What Determines the Emergence and Establishment of an Academic Discipline? The Development of Pharmacy at German Universities from 1880 to 1970. At universities new specialist subjects are developing steadily, but they rarely become established sub-disciplines. The leading mechanisms of these processes seldom have been analyzed. The article investigates this problem, the development of the discipline of pharmacy at German universities from 1880 to 1970, from three different viewpoints: the processes inside the university structures, the politics of the organizations of professional pharmacists, and the research promotion invested by the industry. The analysis is based on archival data. It results in the chokepoint that the proximity of neighbouring disciplines and their behaviour are essential. They limited the ways of getting academic reputation and the award of a new specialisation. The professional pharmaceutical organizations rather hindered processes of disciplinary differentiation. The research promotion by the industry had only marginal effect on the development of disciplinary structures.

Military-Psychiatric Theater. French Cinematography of “War Hysteria”, 1915–1918. During the First World War, the use of a new form of media technology was applied within French military neuro-psychiatry: scientific cinematography. This visual technique was used to represent and produce symptoms of so-called “war hysteria”. “War hysteria” among soldiers and officers not only seemed to symbolize the weakness, inefficiency, and vulnerability of the military collective body, the corps, but challenged the borders of medical cinematography as it was considered to be able to capture ‘real’ symptoms on celluloid. By shivering and shaking, “war hysterics”, firstly, transgressed the classical image of the brave and potent warrior and, secondly, mirrored the flaws of the film technique by emphasizing its limits, twitches, and aesthetical “hysteria”. Analyzing several French medical films, it can be seen that they contain diverse dramaturgical means, just as aesthetical and narrative strategies adopted from forms in the field of illusion, including theater, ballet, cabaret, and feature film. The filmic portrayal of male “hysteria” presented both a transgression and a phantasmatic regaining of the social and military functionability of the strong masculine soldier. The theatrical film rhetoric manages to contrast the shift from the concept of “pithiatisme”, favored by the bulk of the French physicians, in the first half of what was refered to as “la Grande Guerre”, towards a “genuine”, somatic, and physiological aetiology of “war hysteria” cases since 1916.

Philosophy of the Art of Science. Historical Remarks on the Significance of Rules in Scientific Language. This paper undertakes first steps toward a ‘Philosophy of the Art of Science’ from a History of Science and Philosophy of Language perspective. Traditionally it is understood that Philosophy of Science assesses science as to the validity of its methods and to the question of how it is that we hold its claims to be true. However, the range of presuppositions here is considerable: Roughly, it spans from Gottlob Frege's ‘The True’ (das Wahre) as the aim of scientific inquiry on the one end, to Paul Feyerabend's pluralistic understanding of science in a democratic society on the other. Despite this profound difference, however, we can nonetheless detect some similarity between them. Both hold science to be a normative endeavor: Frege thinks we ought to strive for true thoughts as somewhat independent ontological entities; Feyerabend thinks we ought to strive for a pragmatic humanism that takes the historicity of our knowledge into account. But while Frege ventured to show that natural language can benefit from insights drawn from the normative logic of formalized languages, Feyerabend discounted the idea of formalized language altogether, but with no less normative verve in regard to our scientific concept formation. Hence the combining question is whether scientific concept formation is indeed a rule-governed behavior, or, put more generally, whether semantic content as such is normative. Guided by this question, the present paper draws a line from Frege through Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Quine, to those authors who follow or refute Saul Kripke's Wittgensteinian notion of semantic normativity in the most recent discussion of today. However, the paper does not proceed chronologically, but rather thematically along the major lines of argument. Hence after a brief survey of Feyerabend's philosophy of scientific concept formation (I), we explore Frege and his legacy on semantic normativity (II), and investigate the route that eventually led to present day semantic rule-skepticism (III). We conclude with Carnap's ‘Principle of Tolerance’ combined with Feyerabend's notion of Science as an Art, parallels of which we can even find in Kant's third Critique (IV).

Of the Merits of History for Philosophy of Science. This essay is inspired by some of the contributions to the two special issues “History of Science and Philosophy of Science” of the journal Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte. I consider possible roles of historical study for philosophy of science. The first part of the essay discusses contributions to the Anglo-American debate about history and philosophy of science in the 1960s and 1970s. I present two approaches. According to Larry Laudan and others, philosophy of science should be regarded as an empirical theory of science, which has to be tested against historical episodes. I show why this conception of philosophy of science is problematic. According to Dudley Shapere and others, by contrast, philosophical analysis of science requires hermeneutic understanding and should include the study of the development of scientific knowledge. I agree that the method of philosophy of science is best described as hermeneutic. To defend a genuine historical-hermeneutic philosophy of science, however, one would have to demonstrate the privilege of historical analysis over other forms of science studies, such as sociology of science or studies of science communication. I do not think that such a demonstration can be made.