Social Theory as a Cognitive Neuroscience

In the nineteenth century, there was substantial and sophisticated interest in neuroscience on the part of social theorists, including Comte and Spencer, and later Simon Patten and Charles Ellwood. This body of thinking faced a dead end: it could do little more than identify highly general mechanisms, and could not provide accounts of such questions as `why was there no proletarian revolution?\u27 Psychologically dubious explanations, relying on neo-Kantian views of the mind, replaced them. With the rise of neuroscience, however, some of the problems of concern to earlier thinkers, such as imitation, have revived because of the discovery of neuronal mechanisms, or through fMRI studies. The article reviews the history and discusses the implications of current work for the reconsideration of traditional social theory concepts. It is suggested that certain kinds of bridging work with neuroscience would enable us to answer many questions in social theory that empirical sociology has failed to answer

Pesquisa clínica e experimental no Brasil oitocentista: circulação e controle do conhecimento em helmintologia médica Clinical and experimental research in nineteenth-century Brazil: the circulation and control of knowledge in medical helminthology

As contribuições de médicos brasileiros ao conhecimento sobre doenças causadas por vermes parasitas, na segunda metade do século XIX, produziram efeitos distintos em três comunidades epistêmicas: a anatomoclínica brasileira; a geografia médica francesa; e a emergente parasitologia médica. Admitindo a heterogeneidade dos regimes de legitimação dos fatos científicos e das práticas epistemológicas, descreve-se cartografia específica do conhecimento médico da época, revelando as linhas de força dos três campos disciplinares. O foco na circulação, no controle e na validação do conhecimento médico revela controvérsias e complicadas negociações entre distintas comunidades epistêmicas.<br>The contributions of Brazilian physicians to knowledge of diseases caused by parasitic worms, during the second half of the nineteenth century, had distinct effects on three epistemic communities: Brazilian clinical anatomy, French medical geography, and the emerging field of medical parasitology. Accepting the heterogeneity of both the systems for legitimizing scientific facts and the epistemological practices observed by each discipline, the text provides a specific cartography of the period's medical knowledge, revealing the lines of force shaping the three disciplinary fields. The focus on the circulation, control and validation of medical knowledge reveals strong controversies and complicated negotiations between different epistemic communities