History and philosophy of science: Historiographical traditions
and epistemological perspectives

Seminar series

This seminar series is jointly organized by the Centro Internazionale Insubrico « Carlo Cattaneo » (University of Insubria) and the Institute for the History of Philosophy and Science in Modern Age (National Research Council, CNR, Italy). Its aims to promote discussion and comparative assessments of different and well-established traditions and methodologies in the history and philosophy of science. Therefore, the format chosen is dialogic, comprising three guests that will present and discuss different approaches to the same topic. Furthermore, it aims to build in time an informational and educational resource on the state-of-the-art of the history and philosophy of science, a resource to be shared and made available to scholars, students, and the general public.

The first cycle of Seminars (March 2022–November 2023), soon to appear in a volume of proceedings, comprises the following events:

23/3/2022 Mezzo secolo di ricerche is devoted to the historiographical assessment by prominent Italian scholars of the advancement of research in the history of science about the relationship between science and religion (La questione religione-scienza, by U. Baldini), and between science and society (Scienza e società  by R.G. Mazzolini).

10/05/2022 Giovanni Battista Venturi (1746-1822): fisico, erudito e storico della scienza focuses on this multifarious XVIII Century intellectual, physicist, scholar and historian of science. R. Marcuccio deals with his intellectual formation and training (La formazione e gli studi); P.D. Omodeo about his involvement in water management in the Republic of Venice ( Pratiche scientifiche e gestione delle acque a Venezia ai tempi della Rivoluzione Scientifica) and C.S. Maffioli tells about his scholarly work and interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s contributions to hydrology ( Venturi trascrittore e interprete di testi di Leonardo da Vinci sul moto delle acque).

13/10/2022 Tre variazioni sulla cosmologia della prima età moderna presents the work of three of the foremost Italian experts on the subject on Western cosmology during the Renaissance and early modern period. Guido Maria Giglioni presents his interpretation of the role of animism (Animismi: pregi e difetti), Stefano Gulizia focuses on Kepler (La neve di Keplero tra fisica e matematica; and Dario Tessicini provides a reconstruction of the history of the idea of cosmology between Renaissance and Enlightenment (“Cosmologia”: storia di un’idea tra Rinascimento e Illuminismo)

3/11/2022 Reconstructing Recipes: Cross-disciplinary and Cross-cultural Perspectives in the History of Pharmacy, deals with the history of pharmaceutical practice in a comparative perspective.  The speakers are E. Hsu (Chinese qinghao recipes (Artemisia annua L.), and questions of translation); E. Leong (Recipes and Technologies of Health in Early Modern England and B. Orland (Reconstructing historical recipes with students at the pharmacy museum Basel).

14/11/2022, Historical epistemology: European perspectives, presents and compares different European traditions in the field of historical epistemology. The speakers are H.-J. Rheinberger, one of the major representative of this research field (My view on historical epistemology), L. Loison (More on historical epistemology: critical presentism) and D.P. Omodeo (Genesis, validity and the objectives of science: the triad of political epistemology).

18/01/2023 L’epistemologia storica tra analogie, immagini insepolte, monadi: verso un nuovo gioco delle perle di vetro?  comprises the contributions of Maria Teresa Costa on Benjamin and Warburg (Pensare per immagini. Walter Benjamin e Aby Warburg), of Rocco Gaudenzi on the role of analogy (Microcosmo e macrocosmo: la rottura di simmetria e le virtù euristiche dell’analogia) and of Stefano Furlan on John Wheeler (Sotto il segno di Clio: John Wheeler e il rapporto con il passato).

II CYCLE (March 2023–)

22/03/2023 Scienziate italiane del Settecento, riflessioni storiografiche

The seminar is devoted to some of the most reputed Italian women scientists of the XVIII Century. Clara Silvia Roero (Maria Gaetana Agnesi studiosa e autrice di un trattato di successo) and Massimo Mazzotti deal with Maria Gaetana Agnesi, the reasons of her success and the evolution of her image up to the latest interpretations of her work. Aldo Brigaglia (Faustina Pignatelli e i rapporti scientifici tra Napoli, Bologna e Parigi) focuses on Pignatelli, Princess of Colobrano, her work on forze vive and her role as promoter of scientific circles, and her relationship with Neapolitan scientific circles, highlighting in particular the work of Mariangela Ardinghelli in the Neapolitan science of the time.

25/05/2023 Consulti, farmaci e malattie. Note sulla medicina progressista italiana fra Sei e Settecento

The seminar is devoted to the practice of medicine between XVII and XVIII Century in Italy, highlighting the tension between the pharmacological and therapeutic practice on one side and the lively reception of the theoretical developments of the new science on the other. Benedino Gemelli (I consulti medici (1680-1730) fra tradizione empirica e modernità) analyzes in this perspective the medical consultations between late XVII and early XVIII Century; Marco Bresadola (Il polipo ambiguo: dalla patologia meccanicistica all’anatomia patologica) reconstructs the history of the cardiac polyp, to enlighten the transition between humoralist and solidist pathology. Stefano Spataro (Vallisneri, Testi e la scoperta dello “zucchero di latte” come rimedio per la podagra) focuses on the case of the fake review of the discovery of the milk sugar as a remedy to gout by Vallisneri to analyze the relationship between medical science and practice in this period.

07/03/2024 Complessità e politica

The science of complexity has established itself, since the 1970s, as a movement of scientific thought that is notably anti-reductionist and anti-determinist, but also as a project for the unification of models and investigation techniques for the study of extremely different systems. , physical, biological, social, economic, ecological and socio-ecological, with the aim of predicting and proactively controlling their trajectories, and in particular the multiple “systemic risks” to which contemporary society is exposed. The growing importance of complexity science in the governance of contemporary societies makes an urgent examination of the multiple political demands that its different currents have incorporated over time, especially in its application to the social and economic world. This seminar investigates in particular the neoliberal compromises of complexity science in the origins of the Santa Fe school (Li Vigni), in the first cybernetic models of neural networks (Jensen), and in modern representations of the technosphere (Rispoli). Recognizing the plurality of traditions and meanings that have sedimented in the different conceptions and modeling of complexity is equally important for a historically informed critical reflection on the social uses of science, as it is for mobilizing alternative, non-technocratic resources and traditions of this vast and articulated current of thought