The seminar will take place in the Sala de Graus II of the Edificio de Ciencias/Biociencias at 16h00.

I would like to draw your attention and invite you to a special seminar organized in partnership with the Centre d’Història de la Ciència (CEHIC) of the UAB this Spring on March, 22nd, 2012.

Prof. Josephson, from Colby College in the United States, will present his recent research in an open seminar called “You cannot fool (mother) Nature: The political and cultural roots of (natural) disasters.”

Paul Josephson, a specialist in the history of 20th century science and technology, teaches at Colby College, Waterville, Maine, USA.  He has written several books about science, technology and nature, increasingly from a comparative perspective.  His last books were an evaluation of technological utopianism under socialism (Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth?) and a biography of Nobel laureate in physics, Zhores Alferov (Lenin’s Laureate).  He is finishing an environmental history of Soviet arctic conquest, 1930-1990.

Below is a short summary of Prof. Josephson’s talk:
“Natural disasters are hardly the stuff only of nature, nor behave in an unpredictable fashion.  Rather natural disasters involve human presence – their villages, homes, cemeteries, businesses, factories, schools and hospitals – and their science and engineering.  The way they organize agriculture, build structures, and attempt to control nature to limit its capricious fury is central to natural disasters.  To call something natural without seeing humans as part of it, ignores not only the epistemological aspect, but also the physical and psychological.  It also avoids recognizing the interaction of politics – of class, race and gender – with science and nature in all disasters”

Seminari:

Theo Loinaz (Universitat de Barcelona, Dept. de Filologia Semítica)

*Astrologia llega en català durant l’Edat Mitjana*

Dimarts, 13 de març de 2012, 19.30h
Sala de Professors, Facultat de Filologia (Edifici Carner, Aribau / pl.
Universitat), 5è pis

En el marc del Seminari de Literatura i Cultura de l’Edat Mitjana i l’Edat
Moderna (SLIMM)
del Departament de Filologia Catalana de la Universitat de Barcelona

http://slimm.narpan.net/?Programa_del_semestre_en_curs

Dimecres 21 de març de 2012, 15-17h

“Pictures and People”

Patricia Fara (University of Cambridge), seminari de màster obert al públic dins el mòdul M8 De Frankenstein a Einstein.

James R. Moore

(Professor of the History of Science at the Open University)

Darwin: antiesclavisme, humanitarisme i teoria de la descendència

dues conferències a Barcelona (15 i 16 de març de 2012)

Darwin’s “sacred cause”

Dijous 15 de març  a les 18 hores

Sala d’Actes de la Delegació del CSIC a Catalunya

(c/ Egipcíaques, 15    08001 Barcelona)

Abstract: Why did Charles Darwin, a rich and impeccably upright gentleman, go out of his way to develop privately a subversive image of human evolution in 1837-39? Why did he pursue the subject with tenacity for three decades before publishing The Descent of Man in 1871? A radical reassessment of the basis of Darwin’s achievement provides the answer. In the standard myth, Darwin was a heroic genius discovering gems of truth beyond the vision of ordinary mortals. He was a great scientist getting on with a scientist’s proper job, not a Victorian naturalist with a consuming moral passion. But today we need to examine the circumstances that made it possible for Darwin to craft a theory from available cultural resources. Underpinning his work on human origins was a belief in racial brotherhood rooted in the greatest moral movement of his age, for the abolition of slavery. For abolitionists, the human races were members of one family, with a common ancestry. Darwin extended the `common descent’ image to the rest of life, making not just the races, but all races kin. Darwin’s science wasn’t the dispassionate practise of textbook caricature; it was driven by human needs and foibles. Even our most vaunted theories may be fostered by humanitarian concern.

Acte organitzat per la Línia d’Investigació «Pràctiques culturals, sabers i patrimoni en espais urbans: música, ciència, medicina» de la IMF-CSIC en el marc dels projectes d’investigació fi nançats per la Direcció General d’Investigació, «Sanitat militar, medicina de guerra i humanitarisme en l’Espanya del segle XIX» (HAR2011-24134) i «Ciència i creença entre dos mons. Evolucionisme, biopolítica i religió a Espanya i Argentina» (HAR2010-21333-C03-03).

——-

James R. Moore

(Professor of the History of Science at the Open University)

Darwin and the “sin” of slavery

Divendres 16 de  a les 19 hores

Institut d´Estudis Catalans

(Sala Pi i Sunyer – c/Carme, 48, Barcelona)

Abstract: Integral to Darwin’s vision of life’s history was the moral progress that must bring about the abolition of black chattel slavery. Yet the progress he expected could not be easily reconciled with his sense of evolutionary contingency. A man who, in the name of suffering slaves, damned the white man’s ‘arrogance’ in believing himself the ‘godlike’ goal of creation, could not rest comfortably in believing that history must realize his own highest moral goal, black emancipation. In the 1850s, Darwin’s dilemma became increasingly poignant as the conflict over slavery in the United States turned into a holocaust. He could still hope for abolition, but in a dark hour he had to admit, ‘a man cannot hope by intention’. It was only after the emancipation of America’s slaves in the 1860s, when he turned at last to publish on human origins, that Darwin’s optimism revived. In the Descent of Man (1871), ‘the great sin of slavery’ is among the evils to be abolished as ‘the civilised races of man … exterminate and replace’ races that were formerly enslaved. ‘At some future period’, not many centuries hence, Darwin prophesied, ‘virtue will be triumphant’.

Acte organitzat per la Societat Catalana d’Història de la Ciència i de la Tècnica (SCHCT), societat filial de l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC), amb la col·laboració de la Línia d’Investigació «Pràctiques culturals, sabers i patrimoni en espais urbans: música, ciència, medicina» de la IMF-CSIC

Dilluns 12 de març de 2012

“Science as Cultural Practice: What’s in a Line?”

Norton Wise (University of California, Los Angeles), seminari de màster obert al públic dins el mòdul M8 De Frankenstein a Einstein.

Línies isotermes a través d'una muntanya, Humboldt i du Bois-Reymond

Els fundadors de la Societat de Física de Berlin (1845), Emil du Bois-Reymond, E. Brücke, K. Knoblauch, H. von Helmholtz… van triar les corbes com a emblema del progrés del coneixement científic. Molts d’ells tenien talent per al dibuix i estaven relacionats amb el món de l’art. En aquesta sessió del mòdul tractarem sobre la significació d’aquestes relacions entre ciència i art a l’hora de representar gràficament, mitjançant corbes, les lleis naturals.

CEHIC-UAB, 15-17h

Frog-drawing machine, Helmholtz 1848–1852

“The Aesthetics of Experiment of Hermann Helmholtz”

Norton Wise, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

IEC, 18h30

Helmholtz began teaching anatomical drawing to students at the Academy of Art in Berlin at the same time as he began experiments with a “frog-drawing-machine” in which the muscle of a frog drew the curve of its own contraction. This correlation between students and frogs learning to draw will initiate an exploration of a particular culture of experiment that grew up in mid-century Berlin. It focused on the immediate visual intuition supposed to be supplied by lines inscribed by self-recording instruments, and it treated the lines in idealistic terms as the true expression of nature’s own writing. The motivation and justification for this form of experimental knowledge should be sought in historical terms, in the resources that Helmholtz and his associates derived from the wider culture of art and industry in Berlin.

SCHCT-CEHIC, Institut d’Estudis Catalans.