how actors deal with the tension between the-already-known-and-classified and the unknown-unclassified-phenomenon in health surveillance practice.

This article uses four historical case studies to address epistemological issues related to the animal model of human diseases and its use in medical research on human diseases. The knowledge derived from animal models is widely assumed to be highly valid and predictive of reactions by human organisms. In this contribution, I use three significant historical cases of failure (ca. 1890, 1960, 2006), and a closer look at the emergence of the concept around 1860/70, to elucidate core assumptions related to the specific practices of animal-human knowledge transfer, and to analyze the explanations provided by historical actors after each of the failures. Based on these examples, I argue that the epistemological status of the animal model changed from that of a helpful methodological tool for addressing specific questions, but with precarious validity, to an obligatory method for the production of strong knowledge on human diseases. As a result, there now exists a culture of biomedical research in human disease that, for more than a century, has taken the value of this methodological tool as self-evident, and more or less beyond question.

In 1909, Italian zoologist Daniele Rosa (1857-1944) proposed a radical new evolutionary theory: hologenesis, or simultaneous, pan-terrestrial creation and evolution driven primarily by internal factors. Hologenesis was widely ignored or rejected outside Italy, but Swiss-French anthropologist George Montandon (1879-1944) eagerly embraced and developed the theory. An ambitious careerist, Montandon's deep investment in an obscure and unpopular theory is puzzling. Today, Montandon is best known for his virulent antisemitism and active collaboration with the Nazi occupation of France at the end of his career. By that point, however, he had quietly moved away from hologenesis. This shift has gone unnoticed or been left unexplained in existing research. This article reexamines Montandon's theoretical outlook and reasons for championing Rosa's forgotten theory. It argues that while Montandon's adoption of hologenesis arose from a complex blend of scientific and personal factors, his previously overlooked early fieldwork with the Ainu played a key role. In contrast, hologenesis did not inform Montandon's later public antisemitism.

The Fourth Postulate of Euclid's states that all right angles are equal. This principle has always been considered problematic in the deductive economy of the treatise, and even the ancient interpreters were confused about its mathematical role and its epistemological status. The present essay reconsiders the ancient testimonies on the Fourth Postulate, showing that there is no certain evidence for its authenticity, nor for its spuriousness. The paper also considers modern mathematical interpretations of this postulate, pointing out various anachronisms. It further discusses the validity of the ancient proof by superposition of the Fourth Postulate. Finally, the article proposes an interpretation of the history of the concept of angle in Greek geometry between Euclid and Apollonius, and puts forward a conjecture on the interpolation of the Fourth Postulate in the Hellenistic age. The essay contributes to a general reassessment of the axiomatic foundations of ancient mathematics.

In this paper, we wish to explore the role that textual representations play in the creation of new mathematical objects. We do so by analyzing texts by Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736-1813) and Évariste Galois (1811-1832), which are seen as central to the historical development of the mathematical concept of groups. In our analysis, we consider how the material features of representations relate to the changes in conceptualization that we see in the texts.Against this backdrop, we discuss the idea that new mathematical concepts, in general, are increasingly abstract in the sense of being detached from material configurations. Our analysis supports the opposite view. We suggest that changes in the material aspects of textual representations (i.e., the actual graphic inscriptions) play an active and crucial role in conceptual change.We employ an analytical framework adapted from Bruno Latour's account of intertwined material and representational practices in the empirical sciences. This approach facilitates a foregrounding of the interconnection between the conceptual development of mathematics, and the construction, (re-)configuration, and manipulation of the materiality of representations. Our analysis suggests that, in mathematical practice, distinctions between the material and structural features of representations are not permanent and absolute. This problematizes the appropriateness of the distinction between concrete inscriptions and abstract relations in understanding the development of mathematical concepts.

