Endeavour

Can love affect knowledge and knowledge affect love? John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor-Mill, Max and Marianne Weber, and Bertrand and Dora Russell had a definite vocation: they wanted to change the world. They questioned traditional gender arrangements through publications on equality, marriage, and education. They were liberal thinkers, advocating individual freedom and autonomy, vis à vis the constraints of state and society. Their partnership inspired their work, a living experiment conducted through their own unconventional relationship...

In his 1917 lecture for Munich students (most often entitled in English translation "Science as a Vocation"), Max Weber addressed numerous issues: not only how "profession" and "calling" are related in science and scholarship, but also Entzauberung ("disenchantment"); rationality and its limits; ultimate values; and the field of tension between science and religion. The present essay locates these themes in Weber's oeuvre from 1911 onward, and analyses how they resonate and culminate in Weber's address in 1917...

This article is both a comment on the collection of papers, "Specialists with Spirit: Re-Enchanting the Vocation of Science," offered as a tribute to Klaas van Berkel, and an attempt to add historical depth to present-day sensibilities about the academic discipline called the history of science: Is it a special sort of inquiry? Is science as its subject matter a special sort of culture? Max Weber's 1917 Science as a Vocation lecture, and its continuing appropriations, is a focal point for addressing these questions...

Intellectuals tend to cherish heroes who embody their ideal way of life. The fact that the personas of the unworldly Greek philosophers Diogenes and Crates were so popular in the late Middle Ages proves that Max Weber's Idealtypus of the "authentic man of science" (as termed by Steven Shapin) has been problematic for centuries. This finding gives cause to modify Max Weber's and Shapin's viewpoints about the loss of the "authentic man of science" due to professionalization. The development of the university as an educational institution in the High Middle Ages chained the academic once and for all to a formal training that costs time and money: investments that were expected to have reward...

This editorial introduces the collection, "Specialists with Spirit: Re-Enchanting the Vocation of Science," co-edited by Dorien Daling and Hanneke Hoekstra. The collection offers a tribute to the eminent historian of science, Klaas van Berkel, commemorating his retirement from the University of Groningen. The papers compel us to consider the ongoing tensions between knowledge production and the social, political, and economic constraints faced by scholars, a theme that Max Weber famously addressed in his 1917 lecture, Wissenschaft als Beruf, which the collection's contributors revisit as they consider a range of historical and contemporary questions concerning science and its study by historians...

In well-established disciplines like history it is not common to find professionals who admit that they are driven by a "calling" or who say they have a "mission" to fulfill. In emerging disciplines, however, the situation is different: in order to gain recognition these new disciplines need highly driven practitioners, who's calling enables them to overcome opposition or neglect from the side of the established disciplines. A clear example of such a practitioner with a mission in an emerging field of knowledge is the Dutch historian of science Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis (1892-1965)...

This essay aims to shed some light on the still common sense of a vocation among scientists. Taking its cue from Paul Forman's analysis of twentieth-century disciplinary science and Emile Durkheim's social view of religions, it suggests that modern scientific communities resemble religious communities in their penchant for transcendence. The essay aims to illustrate this perspective by looking at some developments within the physics discipline since its emergence in the late nineteenth century. One indication for this penchant is the tendency to distance oneself from the material conditions which allowed the discipline to flourish...

According to the Dutch chemist Gerrit Jan Mulder (1802-1880), the principal aim of university education was character building and moral edification. Professional training was of secondary importance. Mulder's ideas about the vocation and moral mission of the university professor can serve as a historical counterpart to later Weberian, Mertonian, and contemporary ideas on the ethos of science. I argue that a revaluation of the moral precepts that Mulder saw as defining the life of an academic is helpful in dealing with the problems of late modern science, such as the replication crisis and research misconduct...

Within the history of mathematics and mathematics education in Nepal, Tikaram and Chandrakala Dhananjaya are relatively well-known figures for their two books Śiśubodha Taraṅgiṇī and Līlāvatī. This is despite there being almost no archival or manuscript materials offering a window into their lives: we have no letters, notebooks, diaries, or school records. Rather than focusing on either individual in isolation, in this article we present an argument for considering the Dhananjayas as an analytically indivisible collaborative couple in mathematics...

The avowed atheist, evolutionary naturalist and mathematician William Kingdon Clifford is often remembered for his essay, "The Ethics of Belief," in which he opposed organized religion in any form. As a mathematician, Clifford was an early advocate of non-Euclidean geometry in England. Combining William Rowan Hamilton's work on quaternions with Hermann Grassmann's theory of linear extension, he invented an original system of geometric algebra. Breaking with conservative traditionalism in his philosophical and mathematical work, Clifford's marriage to the children's writer, novelist, and dramatist Lucy Lane was a relatively conventional, if brief, Victorian marriage...

