Abstracts of the History of Science Society 2004 Austin Meeting 18 ...

Matt Price, Univeristy of Toronto (matt.price@utoronto.ca)
Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Texas Ballroom VII
The Hand, Human Nature, and the Art of Prosthesis in World War I
In the most authoritative German work on prosthetics design to emerge from the fires of World War I, the great mechanical engineer
Georg Schlesinger has as his epigraph a misquotation from Kant’s Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. This transcription error
illuminates the fundamentally novel character of the early twentieth century project of prosthesis, and the notions of mind, body, and
machine that it developed. Engineers’ and doctors’ attempts to tie their work back to the tradition of the German Enlightenment only
highlight the vast gulf that separates these two eras and the meanings they attached to all-important terms like reason, nation, and even
soul. I discuss the project of prosthetic design and physical rehabilitation of maimed soldiers as a project for the technical manipulation
of subjectivity, and as part of a utopian political project which, though seeking to ground itself in the Enlightenment, misunderstood
its dramatic separation from the earlier era.
Patricia Princehouse, Case Western Reserve University (patricia.princehouse@case.edu)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Texas Ballroom III
Haeckel, Goldschmidt, Gould: 100 Years of Contrarian Darwinians
Contrary to popular (and much academic) opinion, there is no one, true Darwinism, but a dynamic matrix of ideas and approaches that
embody and extend Darwin’s own plurality of interests and theories. Germany demonstrates this in microcosm. The period from
Haeckel and Weismann to Goldschmidt established the scope, nature, diversity and trajectory of German Darwinism in the twentieth
century as theories, experiments and field studies evolved and flourished. To date, historians have misunderstood or oversimplified
German evolutionary theory, concentrating on scientists and themes isolated from the rich social and theoretical context of German
biology. The multidimensionality of German biology and even the existence of the German Synthesis of evolution (established prior
to the Anglo-American Modern Synthesis) have been elided. Yet a deep historical understanding of worldwide changes in late twentieth-century
evolutionary theory cannot be achieved without tracing the paths by which American paleontologists such as Raup, Eldredge
and Gould followed Goldschmidt, Schindewolf and Seilacher, and movements such as paleobiology, punctuated equilibria, and evo-devo
are rooted in the German Synthesis.
Lawrence Principe, Johns Hopkins University (LMAFP@jhu.edu)
Thursday, 18-Nov-04, 5:00 - 7:00 PM - Texas Ballroom VII
Wilhelm Homberg and the Chymistry of Light
Wilhelm Homberg (1652-1715) was the most celebrated and respected chemist of the early 18th century Academie Royale des Sciences.
One of his most dramatic claims, made in 1705, was that the matter of light was identical to the chemical principle of Sulphur. This
paper strives to indicate the experimental background to this announcement, tracing the route by which Homberg was lead to this conclusion
through seemingly unrelated experiments. The impact of Homberg’s claim is also briefly traced. This study illuminates not only
the means by with theories are drawn from practices, but also points to some issues in the historiography of early eighteenth century
chemistry.
Courtenay Raia, University of Califorina, Los Angeles (plscortena@aol.com)
Thursday, 18-Nov-04, 5:00 - 7:00 PM - Texas Ballroom V
Frederic Myers, Depth Psychology and the Spiritual Anatomy of Mind:
Searching for the Psychical Soul in Late 19th Century England
This paper will examine how Frederic Myers, a British psychologist and psychical researcher, used abnormal states of consciousness
to evidence the existence of a ‘subliminal self ’, a transcendent aspect of mind which provided a theoretical model for the “survival of
human personality after bodily death.” In this manner, he translated mental pathologies into spiritual possibilities, working against the
grain of other contemporary deviance theories and the materialistic models of mind on which they were based. Myers conducted hundreds
of case studies on various forms of mental influence, such as hypnotism, telepathy, and automatic writing, and his work served
as a resource for Jung, James, McDougal and other psychologists looking for a more complex noesis than the prevailing neurobiological
model allowed. At a time when much of the psychology establishment was busily mapping the mechanical-chemical determinants
of human behavior, Myers bundled his evidence into a wildly heterodox and expanded view of the human self. His theory of mind proposed
a ‘multiplex’ personality, organized and coherent at the level of consciousness, but, subliminally, an unbounded, undifferentiated
sea of potential selves and information. Myers borrowed from physicists’ idealized theories of “the ether” to counter the materialism
of biologically-based models of mind, proposing that consciousness was a kind of sub-ethereal soul occupying the continuum between
matter (the brain) and a world within or beyond ether. Theoretically, Myers moved in the opposite direction of the mechanical reductionists,
resisting both their determinism and materialism by enlarging the concept of “the self,” and with it, the program of psychology.