The article uses three case studies from the 1920s to explore how psychologists and elementary school teachers employed psychological techniques to gain knowledge about elementary school children and their milieu. It begins by describing the role of the elementary school and the elementary school teacher in the Weimar Republic. It then discusses the so-called "observation sheets" that were used in elementary schools in the 1920s to gain insights into the mental and moral characteristics of pupils. Third, it examines psychological experiments undertaken in elementary school classrooms based on the exemplar case of a single teacher/experimenter, before concluding with a comparison of the two practices. I argue that psychology gained in standing through this history, becoming recognized as a foundational science in the context of education. Teachers used the professionalization of observation techniques in school to enhance their socio-epistemic status.

Data collections are a hallmark of nineteenth-century administrative knowledge making, and they were by no means confined to Europe. All colonial empires transferred and translated these techniques of serialised and quantified information gathering to their dominions overseas. The colonial situation affected the encounters underlying vital statistics, enquête methods and land surveying. In this paper, two of those data collections will be investigated-a survey on land and a survey on indigenous law, both conducted around 1910 on the Micronesian island of Pohnpei, which had fallen under German colonial influence a decade earlier. Strikingly, there are no enumerators or envoys of the state visiting the doorsteps of Pohnpei. To facilitate the data collection on homesteads, the whole population of the island was called upon to measure their respective plots of land themselves, without resorting to certified land surveyors. The preserved cadastral lists and spreadsheets testify to a rather peculiar contact between the colonizing administration and the colonized peoples. I argue that the production of data made encounters necessary, which are best observed though a methodological focus on data practices. I argue, furthermore, that the Pohnpeians were prompted during the surveys to define their homestead in new terms. This did not only entail new two-dimensional plots but also a new regime of private property. The change in the legal concept can be seen as a continuation of colonial violence by other means, given that it happened in the aftermath of the defeated Pohnpei Rebellion. The argument of the paper is, therefore, that data collection can have formative effects on society, and that measurement and quantified information are often, as Witold Kula argued, a scene of conflict. At its core, the installation of these metric regimes signified a change in patterns of justification, resource management and the unwritten constitution of the Pacific island.

In the spring of 1893, the Austrian writer and critic Hermann Bahr began interviewing various people on antisemitism, a subject of heated discussion in the European feuilleton around 1900. "Once again, I am travelling the world sounding out people's opinions and listening to what they have to say," he wrote in his introduction to a series of articles on that issue that appeared in the feuilleton of the Deutsche Zeitung between March and September 1893. A year later, the Berlin publishing house S. Fischer turned Bahr's articles into a book. Bahr conducted a total of thirty-eight interviews with prominent personages, such as August Bebel, Theodor Mommsen, Ernst Haeckel, Henrik Ibsen and Jules Simon. Bahr did not focus on the arguments in favour or against antisemitism. Instead, he set out explicitly to investigate the sentiments, perceptions and opinions on this topic within the cultured classes. Yet, as I will show in this article, Bahr tried to capture not only the "sentiments" [Empfindungen] aired by his interviewees, but also the settings and interiors in which the interviews took place. I argue that these descriptions of physical space served Bahr as authentication, as a three-dimensional certificate for the "facts of opinion" [Meinungstatsachen] he recorded.

This paper examines self-inscription, a mode of census enumeration that emerged during the nineteenth century. Starting in the 1840s, a number of European states introduced self-inscription as an auxiliary means to facilitate the work of enumerators. However, a decisive shift occurred when Prussian census statisticians implemented self-inscription via individual "Zählkarten"-or "counting cards"-in 1871. The paper argues that scientific ideals of accuracy and precision prevalent in the sciences at the time motivated Prussian census officials to initiate self-inscription as an at-home scenario unmediated by enumerators, in which the census form alone was to yield truthful information from the respondents. By illuminating the bureaucratic means for implementing scientific ideals and practices in gathering personal census data, the paper offers an in-depth analysis of the media, technologies, and manpower that census takers deployed to reveal the epistemic-as well as social and political-impact of being "true to form."

