Fabian Krämer

Introduction: Cooperation and Competition in the Sciences

Third party funding, publications in pertinent journals, top spots in rankings or excellent PhD students: these are some of the rewards for which scientists and scientific institutions strive and compete. Often, the dynamics of modern science—which we understand in this introduction in the broad sense of the German termWissenschaft—are reduced to an all-out competition. This view, however, tends to conceal the fact that scholars are in numerous ways part of cooperative structures. More often than not, they pursue their research goals as part of a larger group, share their insights and results with colleagues, and exchange ideas at conferences. Without cooperation, Wissenschaft would be unthinkable, be it the deciphering of the human genome, the proof of existence of the Higgs-Boson or the edition of ancient Latin inscriptions, such as the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Contrary to the widely held view, cooperation and competition are not antonymous modes of interaction: non-collaborating scientists are not necessarily competitors, and vice versa. Neither are these modes mutually exclusive. In fact, in the sciences cooperation and competition seem to be closely connected. In order to successfully compete with others, scientists have to be firmly embedded in collaborative structures; and they have to comply with norms and conventions of mutual support and acknowledgement (e.g. Felt et al. 1995: 70–83). These structures, norms and conventions are historically and culturally contingent. The prevailing mode of interaction depends on circumstances and historical setting, and is constantly under negotiation, because neither all-in cooperation nor all-out competition results in stable final configurations: collaboration partners can quickly become rivals; while groups in sharp competition can change into collaborative hunting packs. In Germany, we have had in recent years ample opportunity to observe N.T.M. 24 (2016) 119–123 0036-6978/16/020119-05 DOI 10.1007/s00048-016-0145-4 Published online: 13 May 2016 2016 SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING

Ein papiernes Archiv für alles jemals Geschriebene

The hitherto neglected Pandechion epistemonicon, Ulisse Aldrovandi’s (1522–1605) extant manuscript encyclopaedia, indicates that Renaissance naturalists did not necessarily apply the humanist jack-of-all-trades, the commonplace book, in their own field without considerably altering its form. Over many years the Italian natural historian tested and recombined different techniques to arrive at the form of paper technology that he considered to be the most fit for his purposes. Not all of these techniques were taught at school or university. Rather, Aldrovandi drew on administrative practices as well as on the bookkeeping practices of early modern merchants that he knew first-hand. Reconstructing the formation and use of the Pandechion this article contributes to the historiography of learned reading and information management in Renaissance Europe.

Shifting Demarcations: An Introduction

This introduction situates the forum in the recent scholarship on the “two cultures.” It argues that for a long time two concepts exerted a powerful influence over our thinking about the intertwined histories of the sciences and the humanities: “the Scientific Revolution,” by offering a historical beginning for their separation, and C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” thesis, by offering an end point for this development. Of late both of them have lost in persuasiveness. Recent research offers a more balanced view of the innovations of seventeenth-century naturalists, puts more weight on developments that took place during the long nineteenth century, and highlights the limits of the division. Instead of presupposing a single, unified divide, different attempts to demarcate both the sciences and the humanities have to be studied with an eye on the specifics of their intellectual, disciplinary, and wider cultural contexts. This forum maps the problem in this vein, offers different interpretations, and widens the scope of our discussion in both geographical and chronological terms.

Albrecht von Haller as an ‘Enlightened’ Reader-Observer

Forgetting Machines. Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe investigates the evolution of scholarly practices and the transformation of cognitive habits in the early modern age, focussing on the development of note-taking systems and data storage devices.

Why There Was No Centaur in Eighteenth-Century London. The Vulgar As a Cognitive Category in Enlightenment Europe

The second paper that I gave in the seminar of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University was designed to provide the other fellows, staff members and guests with some background knowledge on the project on Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Pandechion Epistemonichon that I had been pursuing during tenure of my fellowship at the Italian Academy. This research project grew out of my dissertation research. I wrote my PhD dissertation under the supervision of Professor Helmut Zedelmaier at Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität München and Professor Lorraine Daston at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. The book I have been writing on the basis of it is tentatively entitled How Did a Centaur Get to Early Modern London? Observation and Reading in the European Study of Nature, ca. 1550-1750. It enquires into the relationship between observation and reading in the study of nature in the early modern period and brings some fundamental but hitherto neglected epistemic and cognitive categories to the fore: plenitude (copia) and credulity (credulitas), amongst others. I chose to present in some detail an episode that is especially well suited to illustrate my approach.