Jürgen Renn, The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene. Princeton:  University Press, 2020; 584pp; Hardcover £30; ISBN: 9780691171982. By Alfred Freeborn The year 2012 marked the 50th anniversary of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book which profoundly shaped the historical study of science. The then director of Department II of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, Lorraine Daston, reflected that one unintended result of the book’s influence was that ‘most historians of science no longer believe that any kind of structure could possibly do justice to their subject matter.’[i] Daston proposed that the path to a new intellectual structure, sight of which had been lost among the growing plethora of detailed micro-histories, lay in the turn from a cultural history of science to a historical theory of knowledge.[ii] Down the corridor from Daston’s office the director of Department I has been busy charting just such a path. Jürgen Renn’s The Evolution of

Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene is a guidebook for a new historical theory of knowledge. It is not so much a contribution to the growing literature on how society might tackle global climate change, but uses this context to give urgency to the daunting task of synthesizing a common theoretical structure for a discipline that has lost its way. As the title of the book suggests, the structure of knowledge is not revolutionary but evolutionary. Renn takes his theoretical model from the biological theory of evolution and its explanatory concepts from the cognitive sciences. An evolutionary theory of knowledge seeks to do for the human sciences what Darwin’s theory of evolution did for the biological sciences by conceptually linking the morphology of the organism with its environmental conditions. It hopes to conceptually link experimental studies of individual cognitive development with the historical study of socially shared knowledge. The binding thread is, like in Darwinian evolution, the…

Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017; 206 pages, Hardcover £30; ISBN: 9780691174792 By Chris Wilson ‘Out of the darkness my eye glimpses a faint light. I see my small hand as it reaches for the moon from atop my mother’s shoulder. What a memory! How often have we reached for moons that are no less unattainable? I recall the tremendous effort I once expended trying to take hold of my mother’s nipple, only to be thwarted by something with a bitter taste…’[i] By the 1940s, the Oedipus complex, along with a host of other Freudian notions, would have been familiar to an Egyptian reading public. Naguib Mahfouz’s The Mirage (al-Sarab), published in 1948, offered readers one of the most evocative portrayals – and starkest warnings – of the perils of an excessive, pathological, and ultimately destructive attachment to the mother, in the story of Kamil Ru’ba Laz.

So unattractive was this portrait of Kamil that when an acquaintance was informed that Mahfouz had based the character on him – the problem in his life, Mahfouz later recounted, as in Kamil’s, was his relationship with his mother – he pulled out a revolver and made threats against the future Nobel Prize winner.[ii] Together with radio shows hosted by practising psychoanalysts, the introduction of psychological and intelligence testing into the military, and a flurry of other novels, plays, and films which dealt in similarly Freudian themes, Mahfouz’s novel was one of the many ways in which psychoanalysis became ‘nothing short of ubiquitous in postwar Egypt’.[iii] Yet rather than attempt a comprehensive reception history, Omnia El Shakry’s The Arabic Freud – the much-anticipated monograph-length sequel to her article of the same name, published in Modern Intellectual History back in 2014[iv] – has its sights set on a different aim, one at once more focussed and more ambitious. The Arabic Freud,…

Cheryl Mattingly, Rasmus Dyring, Maria Louw, and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer (eds.) Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018; 266 pages, hardcover $135.00/£99.00; ISBN 978-1-78533-693-5 By Paul van Trigt What does it mean to be human? It feels like a cliché to ask this question, but it is undeniably high on the agenda of public and scholarly debates. Technological developments have fed these discussions, as well as identity politics, in which the human norm presented as a white, heterosexual man is questioned. An interesting contribution has recently been delivered by a collective of anthropologists and philosophers, under the banner of ‘new humanism’, which is characterized by a charming combination of theoretical and empirical approaches. In this review I will discuss one of their main contributions, the volume Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life (2018), by situating it in scholarly debates and by exploring the meaning of their enterprise for other disciplines, history in particular. In

