New Books in the History of Science New Books Network

Alan McGowan delves into Franz Boas’s dual identity as both a scientist and a political activist, shedding light on how his work transcended academic boundaries to make a profound impact on society. In The Political Activism of Anthropologist Franz Boas, Citizen Scientist (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2024), McGowan provides a comprehensive overview of Boas’s career, from his groundbreaking research on cultural relativism to his advocacy for social justice and racial equality. By drawing on a wealth of primary sources and historical documents, he paints a vivid portrait of Boas as a multifaceted figure whose work was deeply intertwined with his political beliefs. Uncovering the intricate connection between his scientific endeavors and political beliefs, McGowan illuminates how Boas used his platform as an anthropologist to challenge societal norms and advocate for those on the fringes. Furthermore, the book offers valuable insights into the broader implications of Boas’s legacy. By emphasizing Boas’s commitment to antiracism, cultural relativism, and social justice, the author underscores the enduring relevance of Boas’s ideas in contemporary discussions on race, identity, and inequality. McGowan’s insightful analysis and engaging narrative style make this book a valuable resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in the intersection of science, politics, and social change.
Alan H. McGowan is Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies at The New School. Prior to coming to The New School, he founded and was president of the Gene Media Forum, an arm of the Newhouse School of Journalism at Syracuse University. Previously, he was for twenty years the president of the Scientists’ Institute for Public Information, a major bridge between the scientific community and the media. His research interests focus on the intersection between science and technology and social issues, including ethics, politics, and the economy.
Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eric Kandel was born in Vienna in 1929. In 1938 he and his family fled to Brooklyn, where he attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush. He studied history and literature at Harvard, and received an MD from NYU. He is a professor of biochemistry at Columbia University, and won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research on memory.
In addition to his science textbooks, Kandel has written several books for a general readership, including In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (2007), and The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves (2018). 
In 2012 he spoke to the Institute about his book The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (Random House, 2012).
About the book: 
At the turn of the century, Vienna was the cultural capital of Europe. Artists and scientists met in glittering salons, where they freely exchanged ideas that led to revolutionary breakthroughs in psychology, brain science, literature, and art. Kandel takes us into the world of Vienna to trace, in rich and rewarding detail, the ideas and advances made then, and their enduring influence today.
The Vienna School of Medicine led the way with its realization that truth lies hidden beneath the surface. That principle infused Viennese culture and strongly influenced the other pioneers of Vienna 1900. Sigmund Freud shocked the world with his insights into how our everyday unconscious aggressive and erotic desires are repressed and disguised in symbols, dreams, and behavior. Arthur Schnitzler revealed women's unconscious sexuality in his novels through his innovative use of the interior monologue. Gustav Klimt, Oscar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele created startlingly evocative and honest portraits that expressed unconscious lust, desire, anxiety, and the fear of death.
Kandel tells the story of how these pioneers--Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele--inspired by the Vienna School of Medicine, in turn influenced the founders of the Vienna School of Art History to ask pivotal questions such as What does the viewer bring to a work of art? How does the beholder respond to it? These questions prompted new and ongoing discoveries in psychology and brain biology, leading to revelations about how we see and perceive, how we think and feel, and how we respond to and create works of art. Kandel, one of the leading scientific thinkers of our time, places these five innovators in the context of today's cutting-edge science and gives us a new understanding of the modernist art of Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele, as well as the school of thought of Freud and Schnitzler. Reinvigorating the intellectual enquiry that began in Vienna 1900, The Age of Insight is a wonderfully written, superbly researched, and beautifully illustrated book that also provides a foundation for future work in neuroscience and the humanities. It is an extraordinary book from an international leader in neuroscience and intellectual history.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Students in twelfth-century Paris held slanging matches, branding the English drunkards, the Germans madmen and the French as arrogant. On Crusade, army recruits from different ethnic backgrounds taunted each other’s military skills. Men producing ethnography in monasteries and at court drafted derogatory descriptions of peoples dwelling in territories under colonization, questioning their work ethic, social organization, religious devotion and humanness. Monks listed and ruminated on the alleged traits of Jews, Saracens, Greeks, Saxons and Britons and their acceptance or rejection of Christianity.
