How academics review books (and each other)

NWOPolitical Culture and National Identit

Review of Kooystra, U. (2021) De Scheikunstenaar: de innovatieve wetenschap van de Groningse hoogleraar Sibrand Stratingh Ez. 1785–1841

NWOPolitical Culture and National Identit

History and physics entangled: Disciplinary intersections in the long nineteenth century

This dissertation uncovers historical relations between two knowledge disciplines that are usually defined in contrasting terms: history and physics. My main claim is that the histories of these disciplines have crucially depended on one another: they are “entangled.” To support this claim, I describe the sharing of three knowledge-making tools by historians and physicists in nineteenth-century German-speaking contexts: the concept of “fact,” the epistemic virtue of “exactitude,” and the method of source criticism. I argue that, by sharing these tools of knowledge making – which I subsume under the notion of “cognitive goods” — German historians and physicists defined the boundaries of their disciplines, while also maintaining a common, empirically oriented culture of knowledge making. I also pay attention to the divergences that emerged as part of these disciplinary intersections. In particular, I show that historians and physicists assigned different roles and interpretations to the concepts, virtues, and methods that they shared. This illustrates a fundamental aspect of how disciplinary communities interact: when they share tools of knowledge making, these tools inevitably transform. Finally, this dissertation aims to contribute to a better understanding of the historical relation between the natural sciences and the humanities. Previous historiography has dealt with these areas of knowledge mostly in separate terms. However, as this entangled history illustrates, disciplines that we today consider as belonging to the humanities or the natural sciences, turn out to have an intimately connected history. Hence, their histories should be studied not separately, but in relation to one another

Evaluating knowledge, evaluating character: book reviewing by American historians and physicists (1900–1940)

How have the evaluative norms and evaluative language of academics developed historically, and how have they varied between disciplines? Meaningful answers to these questions may be obtained from the historical-comparative study of book reviewing, a widely practiced yet historically understudied academic genre. My focus in this article is on book reviews written by American historians and physicists in the American Historical Review, Physical Review, and Science from 1900 until 1940. I show that book reviewers in these journals assessed not only results and methods of authors but also authors themselves. They would praise some authors—especially colleagues—for exhibiting virtues like “carefulness,” “objectivity,” or “thoroughness,” while charging others—especially nonacademics—with vices such as “recklessness,” “dogmatism,” or “exaggeration.” Remarkably, such virtue and vice language was applied not only to the character of authors, but also to their actions and outputs. Indeed, in early twentieth-century book reviews by historians and physicists, epistemic virtues and vices functioned as norms to evaluate both knowledge and character.NWOPolitical Culture and National Identit

The Icarus flight of speculation: philosophers' vices as perceived by nineteenth‐century historians and physicists

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The Flow of Cognitive Goods: A Historiographical Framework for the Study of Epistemic Transfer

Historians of science have described various cases of disciplines influencing one another. Such exchanges across disciplinary boundaries often signal innovation, intellectual change, and breakthroughs. A satisfactory framework from which the historical phenomenon of epistemic transfer between disciplines can be studied systematically, however, has not yet been proposed. This essay introduces the notion of “cognitive goods,” a tool of knowledge making that can be transferred across disciplinary boundaries. Cognitive goods include, for example, methods, concepts, and instruments. The essay proposes to study historical interactions between disciplines as instances of the “flow” of cognitive goods. The notion of cognitive goodsmay serve as a springboard for a systematic analysis of flows occurring throughout the history of the disciplines. Such an analysis could be instrumental for an integrated historiography of knowledge, including the humanities and the natural and social sciences