This introduction to historical epistemology offers a general overview of the main themes, debates, and currents of this multifaceted field, which has emerged at the intersection of the philosophy of science and the history of science. The authors offer a historical reconstruction of the main debates that forged historical epistemology and assess today’s challenges. Additionally, they provide the reader with the conceptual and methodological tools that are necessary to enter this field and understand its main questions and approaches. This preprint is in Italian and available in print form only.

The Tacuinum sanitatis is a genre of illuminated medical texts from the Late Middle Ages that contains an intriguing and surprising combination of theoretical knowledge and lavish, detailed, and colorful images. By exploring a specific manuscript of this genre, and by comparing it with related practical medical texts and genres, this study wishes to better understand the different aspects of this text and explain this combination. The Late Middle Ages are traditionally thought of as a time of stagnation in the history of science and particularly in the history of medicine. However, in recent decades historians have observed the long-term intellectual and social evolutions of the Middle Ages and have demonstrated the ways in which these changes formed the grounds for the great achievements of the sixteenth century. These evolutions include the translations and dissemination of Greek and Arab knowledge traditions in the Latin West, the establishment of universities, the formation of a medical market and the medicalization of society, and the formation of new audiences for practical and theoretical medical texts. The arts were also heavily influenced by the rise of naturalism and natural study from direct observation, for example. This study demonstrates how a singular text can be linked to major historical evolutions and how a text of this sort can function as a historical source, shedding light on the major intellectual and artistic shift between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

The resources used for teaching at medieval universities became increasingly enriched by pictorial material, particularly during the fourteenth century. This work explores the epistemic function of pictorial material—images of science—in the context of medieval and early modern medicine, alchemy, and anatomy. The historical context is defined by the expansion in the thirteenth century of the spatial horizons of Western culture and the consequent need for a cultural identity, first expressed through the assimilation of the local European calendric systems. The regulation of time is determined as the first cause of the diffusion of pictorial material as an epistemic means of transcending the boundaries of learned scholarly circles, thereby enabling a broader access to knowledge. Originally based on a seminar delivered at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at the University of Tel Aviv by Matteo Valleriani, this work is the result of a science history exhibition supported by curator Yifat-Sara Pearl, for which students collaborated with artist and designer Liron Ben Arzi to further develop their research activities.

There are powerful social, political, and epistemological reasons for concealing (or revealing) certain people and practices in the course of scientific research and publication. The human sciences—including biology and biomedicine as well as anthropology, linguistics, and social science—depend upon people with diverse values and expertise, who have varied motivations and degrees of political agency. Research encounters are often orchestrated by actors behind the scenes—tissue donors, survey respondents, student subjects, translators, activists, ethics review boards, civic or religious institutions, lawyers, nurses, and archivists. Their contributions move in and out of the shadows as scientific knowledge is made, with important consequences for the authority and authenticity of research findings. Through a collection of case studies, this volume encourages methodological reflection on whether and how historians of science and STS scholars might recover contributions to the human sciences. Ultimately the volume asks how our professional, institutional, geographical and political circumstances condition whom we claim to speak of and for.

Around 1801 Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau (1737–1816) designed his famous fumigating machine. The machine spread a controlled emission of a specific gas—described as an oxygenated acid—that was supposed to destroy the contagious miasmas in the air, objects, and bodies. During the 1804 outburst of the yellow fever, the Spanish Government ordered that the original design of Guyton’s fumigating machine be adapted to the Spanish market for extensive use in households. This was done against some criticism, as the nature of the contagion was avowedly unknown and the acid fumigation technology polemic. Nonetheless, the machine was pictured as crucial for the health of individuals and for society as a whole. The essay looks at the fumigating machine as a way of exploring how scientific and political practices pervaded societies and, vice-versa, how ways of interpreting nature and politics became embedded in artifacts. It will show, first, how the machine served to spread the new French chemistry among Spaniards; second, how it embodied a new relationship between the citizens and the state, and third, how this artefact was imported by the Spanish absolutist state, appropriated, and used for political propaganda. By focusing on a chemical artefact, it shows a historically complex and significant interweaving of theory, material culture, and politics.

Erich Kretschmann (1887–1973) was a German theoretical physicist whose work on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (1917) offered some interesting insights, but was also critical of Einstein’s semantics. Einstein responded in a paper in 1918 and agreed that Kretschmann’s criticism was valid. Kretschmann wrote his thesis under the supervision of Max Planck and obtained his doctorate in 1914. A psychiatric disease during his adolescence made him permanently unfit for military service and saved him from having to participate in the First World War. From 1920 he lectured in theoretical physics at the University of Königsberg. In 1926 he became an apl. professor, a position which he held until 1945. After his escape from Königsberg in January 1945 he found temporary accommodation at Rendsburg, Schleswig-Holstein. In 1946 he was appointed as a full professor of theoretical physics at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle.

This paper is the translation by Giampiero Esposito of a paper originally published in French in Acta Mathematica 88, 141-225 (1952) under the title: Théorème d’existence pour certains systèmes d’équations aux dérivées partielles non linéaires. The first three chapters are devoted to the solution of the Cauchy problem, in the nonanalytic case, for a system of nonlinear second-order hyperbolic partial differential equations with n unknown functions and four independent variables. This task is accomplished in chapter III by using the system of integral equations fulfilled by the solutions of partial differential equations that approximate the original nonlinear system. In chapter IV, such results are applied to the vacuum Einstein equations. The resulting Ricci-flatness condition is expressed, in isothermal coordinates, through nonlinear equations of the kind studied here. It is hence proved that the solution of the Cauchy problem, pertaining to such nonlinear equations, satisfies over the whole of its existence domain the isothermal conditions if the same is true for the initial data. One therefore obtains a solution of the vacuum Einstein equations which is unique up to a coordinate change.

When the Federation of German Scientists (VDW) was founded as the West German section of Pugwash in the late 1950s, several high-profile scientists from the Max Planck Society (MPG), especially nuclear physicists, were involved. Well into the 1980s, institutional links existed between the MPG, the Federal Republic’s most distinguished scientific research institution, and Pugwash, the transnational peace activist network that was set up in 1957 in the eponymous Nova Scotia village following the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. In the beginning, the two organisations’ relationship was maintained primarily by the physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. However, it was difficult right from the start, and the distance between them grew during the rise of détente in the 1970s, when the scientific flagship MPG was deployed more and more frequently in matters of foreign cultural policy, not only for the FRG but for the western alliance as a whole. This contribution explores the resources and the risks of transnational political engagement – not only as the individual strategies of top-ranking researchers, but also in terms of policy deliberations within a leading scientific organization at one of the Cold War’s sharpest divisions: the front line between two Germanys.

The paper discusses the interplay of experience and representation in disciplinarily structured science using the example of the fundamental changes in the concepts of space and time brought about by the advanced formalism of twentieth-century physics, which enabled the integration of a growing corpus of experiential knowledge. In particular the question of why certain parts of experiential knowledge had an impact on concepts of space and time, while other parts did not have such an impact, is addressed.