The Victorian writer Mary Everest Boole (1832-1916) developed an idiosyncratic pedagogical treatment of arithmetic, algebra, and logic. Her pedagogy favored active, child-directed learning, and is now generally admired as ahead of its time, though it must be deciphered through fairly eccentric delivery. A recurring theme in Mrs. Boole's prolific writing is the misunderstood legacy of her late husband, the renowned mathematician and logician George Boole (1815-1864). As existing literature has shown, she worked to promote a morally and religiously charged understanding of his work...

Although much scholarship on nineteenth and twentieth century mathematics has focused on processes of professionalization, historical mathematicians themselves rarely experienced their lives as neatly divisible into the professional and the private. Taking marriage as a focal point, this introduction brings the fruitful historiography of gender, collaborative couples, and domesticity in science into a broader conversation with the history of mathematics. By historicizing marriage and its relationship to mathematical careers, we lay the groundwork for the special issue which uncovers the myriad ways in which spousal collaboration and support have been central to mathematical work...

In this article, the extraordinary life of the astronomer Dorothea Klumpke (1861-1942) is described in detail for the first time, focussing on the four phases of her career, in which she researched various astronomical questions both as an amateur and as an employee of an observatory and as one half of a couple in science. For this reason, Klumpke's biography provides insights into the cornucopia of research approaches in astronomy at the time, in which professional and amateur astronomers explored the heavens in observatories, on field trips to exotic countries, in their own backyards, or aboard hot air balloons, using telescopes, gazing through the lenses of cameras and spectroscopes, or based on mathematical reasoning...

When Bryn Mawr College opened in 1885, then-president James Rhoads highlighted the precautions taken to ensure that the young women students would remain healthy, in reaction to the publicized warnings of Scottish physician Thomas S. Clouston, M.D. Dr. Clouston's concern that girls' higher education would damage their health epitomized a growing anxiety around the status of wives and mothers at a time of increased educational opportunities for the so-called 'fairer sex'. To counter these opinions, college alumnae and administrators turned to statistics...

J. D. Wetherspoon is a popular pub chain in the United Kingdom. Despite its prominence in British cultural life and active and deliberate engagement with history, it has received scant academic attention. Here, this engagement with history is explored with a particular focus on how Wetherspoon approaches the history of science. This paper highlights the focus of Wetherspoon on local history and, in particular, on local exceptionalism, before discussing how such an understanding of history informs wider debates-such as Wetherspoon's support of Brexit (the UK's withdrawal from the European Union)...

The story of John Farrar (1779-1853) and Eliza Ware Rotch (1791-1870) is neither a tale about a female mathematician nor one of the "making" of a mathematical career. Rather, the productivity of John, who is known to historians of American mathematics for the Harvard College series of mathematics and natural philosophy textbooks that bears his name, had already begun to decline by the time he married Eliza in 1828. She then embarked on her own career of adapting novels and biographies for children and writing self-improvement manuals...

Twenty-first-century discourse on science has been marked by narratives of crisis. Science is said to be experiencing crises of public trust, of peer review and publishing, of reproducibility and replicability, and of recognition and reward. The dominant response has been to "repair" the scientific literature and the system of scientific publishing through open science. This paper places the current predicament of scholarly communication in historical perspective by exploring the evolution of the scientific journal in the second half of the twentieth century...

In 1936 the Austrian geologist Paul Waitz published a seminal bibliographical, historical essay on Colima volcano, Mexico. His article exemplifies well the paths by which geology became what Lorraine Daston has termed sciences of the archive, that is, the manner in which scientific disciplines became concerned with archival work. Waitz's historical description of studies of Colima volcano built a genealogy of observations, ultimately constructing a history of the volcano itself. By bringing attention not only to Waitz's discourse but also to his treatment of visual objects, such as pictorial and photographic landscapes, my article points out how long-term aesthetics, such as the picturesque and the sublime, functioned as tropes which enabled a standardized perception, essential to visualize a clear history of scientific observations, from the landscape paintings of the nineteenth-century artist Johann Moritz Rugendas to Waitz's own photographs...

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed concerns around life span and aging, but these tensions and anxieties around longevity are not new. Physicians, scientists, and philosophers have been meditating on the idea and consequences of life extension for many centuries. In this short article, we put into conversation some of the ways that people have understood longevity from the early modern period to the present. We trace the history of texts like Alvise Cornaro's Treatise on the Sober Life through present-day dieting manuals, consider accounts of extreme old age from Old Man Parr in the sixteenth century to Jeanne Calment in the twentieth, and reflect on the role of caretakers for older adults, from Gabriele Zerbi's fifteenth-century gerontocomos to graphic novel representations of aging parents in the present...

The second half of the 1180s witnessed an unusual number of solar eclipses visible within Europe in quick succession. These were recorded or referenced in a wide range of sources, from chronicles in Latin and Old Church Slavonic to the earliest epic poem from the medieval Rus'. A comparison between key elements of these accounts reveals several notable features. First, the identification of solar prominences. The account of the 1185 total eclipse from the Rus' Laurentian Chronicle is well established in this context as the first probable textual witness to the phenomenon in Europe...