Los Congresos Científicos Pan-Americanos abrieron una nueva época de intercambio científico no solamente dentro de los pa?ses de América Latina sino entre estos y los Estados Unidos. Figuras importantes como Albert. A. Michelson, ganador del Premio Nobel en 1907, regularmente atendieron estas conferencias, así ayudando a difundir los últimos avanc…[Read more]

Biology and Ethics provides a historian’s perspective of the attempts to ground an ethics within a biological framework. Aside from its analysis of schools as social Darwinism, eugenics, and sociobiology, it attempts to evaluate their veracity using cases as Japan’s Unit 731, the Guatemala Syphilis study, and others. In spite of the much disputed…[Read more]

This is the first episode of a five-part podcast series exploring the theology of prayer through a historic lens. The episode explores Saint Augustine’s work, known as “Letter 130” written in 412 A.D. to a Christian noblewoman on the subject of prayer. The complete five-part series includes a theology of prayer in the works of: Saint Augustine,…[Read more]

The purpose of this book is to analyse the role which the development of the German Altertumswissenschaft at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries had (in combination with the English-French intellectual base) on the birth of the Romantic reception of the ancient traditions in Poland.

This paper discusses the issue of the relationship between theology and religious studies, drawing on certain principles of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical theory. Leaving aside differences between Gadamer and his critics, it is argued that his rehabilitation of prejudice, authority, and tradition as well as his notions of the fusion of…[Read more]

Muslim study of religions before modern times has claimed the attention of some modern Western scholars. At least three developmental phases of this nascent discursive field are discernable. Firstly, Western views of Muslim writings on different religions started appearing as prefaces, marginal notes, and introductions to the edited manuscripts…[Read more]

One of the recurring themes in the public perception of containment policies during the current COVID-19 pandemic are the supposedly uneven and everchanging measures taken up by international, national and local authorities. This is especially the case in countries with a federal structure, like Germany. Not surprisingly, historical containment…[Read more]

This chapter analyses the image production practices of the Goettingen university anatomist and natural historian Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) and the Berlin artis Daniel Chodowiecki (1726-1801) when they collaborated on Blumenbach’s Beyträge zur Naturgeschichte (1790). Blumenbach wanted Chodowiecki to produce family scences for each of…[Read more]

I take as a “jumping off place” for this reflection the Conclusion that Werner Brock, (DPhil) made to his lectures published as An Introduction to Contemporary German Philosophy (1935, Cambridge University Press). Following the observation of J. H. Muirhead in the Foreword, that “readers will draw their own conclusions from his presentation of hi…[Read more]

This talk reads Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer, not as a mere collection of thoughts, but as spiritual reflections. These brief meditations record aspects of his film practice in condensed form and reveal the connection between contemplation and action. The contemplative tone of the book becomes perceptible through the careful o…[Read more]

The Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville was one of the most widely read works of the early Middle Ages, as is evidenced by the number of surviving manuscripts. August Eduard Anspach’s handlist from the 1940s puts their number at almost 1,200, of which approximately 300 were estimated to have been copied before the year 1000. This article, based on a…[Read more]

Literary journalism offers an important way for explaining the complexity of the scientific world to a lay audience. An analysis of two of Richard Preston’s pieces published by The New Yorker, “The Mountains of Pi” and “Capturing the Unicorn” and how they give emphasize science-in-the-making.

The genesis and growth of minerals, as well as the existence in ore veins of such organic features as ‘seeds’, ‘matrices’, and ‘nourishment’, remained central and recurrent issues for natural philosophers, technicians, alchemists and practitioners throughout early modern Europe. By providing an overview of the main themes, voices, and concurrent…[Read more]

This study argues that there is a tradition, arising from a ‘Jewish milieu’, based around the exegesis of select biblical passages, indicating that the messiah bears the Divine Name. This tradition appears to predate the Christian movement, and is referenced also in rabbinic literature. In the first section we highlight a tradition regarding the…[Read more]

The essays collected into this volume represent an attempt by the author to philosophize creatively on three different topics; Video Gaming, God, and Philosophical Thought in light of a posthuman understanding. Each has been written from a “dehellenized” point of view which makes them somewhat unconventional in their construction and pre…[Read more]

In the history of early modern science, the German physician Andreas Libavius (Halle, Saxony, c.1550–Coburg, Bavaria, 1616) is known for having promoted the institutionalization of alchemy in the academic sphere along with the creation of laboratories and instruments. Libavius was also remarkable for his extended network of scholarly friends and f…[Read more]

This paper examines the responses to the 1954 BBC adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, as held by the BBC Written Archives Centre, in the light of the British Horror Comics campaign of the mid-1950s.

Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway relies on mutually incompatible grounding gestures, one of which describes the relationality of an always already material-discursive reality, while the other seeks to ground this relation one-sidedly in matter. These two materialisms derive from the gesture she borrows from the New Materialist (and o…[Read more]

The chapter argues that disciplinary memory claims in US American communication research have become smaller, more parochial, and less potent, as their underlying referent—the discipline—has splintered in the wake of the digital in the mid-1990s. For decades after its institutionalization in the 1950s, US communication research had relied on gra…[Read more]

NASA’s Viking probes were launched in 1975. Six years earlier an International Planetary Patrol Network of telescopes was set up to observe Martian surface conditions. Sites were chosen to provide continuous observing, and were located in Hawaii, eastern Australia, India, South Africa, Chile, and central USA. Negotiations for a facility to be s…[Read more]