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

explore the implications of this for morality and religion, an exercise that was simultaneously both
empirical and normative. This paper explores some of these attempts among British writers of different
intellectual orientation and ideological persuasion from the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries, e.g.
Leslie Stephen, Benjamin Kidd, Herbert Spencer, Graham Wallas and F.H Bradley. The argument is that
such thinkers encountered the dual qualities of Darwinism when applied to social existence as both
model and threat. Darwinian nature seemed to provide a dynamic model for understanding human
social interactions, but its focus on processes of selection, struggle and extirpation created dilemmas for
moral virtues and domestic and international harmony. The tensions between these two features of
Darwinism are central to the attempts - and failure - to establish a Darwinian inspired evolutionary
ethics.
Haynes, Douglas
E-mail Address: dhaynesd@uci.edu
Theater of Malaria: Demonstrating Transmission in Rome and London, 1900
"Theater of Malaria" focuses on the 1900 demonstration of the transmission of the malaria parasite
through the bite of the mosquito. Although malaria was long represented as a sign of the backwardness
of the tropical world, the demonstrated of the mosquito-malaria relationship in fact occurred in Europe.
Patrick Manson, medical adviser to the Colonial Office who was associated with the 1898 discovery of
the role of the mosquito in spreading plasmodia, organized a prophylaxis in Rome and human infection
demonstration in London concurrently. The freedom from disease of the occupants of a mosquito-proof
hut in Italy and the presence of the clinical signs of disease in human subjects in England bitten by
mosquitoes imported from Italy together were designed to display the power of British science to control
malaria and hence the tropical world. This study in imperial science not only shows the role of Londonbased
scientists in the creation of knowledge about the periphery. It too reveals how the rhetorical
representation of southern Italy as a European analogue to Africa framed the credibility or "truth-value"
of the mosquito-malaria demonstration in Europe.
Hecht, Jennifer
E-mail Address: hechtjm@aol.com
Atheism, Evolution, Nihilism, and a Transcendental Turn: The Question of Secular Ethics in
France, 1870-1914
The French Third Republic celebrated secularism and scientism and explicitly drew from these ideas
the authority for its governance and the style of its swagger. A question of the grounds for morality
emerged alongside this scientism. It affected a broad swath of intellectual, artistic, and political questions,
varying in relation to levels of religious belief. Most of the population certainly seems to have
believed in God, but in Paris in the 1880s and 1890s there was a very vocal, well-supported community
of atheists. They were enthusiastic in their atheism, but very worried that civilization’s entire moral
edifice was now without support. They either became oddly dedicated to a worldwide moral collapse, or
they fought against it by showing that the old Judeo-Christian morality was actually somehow coded
into the natural or social world. In Neo-Kantian and Bergsonian philosophy, evolutionary theory, Social
Darwinism, and Durkheimian sociology, much of the most lasting and innovative work of the period
was originally fashioned, at least in part, to address this crucial question of morality without God. For
atheists the question was: How can we talk about good and evil now that God is gone? And for the much
larger anticlerical community: How can we get citizens to choose good over evil without the invocation
of God in the daily life of the state? Their varied and resourceful answers had considerable impact on
the modern idea of the state and significantly influenced lines of academic, artistic, and political thought
in the twentieth century.