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Download Expeditions as Experiments: Practising Observation and by Marianne Klemun, Ulrike Spring PDF

By Marianne Klemun, Ulrike Spring

This assortment makes a speciality of various expeditions and their position within the means of wisdom acquisition from the eighteenth century onwards. It investigates numerous types of clinical perform carried out in the course of, after and ahead of expeditions, and it areas this dialogue into the clinical context of experiments. In treating expeditions as experiments in a heuristic feel, we additionally suggest that the excursion is a edition at the laboratory during which diversified practices should be carried out and the place the transformation of doubtful into convinced wisdom is proven. The experimental positioning of the excursion brings jointly an ensemble of concepts, innovations, fabric brokers and social actors, and illuminates the stairs top from commentary to proof and documentation. The chapters express the diversity of medical pursuits that influenced expeditions with their concentrate on usual background, geology, ichthyology, botany, zoology, helminthology, speleology, actual anthropology, oceanography, meteorology and magnetism.

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Expedition into Empire, 25–50. 24. , Experimental Essays—Versuche zum Experiment (=Intersdisziplinäre Studien 3, Bielefeld), (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 1998), especially 34–67. 25. In the sense of Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin, “The Place of Knowledge: A Methodological Survey”, Science in Context 4 (1991): 3–21; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock Press, 1970), xvii–xviii. 26.  Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab–Field Border in Biology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 6; Henrika Kuklick and Robert E.

In his descriptions of these experiments, Rousseau refers to the “precautions” he applied, and assesses the outcomes as more or less “decisive”. 20 AN IDEA AHEAD OF ITS TIME: JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU’S MOBILE... 31 Upon returning to Paris from Venice in late summer 1744, Rousseau’s chemical education was stimulated by his relationship with the wealthy Dupin family. The heir to this fortune, Charles-Louis Dupin de Francueil (1716–1780), aspired to membership in the Royal Academy of Sciences (Paris)21 and enlisted Rousseau in this pursuit: “I became attached to Chemistry.

The camaraderie that Rousseau promoted in the group facilitated cooperation. 75 Rousseau mobilized this esprit de corps to facilitate mutual research assistance, which he emphasized in a letter of introduction to one such companion: “we will help each other, and will return as little Linnaeuses. ”76 EXPEDITIONS TESTING THE REPORTS OF OTHERS Visiting the field laboratory offers the possibility of performing tests—a core aspect, as we have seen, of the eighteenth-century understanding of experiment.

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