Ethnicity in Medieval Europe 950-1250, Medicine, Power and Religion (Boydell and Brewer, 2021), provides a radical new approach to representations of nationhood in medieval western Europe, the author argues that ethnic stereotypes were constructed and wielded rhetorically to justify property claims, flaunt military strength, and assert moral and cultural ascendance over others. The gendered images of ethnicity in circulation reflect a negotiation over self-representations of discipline, rationality and strength, juxtaposed with the alleged chaos and weakness of racialized others. Interpreting nationhood through a religious lens, monks and schoolmen explained it as scientifically informed by environmental medicine, and ancient theory that held that location and climate influenced the physical and mental traits of peoples. Drawing on lists of ethnic character traits, school textbooks, medical treatises, proverbs, poetry and chronicles, this book shows that ethnic stereotypes served as rhetorical tools of power, crafting relationships within communities and towards others.
Claire Weeda is a cultural historian at the Institute for History at Leiden University, Netherlands. Her main fields of interest include ethnic stereotyping, the history of the body, Greco-Arabic medicine, and organic politics in Europe, 1100-1500.
Evan Zarkadas is a graduate student of European history at the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David S. Richeson's book Tales of Impossibility: The 2000-Year Quest to Solve the Mathematical Problems of Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2019) is the fascinating story of the 2000 year quest to solve four of the most perplexing problems of antiquity: squaring the circle, duplicating the cube, trisecting the angle, and constructing regular polygons. The eventual conclusion was that all four of these problems could not be solved under the conditions laid out millennia ago. But it's also an engaging tale of some of the greatest mathematicians, and some not-so-well known ones, who met the challenge and moved mathematics forward in ways that the Greek geometers could never have envisioned. Even if you never read a single proof through to its conclusion, you'll enjoy the many entertaining side trips into a geometry far beyond what you learned in high school.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is reality more than the material? Raj Balkaran holds a fascinating interview with philosopher Bernardo Kastrup on this topic. At the vanguard of the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, Bernardo presents cogent argumentation that reality is essentially mental, and examines the proper place of the scientific method in this deliberation. Bernardo’s research exhibits some astonishing parallels with ancient Indic thought. 
Bernardo Kastrup is the author of Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A Straightforward Summary of the 21st Century's Only Plausible Metaphysics" (Iff Books, 2024). About the book:
As the failures of physicalism begin to shake the confidence of even the most biased of its supporters, a new view on the nature of reality is establishing itself as the only tenable alternative: Analytic Idealism. According to it, there is a world out there independent of our individual minds, but such world is - just like ourselves - also mental or experiential. While being a realist, naturalist, rationalist, and even reductionist view, Analytic Idealism flips our culture-bound intuitions on their head, revealing that only through understanding our own inner nature can we understand the nature of the world. This book embodies its author's years-long experience on how best to explain Analytic Idealism to someone who has never studied it before, and has no background in the technical fields involved. It meets the readers where they are, holding their hand as they are shown - through a series of evocative metaphors - how to see through their own unexamined assumptions, so to realize how the impossible dilemas of physicalism disappear when nature is regarded from a slightly different slant. The conclusions have tremendous implications for our values and way of life, as well as our understanding of purpose, self, identity, and death.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a broken world, in which even God Himself is in a state of deep crisis, what is required in order to mend the rupture? How can one heal God and His world? Moreover, what might allow our actions to be effective? These questions stand at the heart of the Lurianic Kabbalah, the apex of the Safedian intellectual and religious renaissance of the sixteenth century, and one of the constituting phenomena of Modern Jewish thought. 
God as Patient: The Medical Discourse of Lurianic Kabbalah (Magnes Press, 2023) presents medical discourse – the knowledge, language, and practice of medicine – as a significant key to our understanding of the Lurianic search for a way to mend reality, and first and foremost the Godhead. The book reads together the Lurianic texts alongside the medical writings of R. Hayyim Vital, R. Isaac Luria's chief disciple, and a medical practitioner. Consequently, the book analyzes how medicine becomes the model for the Lurianic language of action. In its final part, the book shows how God becomes in this Kabbalah the ultimate patient of the Lurianic Kabbalist, who in turn becomes the private court physician of the King of Kings, and needs, like every physician, the proper modes of healing to accomplish his task.
Dr. Assaf Tamari studies Jewish intellectual history in the early modern eastern Mediterranean, focusing on the affinities between theology, science and political thought, especially in the literature of the Kabbalah. He is currently the deputy head of the Ben Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East, and teaches at Tel Aviv University, Shalem College and Alma - a Home for Hebrew Culture.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices