| 1. |
- Hallengren, Anders, 1950-
(författare)
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The code of Concord : Emerson's search for universal laws
- 1994. - 1
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of this work is to detect a pattern: the concordance of Ethics and Aesthetics, Poetics and Politics in the most influential American thinker of the nineteenth century. It is an attempt to trace a basic concept of the Emersonian transcendentalist doctrine, its development, its philosophical meaning and practical implications. Emerson’s thought is analyzed genetically in search of the generating paradigm, or the set of axioms from which his aesthetic ideas as well as his political reasoning are derived. Such a basic structure, or point of convergence, is sought in the emergence of Emerson’s idea of universal laws that repeat themselves on all levels of reality.A general introduction is given in Part One, where the crisis in Emerson’s life is seen as representing and foreshadowing the deeper existential crisis of modern man.In Part 2 we follow the increasingly skeptical theologian’s turn to science, where he tries to secure a safe secular foundation for ethical good and right and to solve the problem of evil.Part 3 shows how Emerson’s conception of the laws of nature and ethics is applied in his political philosophy.In Part 4, Emerson’s ideas of the arts are seen as corresponding to his views of nature, morality, and individuality.Finally, in Part 5, the ancient and classical nature of Concord philosophy is brought into focus.The book concludes with a short summary.
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| 2. |
- Dunér, David
(författare)
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Världsmaskinen. Emanuel Swedenborgs naturfilosofi
- 2004
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Swedish natural philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) thought in his early scientific career that the world was like a gigantic machine, following the laws of mechanics and geometry. The work presented here is a study of his mechanistic worldview and metaphorical way of thinking up to the year 1734, examining most of his fields of interest, from geometry and metaphysics to technology and mining engineering. After that year he left the mechanistic explanations and turned to an organic worldview, and some years later, in 1745, he entered the spiritual world. The study is based on a cognitive view that there are special cognitive abilities, especially metaphorical conceptualization, that cause human beings to think in one way or another. “Space” is an introductory chapter on the concept of space, about his experiences of space gained through optical instruments and his orientation in the intellectual milieu, and of the spatial world with the aid of geometry. “The sign” treats especially some particular sign systems, such as those of arithmetic and algebra, and the classification of the world by categories in number systems, coinage, measures, weights and volumes. “The wave” follows Swedenborg’s use of the metaphor of the wave, not only in such scientific disciplines as hydrology, acoustics, optics and neurology but also in poetry and music. “The sphere” concerns the sphere as the figure of movement, the relationship between technology and science, and analogies, proportions and mental models as important tools for inventing scientific theories, especially in mechanics, physics and chemistry. “The point” has its point of departure in the indivisible point of mathematics. “The spiral” is Swedenborg’s most admired geometrical figure. He wrote about the windings of the spirals in geometry, particle physics, astronomy, and in the nature of the soul. “Infinity” is limited to Swedenborg’s last mechanistic work, De infinito (1734), where he made a strict distinction between the finite and the infinite. “Conclusion” gives an overview of the major themes of his anatomical and physiological studies from the end of the 1730s to 1745, and his spiritual writings to 1772.
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| 3. |
- Fjæstad, Maja, 1976-
(författare)
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Visionen om outtömlig energi : Bridreaktorn i svensk kärnkraftshistoria 1945–80
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The fast breeder is a type of nuclear reactor that aroused much attention in the 1950s and 60s. Its ability to produce more nuclear fuel than it consumes offered promises of cheap and reliable energy, and thereby connected it to utopian ideas about an eternal supply of energy. Furthermore, the ideas of breeder reactors were a vital part of the post-war visions about the nuclear future. This dissertation investigates the plans for breeder reactors in Sweden, connecting them to the contemporary development of nuclear power with heavy or light water and the discussions of nuclear weapons, as well as to the general visions of a prosperous technological future. The history of the Swedish breeder reactor is traced from high hopes in the beginning, via the fiasco of the Swedish heavy water program, partly focusing on the activities at the company AB Atomenergi and investigating how it planned and argued for its breeder program and how this was received by the politicians. The story continues into the intensive environmental movement in the 1970s, ending with the Swedish referendum on nuclear energy in 1980, which can be seen as the final point for the Swedish breeder. The thesis discusses how the nuclear breeder reactor was transformed from an argument for nuclear power to an argument against it. The breeder began as a part of the vision of a society with abundant energy, but was later seen as a threat against the new sustainable world. The nuclear breeder reactor is an example of a technological vision that did not meet its industrial expectations. But that does not prevent the fact that breeder was an influential technology in an age where import decisions about nuclear energy were made. The thesis argues that important decisions about the contemporary reactors were taken with the idea that they in a foreseeable future would be replaced with the efficient breeder. And the last word on the breeder reactor is not said – today, reactor engineers around the world are showing a renewed interest in this elusive reactor type.
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| 4. |
- Nilsson, Rangnar, 1974
(författare)
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God vetenskap. Hur forskares vetenskapsuppfattningar uttryckta i sakkunnigutlåtanden förändras i tre skilda discipliner.
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Rangnar Nilsson: Good science: How researchers’ conceptions of science expressed in peer review documents change in three different disciplines (God vetenskap: Hur forskares vetenskapsuppfattningar uttryckta i sakkunnigutlåtanden förändras i tre skilda discipliner). Ph.D. Dissertation in Swedish, with a summary in English. Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, University of Gothenburg, 2009. ISBN: 978-91-7346-638-7. This dissertation examines the variety in perceptions of science and research in the academic communities of political science, literature studies and physics in Sweden 1950-1995 as expressed in expert evaluations of professorship candidates. The study relates commonalities as well as differences in these perceptions to internal conditions of the research field, and to the extramural settings and conditions of Swedish academia. Research is thus considered as a historically situated, socially entangled and contingent societal activity that produces knowledge in close concurrence with the surrounding society. The analysis of quality assessments for each discipline examines which of the following aspects of the works reviewed by expert panels are focused in their evaluation reports: problem, method, theory, object, results, writing, the totality of the work or the researcher him- or herself. Based on the panelists’ treatment of these aspects the thesis highlights the concomitant internal perceptions of science and research in each case. It is found that early on in expert evaluations, political science tends to be depicted as a research field largely focused on the research methods. The methods frequently define areas of research, and credibility is typically attained through proper use of reliable methods. Towards the end of the 1900s, political scientists took a new interest in theory, while the knowledge produced was described in less definitive or absolute words. Expert panels reviewing literature studies were traditionally more inclined to focus on the object of research or its material, whereas the methods used were rarely diagnosed. With time, however, one finds a theoretical turn, in as much as theory gained a new appreciation in this discipline as well, and it is, moreover, clearly considered as an active ingredient in knowledge production in the 1990s. As in political science, the descriptions of results - as depicted in evaluations - change from rather final pronouncements to ones that are more tentative. Such a trend may also be seen in the physicists’ evaluations. In that case evaluation reports largely home in on the results in general, but they also - when actual results are described - make explicit references to linkages with external actors or industry. The respective differences identified are analyzed as products of the history of each discipline, inherent requirements and differential relationships to the society outside of the academia.
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| 5. |
- Kristensen, Kasper, 1985-
(författare)
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Spinoza on Ethical Cultivation : An Analysis of Vulnerability, Empowerment, and Early Modern Cultura Animi
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation concerns Benedict Spinoza’s (1632–1677) account of ethical life, emphasising the role of techniques and exercises for achieving greater power to control one’s thoughts, emotions, and actions. The study aims to show that Spinoza offers a much more coherent and ambitious ethical theory than what is commonly acknowledged, involving both theoretical and practical considerations.The primary focus of the dissertation is to trace the influence of the early modern cultura animi (cultivation of the soul) tradition on Spinoza’s moral philosophy and to explore the novel use to which he puts it. Chapter One relates the central aims of Spinoza’s philosophy to a conception of philosophy as the art of living, connecting the Renaissance humanist revival of cultura animi tradition to Spinoza’s own attempt to construct a scientific ethics. Chapter Two analyses how Spinoza’s theories of imagination, judgment, and emotions explain the deep-rooted habits and prejudices that present key obstacles to ethical progress. Taking this diagnosis of human nature as a point of departure, Chapter Three explores the difficulties involved in trying to attain adequate knowledge and argues that Spinoza constructs his philosophical method to remedy the natural weakness of human understanding. Chapter Four explains Spinoza’s account of the central moral concepts of good and evil, articulating and defending an objectivist reading of his value theory. Chapter Five considers the extent to which a rational understanding of good and evil can alter habits and guide action given that passions are often more powerful than reason. Building on the weakness of reason to control the passions, Chapter Six shows that spiritual exercises are necessary components in Spinoza’s proposed remedy insofar as they fortify rational understanding by producing firm habits of character. The concluding discussion underlines that Spinoza’s ethical cultivation should not be seen as a linear process that secures stable happiness. Rather, people are and remain subject to the power of illusory beliefs and passions, and the ethical struggle is ongoing. By cultivating understanding, modifying one’s desires, reforming vicious habits and performing virtuous actions, however, the individual can learn to live with his or her vulnerability more happily and virtuously.
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| 6. |
- Mehrabi, Tara
(författare)
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Making Death Matter : A Feminist Technoscience Study of Alzheimer's Sciences in the Laboratory
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is a contribution to feminist laboratory studies and a critical engagement with the natural sciences, or more precisely research on the biochemical workings and deadly relations of Alzheimer’s disease emanating from a year of field work in a Drosophila fly lab. The natural sciences have been a point of fascination within the field of gender studies for decades. Such sciences produce knowledge on what gets to count as nature and natural, healthy or sick, normal or not, and they have done it with great societal authority and impact throughout European modernity. However, feminist technoscience scholars argue that science and knowledge is socially produced, and political too. Concepts such as nature, animal, human, body, sex, and life itself are not simply given natural realities but phenomena processed through the naturecultures of the laboratory. Situated within such theoretical and methodological approaches, this thesis wonders how scientific facts about Alzheimer’s disease are made in the lab today. What kinds of realities, bodies and ethico-political concerns are enacted? Who gets to live and who gets to die in everyday laboratory practices? Theoretically, the thesis is grounded, particularly, within Karen Barad’s agential realism and posthumanist performativity, and as such it accounts for human and nonhuman entanglements through which AD is performed in the lab in relational ways. In other words, the thesis explores how AD is enacted in the bodies of transgenic fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), as these flies embody the disease, live and die with it. Last but not least, the thesis explores the materialities of death, dying, embodiment and biological waste in a biochemistry lab as constitutive parts of the produced knowledge about AD.
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| 7. |
- Lundell, Patrik, 1969-
(författare)
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Pressen i provinsen : Från medborgerliga samtal till modern opinionsbildning 1750–1850
- 2002
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Att vara kritisk till våra dagars medier är en självklarhet, medan 1800-talets presspionjärer däremot har fått behålla hjältestatusen. I "Pressen i provinsen" tecknas den moderna pressens genombrott dock som en utdragen och långtifrån entydig process. Från att på 1700-talet ha varit arenor där alla hade rätten att delta i det upplysta samtalet, blev tidningarna under början av 1800-talet gradvis opinionsorgan styrda av tämligen enväldiga utgivare. Allt mer professionella tidningsmakare formade och tog makten över mediet - och språket. Begrepp som opinion, press, publicist och redaktör fick då de betydelser vi idag tar för givna. "Pressen i provinsen" bygger på ett omfattande källmaterial och slår ett slag för regional idéhistoria och för studiet av landsortspressen. Denna värld får färg och konturer genom personer som den energiske nyhetskrämaren Didric Gabriel Björn, den fantasiefulle martyren Jacob Philip Tollstorp och den konservative kapitalisten John Swartz. En mängd sedan länge bortglömda stridskrifter och tidningar kastar nytt - och inte alltid så fördelaktigt - ljus även över våra etablerade hjältar i huvudstaden.
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| 8. |
- Åkerlund, Andreas, 1977-
(författare)
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Mellan akademi och kulturpolitik : Lektorat i svenska språket vid tyska universitet 1906–1945
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to analyze the establishment and development of lectureships in the Swedish language in German universities during the first half of the 20th century. Building on earlier research about the role of language teaching abroad for public diplomacy, the study sees the lecturer as a part of both the the academic and political fields in Germany and Sweden. The establishment of and changes in the system of lectureships in Swedish 1906–1945 are explained through an analysis of the actors involved and of the assets allowing the actors to control both the establishment of lectureships and the appointment of lecturers in Germany.During the Weimar Republic a number of actors were involved in the establishment of the lectureships. They included academics with a scholarly interest in Scandinavian languages and old Norse,, the German state, which worked to promote the study of foreign countries and international academic mobility as a way of breaking German isolation after World War I, and the Swedish organization for the preservation of Swedishness abroad for which the teaching of Swedish abroad was a way of increasing the academic status of the language. After the National Socialist takeover in 1933 the NSDAP and the Swedish foreign ministry also took an interest in the Swedish lectureships in Germany for propaganda purposes.The dissertation shows how a system for the appointment of Swedish lecturers to Germany was established through interaction between the actors. Central in this process were the control over economic assets, a social network which made recommendations of lecturers possible, and the control over communication between both the lecturers and universites and between the German and Swedish states. The study also shows that the uneven distribution of assets between German and Swedish actors resulted in an inferior position for the German state and organizations in relationship to their Swedish counterparts.