the prologue of Moral Engines one of the editors, anthropologist Cheryl Mattingly, describes the book project as partly a local history: ‘The Aarhus Story’. By this she refers to an interdisciplinary network at Aarhus University on ‘Health, Humanity and Culture’ founded by the philosopher Uffe Juul Jensen, led by the ‘very strong belief that philosophy could not, by itself, think through crucial issues like health (or suffering) without reaching out to create a cross-disciplinary conversation that not only spanned different disciplines but also involved health practitioners’.[i] An intense collaboration between philosophers and anthropologists arose within this network and led to various publications, including Moral Engines. Before I turn to this volume, I will first discuss the introduction to a special issue in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory in which some of the same editors explain the agenda of their philosophical anthropology. Thomas Schwarz Wentzer and Cheryl Mattingly start by considering what they believe to be, ‘an increasing dehumanization…

Ariane Hanemaayer. The Impossible Clinic: A Critical Sociology of Evidence Based Medicine. Vancouver, Toronto: UBC Press, 2019; 198 pages, hardcover £60.00; ISBN 0774862076 By Sahanika Ratnayake To begin with a caveat, I am somewhat  unsuitable reviewer for Ariane Hanemaayer's The Impossible Clinic, a historical and sociological account of the Evidence Based Medicine Movement (EBM). I am an analytic philosopher of science working on contemporary psychotherapies, reviewing a book in sociology. My interest in the book is thus from a cross-disciplinary perspective. What I am unable to offer is something the book thoroughly deserves —  an evaluation on its own terms, as a contribution to the sociological literature on EBM and more broadly, the sociology of medicine and governmentality. EBM by now is a staple of contemporary medicine, with all manner of fields from psychotherapy and nursing, to new pharmaceuticals and medical technology claiming to be evidence-based. It is a strange chimera, at once an evaluation of interventions, a justification

for healthcare policies and a claim to a certain kind of legitimacy. The early development of EBM is similarly multifaceted, with (at least) two main threads, each corresponding to a particular geographic region. The first concerns the appraisal of evidence for clinical interventions in medical research. Randomised control trials are used to measure the efficacy of clinical interventions and these trials are in turn amalgamated and appraised via systematic reviews and meta-analyses. This thread in the development of EBM, the history of which is still to be written, centers largely on the United Kingdom and involves key developments such as the widely publicised use of a randomised control trial to test the efficacy of streptomycin for tuberculosis, Archie Cochrane's critique of the prevailing medical research literature and  the resulting establishment of the Cochrane Collaboration in 1993 by Iain Chalmers.  The second thread concerns the exercise of clinical judgement. In the late 60's, medical authority came under scrutiny, as the basis for…

Stephen Frosh. Those Who Come After: Postmemory, Acknowledgement and Forgiveness; London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; 246 pages, hardcover £64.99; ISBN 978-3-030-14852-2 By Roger Frie How do we live with inherited traumatic memories of genocide and racial violence? Is it possible to ever atone for crimes against humanity, let alone forgive perpetrators of such crimes? What is the nature of historical responsibility and how does it relate to the silent complicity? Can we be implicated in injustices that we did not personally cause? These are the kinds of questions that reading Stephen Frosh’s deeply perceptive new book, Those Who Come After, evokes in the reader. With his characteristic depth of analysis and breadth of knowledge, Frosh guides his readers through a complex ethical terrain while addressing the ever-present reality of historical trauma. Drawing variously on psychoanalysis, philosophy and social theory, Frosh invites us to struggle with him as he explores the history’s shadows and the afterlife of mass crimes that shape our current lives.

At a time when the meaning of history is often questioned and governments seek to dictate how the past is remembered, Frosh emphasizes the effects of history’s traumas and considers why we are obligated to respond. Those Who Come After is organized around interrelated themes and concepts: postmemory and the ghosts of traumatic history; silence and silencing; acknowledgement and responsibility; atonement and repair; and perhaps most difficult of all, reconciliation and forgiveness. Each theme is expanded in chapters on the politics of encounter, memorialising, the role of art and music in memorialisation, and German philosophy under National Socialism. Frosh doesn’t just engage in theoretical analysis but locates themes within a specific time and place drawing, for example, on the traumas unleased by the Holocaust and the challenge of post-Holocaust memory; the policies of apartheid South Africa and the role of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and the history of slavery and its afterlife in the United States. He…

