History

This essay explores how the Enlightenment preoccupation with nature and reason, and the concomitant desire to restructure civil and political society according to these principles, served simultaneously to write certain speculations within mental philosophy into the heart of the republican project, and to orient the emerging human sciences toward embracing those social formations most consonant with the developing notions of the republican citizen and the enlightened society.  Using the development of the language of talents in the eighteenth century as its focus, the essay examines how Enlightenment political writers and mental philosophers—including Locke, Hartley, Condillac, Cabanis, Rousseau, Helvétius, Godwin, Paine, Wollstonecraft, Jefferson, and Adams—elaborated a vision, on the one hand, of a new social-political order founded on merit and, on the other, of human nature as an object of both scientific and political interest.

This article explores how French psychologists understood the state of their field during the first quarter of the twentieth century, and whether they thought it was in crisis.  The article begins with the Russian-born psychologist Nicolas Kostyleff and his announcement in 1911 that experimental psychology was facing a crisis.  After briefly situating Kostyleff, the article examines his analysis of the troubles facing experimental psychology and his proposed solution, as well as the rather muted response his diagnosis received from the French psychological community.  The optimism about the field evident in many of the accounts surveying French psychology during the early twentieth century notwithstanding, a few others did join Kostyleff in declaring that all was not well with experimental psychology.  Together their pronouncements suggest that under the surface, important unresolved issues faced the French psychological community.  Two are singled out: What was the proper methodology for psychology as a positive science? And what kinds of practices could claim to be objective, and in what sense? The article concludes by examining what these anxieties reveal about the type of science that French psychologists hoped to pursue.

Like his contemporary Herbert Spencer, the nineteenth-century French philosopher/psychologist/academic entrepreneur Victor Cousin has not fared well at the hands of modern historians. When compared to the works of such acclaimed giants as Hegel or Nietzsche or Mill, Cousin's philosophical contributions have largely been considered derivative, if not simply dismissed altogether.

In November 2000, Americans witnessed an extraordinary political spectacle. As is well known, this was not the quick and virtually mechanical process of voting, tabulating, and announcing winners to which the American public had become accustomed. Instead, the presidential vote was so close that it took weeks to produce a result, and generated a raft of lawsuits that subjected numerous aspects of the election procedures to intense public and legal scrutiny.

¿ Qué puede aportar un historiador y académico de los estudios sociales al proyecto de la Organización de Cooperación y Desarrollo Económicos (OCDE)“Definición y Selección de Competencias: Fundamentos Teóricos y Conceptuales”(Proyecto Deseco, por su nombre en inglés,“Definition and Selection of Competences: Theoretical and Conceptual Foundations”)?

... other, more traditional scientific controversies, in which the argument diminishes as new discoveries are ... the condition of slavery is both just and beneficial."17 Although Aristotle's reference to ... it was not until the nineteenth century that the linkage between science and politics ...

This article suggests a possible approach to analyzing the global history of intelligence testing in light of some recent work in the history of science and science studies. In particular, it uses work in metrology and subaltern studies to develop possible models for the dissemination, appropriation, and transformation of mental testing in the early 20th century. It draws on the accounts presented in the other articles in this collection to substantiate its claims. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).