Listing of Sessions and Abstracts of Papers - History of Science ...

The Emergence of the Aggregate Variable "Consumption" and its Measuring Method 1920-1955
Macro-econometric modeling as an activity by experts, as well as its use in policy-making, have been
fully established in the Netherlands since 1955. The emergence of macro-econometric modelling implied
representing the national economy in new terms, one of which was, and still is, the aggregate
traces the contextual history of this macro-econometric aggregate. The aggregate people who consume
and from what has actually been consumed. However, earlier theorising about and measuring of consumption
was related to income, and social class. This paper analyses how measurements, mathematical
representations, theories of consumption, and political alliances changed simultaneously in the period
1920-1955, resulting in the establishment of
Boschiero, Luciano
E-mail Address: luciano_boschiero@hotmail.com
The Beginnings of Post-Galilean Natural Philosophical Thought: 1638-1647
In 1638, five years before Galileo's death, Vincenzio Viviani became Galileo's student--his 'last
disciple', as Viviani himself put it. During the following ten years, Viviani and another of Galileo's
followers, Evangelista Torricelli, collaborated with their colleagues in Rome and Pisa to water the seeds
of natural philosophical thought planted in Florence by Galileo. It is the aim of this paper to explore how
Viviani and Torricelli were largely responsible for the post-Galilean movement in Tuscany. Torricelli
died in 1647, and activities in Florence quieted down until the foundation of the experimentalist institution,
the Academia del Cimento in 1657. Yet the ten years before Torricelli's death are the most critical in
Tuscany's seventeenth century history of science, since they show that what was at stake after Galileo's
death, and what continued to be at stake during the following decades, was not a strange system of
patronage, courtly etiquette, and 'Experimental Science', as some historians would have us believe in
their studies of the Cimento, but the production of knowledge claims according to the natural philosophical
beliefs of these early modern Italian thinkers.
Brian, Eric
E-mail Address: brian@ehess.fr
Classification as a Mathematical Competence Among Eighteenth-Century Geometers
A basic constituent of the mathematical expertise of eighteenth-century geometers was their ability to
conceive a systematic decomposition of the operations to be executed, and subsequently to outline these
conceptions on paper in the form of classification schemes. To solve a problem a geometer had to elaborate
some formalism and to develop the necessary calculus on the registers of integral and differential
calculus improved over the course of the century. But establishing this formalism presupposed a decomposition
of the problem at hand by means of classification. A comparative study of the classifications
proposed by various French specialists during the eighteenth century shows that the progressive degrees
of abstraction involved in mathematical operations were considered to be the primary principles of
construction used for these classifications. Simple facts had to be abstracted into quantities, and quantities
into well-defined measures which allowed them to be compared.
Brooke,John
E-mail Address:
Science, Religion, and the Unification of Nature
Browne, Janet
E-mail Address: j.browne@ucl.ac.uk.