Anne Harrington. Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness; New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019; 384 pages; hardcover $27.95: 978-0-393-07122-1   By Violeta Ruiz Cuenca In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association published the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The DSM was first created in 1952 with the purpose of defining and classifying mental conditions in order to aid diagnosis and treatment. Since this first edition, the manual has undergone multiple changes and revisions, the most notable of which is the decrease of the influence of psychoanalysis in favour of biological theories of the cause of mental disorders. This so-called ‘biological turn’ in psychiatric thinking, which took place over the 1980s, supposedly as a result of discoveries in neuroscience, genetics, and psychopharmacology, is the focus of Anne Harrington’s new book, Mind Fixers. In it, she argues that the current dominant narrative among psychiatrists that presents the ‘biological revolution’

as a triumph over the erroneous Freudian ideas of the 1940s and 50s is incorrect. Instead, she shows how the popularisation of psychoanalytical ideas in the early twentieth century, followed by the biological turn later in the century, is more a result of professional crises within the groups than of the discovery of any decisive piece of science. Harrington’s study begins by focusing on the debates that took place between (and within) the biological and psychoanalytical theories as each tried to identify the causes of mental illnesses during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first part of the book centres on the development of nineteenth-century brain psychiatrists, the popularisation of psychoanalytical theories after the First and Second World Wars, and the progressive overhaul of these ideas by biological psychiatry in the second half of the twentieth century. She convincingly argues that the root cause of the debates, especially during the twentieth century, was one of professional rivalry. Debates over…

Andreas Killen. Homo Cinematicus: Science, Motion Pictures, and the Making of Modern Germany; Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017; 280 pages; cloth edition £65; ISBN: 9780812249279 By Anna Toropova Andreas Killen’s rich and incisive study takes its title from a 1919 press article linking the cinematic medium to the emergence of a new psycho-physiological type – a ‘cinematically conditioned mass man’ who was easily swayed and misled, held captive by the images unfolding on screen (2). Cinema’s power over the minds of its viewers continued to present a source of concern for German officials and scientific and medical experts in the interwar period.  Conservative critiques of the cinema as a public health risk that sapped viewers’ bodily capacities and corroded their morals and will could be heard in both the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. As Killen shows, however, the medium’s capacity to act on and shape its publics was a source of intense fascination as well as anxiety. Showcasing

the varied potentialities that cinema embodied during this period, Killen explores attempts to reform the medium and harness its powers for the tasks of enlightenment, scientific investigation and political persuasion. Whilst acknowledging that cinema’s harnessing to the task of social reform reached full fruition under the Nazis, Homo Cinematicus traces the origins of this enterprise to the period of the First World War. The cinema, Killen argues, formed a constitutive part of a new form of politics that set its sights on the regulation and management of the social body.  Exploring cinema’s participation in the project of human and social remaking, Homo Cinematicus is a valuable addition to the growing body of scholarship on cinema’s coincidence with an ‘art of government’ centred on the cultivation and ‘improvement’ of human life, as well as a vital contribution to scholarship on the entanglement of cinema and medicine. The book’s five chapters explore different facets of the interface between scientific and medical…

Rebecca Reich. State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin; DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018; 280 pages; hardback £45.00; ISBN: 0875807755 By Hannah Proctor Rebecca Reich’s State of Madness focuses on discourses surrounding punitive psychiatry in the Soviet Union in the years between Stalin’s death in 1953 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Much of the existing literature on the pathologisation of dissent, stories of which began to emerge and spread via samizdat in the 1960s, has an institutional emphasis, whereas Reich focuses on relationships between literature and psychiatry. In the context of a state system of psychiatry that understood dissent as a form of insanity and attributed ‘political resistance to a distinctive state of mind’ (p. 62), resistance was imagined by those resisting as a sane response to a mad system. Dissidents–a broad term that does not necessarily imply engagement in political activism–worked to ‘validate a norm of inakomyslie, or “thinking