Collecting data about people with mental disorders living outside of asylums became a heightened concern from the early nineteenth century onwards. In Germany, so-called "insanity counts" targeted the number and sometimes the type the mentally ill who were living unattended and untreated by professional care throughout the country. An eagerly expressed assumption that the "true" extent of the gathered numbers must be much higher than the surveys could reveal came hand in glove with the emerging task of "managing" insanity and its potential dangers in a modern society. The doorstep of the family home became a crucial site in psychiatrists' and enumerators' efforts to register the most sensitive of personal data. This article traces the ever more diligent methods that were employed to obtain the desired information, as well as the hidden agenda of the postulate of missing data itself. It also addresses the profound impact that the presumption of having only incomplete data has had on the practice of counting and surveying, as well as on the understanding of the need for professional monitoring of mental illness.

Agent-based social simulations have historically been evaluated using two criteria: verification and validation. This article questions the adequacy of this dual evaluation scheme. It claims that the scheme does not conform to everyday practices of evaluation, and has, over time, fostered a theory-practice gap in the assessment of social simulations. This gap originates because the dual evaluation scheme, inherited from computer science and software engineering, on one hand, overemphasizes the technical and formal aspects of the implementation process and, on the other hand, misrepresents the connection between the conceptual and the computational model. The mismatch between evaluation theory and practice, it is suggested, might be overcome if practitioners of agent-based social simulation adopt a single criterion evaluation scheme in which: i) the technical/formal issues of the implementation process are tackled as a matter of debugging or instrument calibration, and ii) the epistemological issues surrounding the connection between conceptual and computational models are addressed as a matter of validation.

In this comparative historical analysis, we will analyze the intellectual tendency that emerged between 1946 and 1956 to take advantage of the popularity of communication theory to develop a kind of informational epistemology of statistical mechanics. We will argue that this tendency results from a historical confluence in the early 1950s of certain theoretical claims of the so-called English School of Information Theory, championed by authors such as Gabor (1956) or MacKay (), and from the attempt to extend the profound success of Shannon's ([1948] 1993) technical theory of sign transmission to the field of statistical thermal physics. As a paradigmatic example of this tendency, we will evaluate the intellectual work of Léon Brillouin (), who, in the mid-fifties, developed an information theoretical approach to statistical mechanical physics based on a concept of information linked to the knowledge of the observer.

This paper explores how the Belgian mathematician Paul Mansion became interested in probability theory. In comparison to many other countries at the time, probability theory had a much stronger presence in Belgium. In addition, Mansion, who was an avowed Catholic militant, had found probability theory to be a useful means of reflecting on certain problems pertaining to determinism and randomness that were arising in scientific debates at the time. Mansion's work took place during a time of consolidation of mathematical education in Belgium, as well as a new interest in probabilistic results and the foundation of the Institute for Philosophy in Louvain by his friend Désiré Mercier. The present paper addresses how these aspects intersected at the turn of the twentieth century.

During the first half of the 1970s, climate research gained a new significance and began to be perceived within political and academic circles as being worthy of public support. Conventional explanations for this increased status include a series of climate anomalies that generated awareness and heightened concern over the potentially devastating effects of climate change. Controversial climatologist Reid Bryson was one of the first to publicly promote what he saw as a definitive link between these climate anomalies and unidirectional climate change in the fall of 1973, and rising food prices in the same year gave him a platform on which to air his views to receptive senior members of the US Congress. Bryson's testimony before a US Senate subcommittee offers a unique glimpse into how he was able to successfully resonate his agenda with that of senior politicians in a time of crisis, as well as the immediate responses of those senior US politicians upon first hearing climate change arguments. Bryson was one of the most prominent US climatologists to break a taboo against making bold climatological predictions and de-facto policy recommendations in public. As a result, although Bryson was criticized by many in the climatological community, his actions instigated the involvement of other scientists in the public arena, leading to an important elevation in US public climate discourse.