The early Church regarded dreams as potential messages from God, private revelations that appear as visions while the soul is undistracted by bodily sensations. Sleep, with its accompanying dreams, was also believed to be the temporary state of the disembodied soul as it awaits the resurrection of its body at the Last Judgment. Not only did…[Read more]

[Abstract. This paper begins by examining some of the claims of Dual-Process Theory (also known as Dual-System Theory), in particular its opposition of rapid, intuitive, automatic thought processes to those that are relatively slow, analytic, and consciously controlled. The former traits we share with our primate cousins and with other mammals,…[Read more]

Ernst Haeckel and Emil du Bois-Reymond were the most prominent champions of Darwin in Germany. This essay compares their contributions to popularizing the theory of evolution, drawing special attention to the neglected figure of du Bois-Reymond as a spokesman for a world devoid of natural purpose. It suggests that the historiography of the German…[Read more]

Tracing an early rabbinic approach to the human, this article analyzes how the Tannaim (early Palestinian Jewish sages) of the Mishnah and Tosefta (redacted ca. early 3rd century CE) set the human side by side with other species, and embedded their account within broader considerations of reproduction, zoology and species crossings. The human here…[Read more]

In many US cities, especially those in the Rust Belt, the environmental goods and services (EGS) industry has played a significant role in restructuring local economies to promote new, flexible, and “creative” forms of service-based labour. And yet much of the environmental work conducted in these cities has been directed at an industrial pas…[Read more]

Should philosophy help address the problems of non-philosophers or should it be something isolated both from
other disciplines and from the lay public? This question became more than academic for philosophers working in
UK universities with the introduction of societal impact assessment in the national research evaluation exercise,
the REF.…[Read more]

Over the last 20 years the imbrication between capital and the university has grown much firmer. This
paper seeks to map one point at which this binding occurs: in critical theory. Recently scholars in strategic
management have turned to processual and relational ontologies in an attempt to reimagine the logics of
profit, value, and growth.…[Read more]

In this article, I will be focusing specifically on cryopreservation and two of the American biotechnomedical tenets introduced by Robbie Davis-Floyd and Gloria St. John in their technocratic model of medicine: the “body as machine” and “death as defeat.” These axioms are embraced by both the biotechnomedical establishment as well as the cryopre…[Read more]

Argues that the humanities do not need a replication drive like that being pushed for in the sciences.

It is well known that early modern printers had international networks and were often mobile. A lot has been written about printers from the Southern Netherlands who, for confessional or economical reasons, migrated to the Dutch Republic and helped shape the Dutch Golden Age. Much less attention has been paid to printers who moved in other…[Read more]

This article describes the life and work of Antwerp printer and newspaper publisher Maarten Binnart. Born in Thuringen and raised a Lutheran, he converted to Catholicism during or shortly after his studies at the University of Jena. He moved to Antwerp and worked for the Plantin firm as a corrector for twenty years. While working there, he…[Read more]

On scholarly traditions, quantitative assessments and academic malpractices in Italy, and how these factors affect Italian scholarship in the history of science.

Book review of the book by Marco Leonardi (“Renaissance Quarterly,” Volume 71, n. 4, 2018, pp. 1489-1491).

The foundational gesture of New Materialism and Speculative Realism dismisses vast swaths of past philosophy and theory in order to signify their own avant-garde status. The violence of this gesture, which tries to corral difference within past texts in order to feign its own purity, can be considered as a theoretical quarantine. Examples of…[Read more]

Detailed manuscript description of the 15th century German manuscript Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. germ. 1.

Arzneibuch – Volmar: ‚Steinbuch‘ – Kochrezepte – Gottfried v. Franken: ‚Pelzbuch‘ – Farb- und Tintenrezepte – ‚Lucidarius‘-‚Elucidarius‘-Kompilation – Johann v. Indersdorf (?): Sentenzen und Gebete – ‚Die sieben wei…[Read more]

Examines the role of the yeti in shaping Cold War popular science networks and relations between official and popular scientific practices in the Soviet Union.

This presentation presents a case study in philosophy and science policy surrounding Plan S and argues that we need new ways of evaluating such approaches to research.

The 2018 International Research Conference at UC Davis focuses on:

Changing political environment and its impact on international research
Increasing importance of networks and consortia in advancing international research
Role of interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary research in solving global challenges
Educating the next…[Read more]

Evaluation can be seen as an opportunity for transvaluation, or what Nietzsche called the revaluation of values. However, evaluation is often treated instead as the enforcement of standards – standardization rather than transformation. When evaluation as transvaluation and evaluation as standardization are both used to evaluate the same s…[Read more]