differently”’ by challenging the state’s authority to diagnose insanity (p. 217). Reich demonstrates that literature was a key site for contesting psychiatric diagnoses, becoming a ‘source of diagnostic authority’ in its own right (p. 6). State of Madness is always working with and through contested dichotomies; there is neither dissent nor madness without a norm. Sanity then becomes a question of who is responsible for defining and assigning the diagnostic categories. State of Madness examines literature from a range of genres produced during the period after Stalin’s death that challenged the theoretical frameworks and practices of psychiatry. In the case studies considered by Reich the boundaries between the aesthetic and the psychiatric  – along with those between sanity and insanity – are often blurred. Reich does far more than merely analyse aesthetic representations of psychiatry, however. Not only does she discuss how psychiatrists themselves deployed aesthetic conventions in their clinical documents, but her analysis of the interplay between literature and psychiatry is…

Susan Lanzoni. Empathy: A History; New Haven and London: Yale University Press; 408 pages; hardback $30.00; ISBN: 9780300222685 by Sarah Chaney A couple of years ago, I attended a colloquium on empathy at the University of Oxford. The organisers of this event were rightly concerned by the vague and varied definitions of empathy in medical research and practice and sought to remedy this. While they had found a number of clinical trials that purported to measure empathy, the introductory lecture noted, every single one of these gave a slightly different definition of what it was they were actually measuring! As Susan Lanzoni’s comprehensive history of empathy shows, this conceptual confusion around empathy is not new. Even after an explosion of interest in the term through the 1950s and 1960s, in 1979 the American social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark declared himself dismayed by the lack of “clear definition and a comprehensive theoretical approach” to the subject (p. 248). As

Lanzoni shows in this genealogy, the confusion lies to some extent in the fact that the meaning of the term has “shifted so radically that its original meaning transformed into its opposite” (p. 8). Lanzoni makes this shift clear by outlining a huge range of examples of studies in which empathy does not mean what the modern reader might expect. To take just one example of many, when the psychologist Edward Bullough found in 1908 that his subjects described coloured lights as having a particular temperament or character he called this “empathy” (p. 52). Even in the twenty-first century, many forms of empathy exist: “from emotional resonance and contagion, to cognitive appraisal and perspective taking, and to an empathic concern with another that prompts helpful intervention” (p. 252). While the book takes a chronological approach to the subject, the diversity of different meanings at play in any one period are thus made clear throughout. Lanzoni records the first use of the term “empathy”…

Elizabeth Hannon & Tim Lewens (Eds) Why we disagree about human nature. Oxford University Press, 2018. 206 pp. £30 hbk. By Simon Jarrett If one day a disturbingly precocious child were to ask what part you had played in the nature/ nurture war, what would you reply? Were you with the massed intellectual ranks who, since the philosopher David Hull’s ground-breaking 1986 classic 'On Human Nature,' have denied that there is any such thing as a common nature for all humans? Or did you join Stephen Pinker’s 2003 counter-revolution, when The Blank Slate sought to reclaim the ground for the Enlightenment, and the idea that there is something essentially the same about all humans across time, space and culture? If you are not quite sure where you stand, or perhaps too sure where you stand, then this pleasingly eclectic collection of ten essays on human nature, and whether we can meaningfully talk about such a thing, will be of

great help. Its contributors, who come from psychology, philosophy of science, social and biological anthropology, evolutionary theory, and the study of animal cognition, include human nature advocates, deniers, and sceptics. We could perhaps call the sceptics ‘so-whaters’ – they agree there may be something we can attach the label 'human nature' to, but query whether it really matters, or carries any explanatory weight. These people would take our (hopefully apocryphal) infant prodigy aside and say, ‘well there are some conceptual complexities here that make it quite difficult to give you a straightforward answer.’ Human nature remains, alongside consciousness, one of the great explanatory gaps, a question that permeated philosophical enquiry in antiquity, lay at the heart of Enlightenment ‘science of Man’, and now forms a central anxiety of modernity.  The over-arching problem is, in essence, this: are there traits and characteristics that are biological, and not learned or culturally acquired, which we can say form something called the nature of the…