| 1. |
- Brissman, Henrik
(author)
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Mellan nation och omvärld : debatt i Sverige om vetenskapens organisering och finansiering samt dess internationella och nationella aspekter under 1900-talets första hälft
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Between the nation and the surrounding world - Debate in Sweden regarding the organisation and financing of research and its international and national aspects during the first half of the twentieth century My thesis regards the attitude of the Swedish research society to research as a national and an international phenomenon during the period 1900-1950. My work relates to the question in which way the landscape of the research policy of the surrounding world has influenced Swedish research during this period. Primarily it deals with a change between German and American influences. The aim is to give a contribution to the understanding of the national and international character of research. The thesis consists of three parts; Part 1 deals with the international landscape of organisation and co-operation in research. Such phenomenon as the German “Mandarins”, when the Nazis seized power of in Germany, the progressive ideal of research, “Bernalism” and the consequences for science in Europe and United States through the financial support from Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Foundation is discussed. A picture of the fundamental feature concerning the relationship between research, economy and politics in Europe and United States is given. In order to relate the international picture to the Swedish conditions, I discuss the debate regarding to the societal role of research within the Swedish research society, there I show the span between the national and international aspects concerning Swedish research. The national motive was strong and a legitimizing element for the actors of research, both when they articulated their needs in political discourses and in the national debate. They argued that the destiny of the nation was dependent of that research had a leading role in the society. Most of the problems in society could be soluted with scientific methods. The discussion of the freedom of research and it’s societal use was in great respect influenced of contemporary international currents, even though the national perspectives and priorities were the most important. Part 2 deals with five studies, the boundary organisation The Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences (Ingenjörsvetenskapsakademien), the professional organisation The Swedish Society of Medicine (Svenska Läkaresällskapet) and the research councils, Medical Research Council (Medicinska forskningsrådet), The Research Council of Social Sciences (Samhällsvetenskapliga forskningsrådet) and The Humanistic Fund (Humanistiska fonden). In these studies I focus on the international relations of the scientific organisations. Part 3 will show the results in a summary discussion. I argue that the view of the Swedish research society on international scientific cooperation is connected with the national needs and motifs. International and national motives are no way contrary to each other – if no nations, then no internationalism. From the point of view of the scientific organisations, there are no evidences that Swedish researchers and scientific-political actors were so unambiguous dependent of German science and science politics. Instead there was a complex mosaic of international relations, which were concerning several nations, and Germany was one among many, even if it was an important one. United States, Great Britain and the Nordic countries were other important nations to have a scientific exchange with, and in some cases more important than Germany.
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| 2. |
- Nilsson, Kristian
(author)
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Baltic-Finns and Scandinavians : Comparative-Historical Linguistics and the Early History of the Nordic Region
- 2012
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The study investigates how the early nineteenth century invention of comparative-historical linguistics affected European ethnohistoric thought, and how this process altered ethnohistorical research on the early, pre-Christian history of the Nordic region. The case study of the Nordic region (Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Estonia) includes the discipline histories of Finno-Ugric studies, linguistics and the larger field of intellectual history. The study examines the ethnohistorical narratives on relations between Finno-Ugric-speaking Baltic-Finns and Indo-European-speaking Scandinavians. The study covers a time period from the Middle Ages until 1900, with a chronological focus on the period 1770-1900.
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| 3. |
- Eriksson, Jonnie, 1978-
(author)
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Monstret & människan : Paré, Deleuze och teratologiska traditioner i fransk filosofi, från renässanshumanism till posthumanism
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation studies the problem of the inhuman in relation to human nature in philosophy from antiquity to the present, highlighting the interrelationship between science and philosophy in the development of concepts of monstrosity in France from mid-sixteenth century to late twentieth century thought. By means of constraint, it focuses on Ambroise Paré (1509/10–90) and Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) as representatives of early humanism and posthumanism, respectively. The study is divided into four chronologically ordered parts. In part I, four teratological traditions of philosophical import are discerned in antiquity: the naturalist, the humanist, the metaphysical, and the hermeneutical (each associated with a set of key names: in particular, Empedocles, Lucretius; Socrates, Protagoras; Plato, Aristotle; and Pliny, Augustine). Part II follows these traditions into the Renaissance where they intersect in the ‘books of wonder’, among which Paré’s Des monstres et prodiges (1573) is viewed to have had a lasting influence on the development of the science of teratology. Criticizing the positivistic conventions of interpretation of the book in question, notions of order, causality, diversity, and novelty are analyzed for the purpose of excavating from Paré’s work a natural philosophy which hinges on man’s capacity for knowledge; in such a humanist conception, monsters are not so much naturalized as nature becomes monstrous, while man is taken to reflect and encompass all the properties of natural things, thereby incorporating monstrosity in his singular variability. Part III provides an overview of the development of a scientific teratology from Cartesian mechanicism and rationalism, through theories of preformation, epigenesis, and transformation, to the materialist and vitalist debates of the early nineteenth century, when Étienne and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire create the discipline of teratology, and its aftermath in developmental and evolutionary biology. The general theme is the place of anomalies in the normal scheme of nature (and culture), as man becomes progressively taken as the norm for thought, ultimately rendering the inhuman as such unthought. Finally, part IV looks to Deleuze as an attempt in the late 1900s to construct a posthumanist philosophy of nature where monstrosity is the problem which rather generates thought; it thus chronologically traces formulations of a concept of monstrosity in his body of work, from the 1940s to the 1990s. In Différence et répétition (1968), Deleuze is found to furnish three interconnected theses to define monstrosity, regarding problems of determination, synthesis, and differentiation, where the problematic as such (the nature of difference itself) is conceptualized as the ‘idea’ of monstrosity, not any particular physical shape. After analyzing the concept of the ‘body without organs’ as an issue of identity and materiality, tracing it back to its formulation in Logique du sens (1969), these theses of monstrosity are then applied to a study of Deleuze’s later philosophy, emphasizing Mille plateaux (1980), Logique de la sensation (1981), and Cinéma 1–2 (1983–85), as side-stepping the human norm in order to think its anomaly (the inhuman) as the condition for creativity. This is evidenced in his ideas of technology and the arts as experimental practices of becoming inhuman. The monster is thus regarded as a ‘conceptual persona’ in a Deleuzian philosophy of the virtual Figure—challenging all actual forms—of an inhuman time for the experience of difference in itself.
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