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| 9. |
- Ekerholm, Helena, 1981-
(författare)
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Bränsle för den moderna nationen : Etanol och gengas i Sverige under mellankrigstiden och andra världskriget
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis investigate Swedish policy-making concerning promotion of wood gas and ethanol distilled from fermented sulphite lye as domestic fuel alternatives in the Interwar years and World War II. With a departure point in the theories of social constructions of technology (SCOT), the sociology of expectations and Thomas P. Hughe’s socio-technical systems I analyse the measures that were undertaken in these efforts, the arguments put forward for and against the ethanol and wood gas projects and how the efforts turned out. I also investigate how the interpretations of ethanol and wood gas as fuel alternatives changed from the Interwar period on through World War II and what consequences this had for ethanol and wood gas policy immediately after World War II. Source material includes Parliament and Government records, cabinet meeting files, governmental commissions, authority archives, technical evaluations and handbooks and scientific medical publications.Ethanol and wood gas were promoted from a nationalist vantage point. The Interwar debate was imbued with visions of national techno-scientific prowess in a perceived ongoing global contest for technological and scientific advancement, of which achieving autarky, self-sufficiency on important raw materials and industrial products, was an ideal for some. Ethanol and wood gas were also promoted as means for creating a lucrative new market for the forestry industry, which also held a prominent position in nationalist visions of technology. Expectations of a new war also motivated the promotion of ethanol and wood gas as national fuels. Measures for promotion included tax exemptions, sales guarantees and legislation for mandatory ethanol purchase for all petrol importing companies and gasifier loan funds. Political conflicts mainly centred around the principles of free trade as opposed to protectionism, proper use of tax funds and whether the potentials of the fuel alternatives were rhetorically exaggerated. During World War II ethanol and wood gas in particular served as important petrol surrogates. The increased wood gas use led to negative interpretations of wood gas a fuel alternative due to its hazardous, dirty and time-consuming maintenance and the changed driving behaviour it required from its users compared to petrol or ethanol fuelled automobiles. Compared to wood gas, ethanol was appreciated for its socio-technical similarities to petrol, but production was after the war deemed difficult to maintain during wartime. Whereas wood gas remained an important stand-by surrogate during the cold war, Swedish politicians lost interest in ethanol of the kind that was promoted in the Interwar years.
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| 10. |
- Holmberg, Linn, 1981-
(författare)
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The forgotten encyclopedia : the Maurists' dictionary of arts, crafts, and sciences, the unrealized rival of the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In mid-eighteenth century Paris, two Benedictine monks from the Congregation of Saint-Maur – also known as the Maurists – started compiling a universal dictionary of arts, crafts, and sciences. The project was initiated simultaneously with what would become one of the most famous literary enterprises in Western intellectual history: the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert. The latter started as an augmented translation of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, but it was constructed with another French dictionary as its ideological counterpart: the Jesuits’ Dictionnaire de Trévoux. While the Encyclopédie eventually turned into a controversial but successful best-seller, considered as the most important medium of Enlightenment thought, the Benedictines never finished or published their work. After a decade, the manuscripts were put aside in the monastery library, and were soon forgotten. For about two hundred and sixty years, the Maurists’ dictionary material has largely escaped the attention of researchers, and its history of production has been unknown. This dissertation examines the history and characteristics of the Maurists’ enterprise. The manuscripts are compared to the Encyclopédie and the Dictionnaire de Trévoux, and the project situated within its monastic environment of production, the history of the encyclopedic dictionary, and the Enlightenment culture. The study has an interdisciplinary character and combines perspectives of History of Science and Ideas, History of Monasticism, History of Encyclopedism, and History of the Book. The research procedure is distinguished by a microhistorical approach, where the studied materials are analyzed in a detailed manner, and the research process included in the narrative. The dissertation shows that the Maurists early found themselves in a rival situation with the embryonic Encyclopédie, and that the two projects had several common denominators that distinguished them from the predecessors within the genre. At the same time, the Maurists were making a dictionary unique in the eighteenth century, which assumed a third position in relation to the works of the encyclopédistes and the Jesuits. The study provides new perspectives on the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, the intellectual activities of the Congregation of Saint-Maur, as well as the editor in charge of the Maurist dictionary: Dom Antoine-Joseph Pernety, otherwise known for his alchemical writings.
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