Abstract The history of science is a valuable means of exploring innovation, and it is a field that is continually changing itself. Gender studies play a crucial role at this intersection, serving as an analytical tool that transforms historical research methods and content and reshapes our collective memory. A key concept in this discussion is the Matilda Effect, which describes the systematic bias against recognizing women’s scientific achievements. Critical hermeneutical studies of the Matilda Effect offer a framework for addressing historical and epistemological narratives, while highlighting the challenges associated with combating inequalities in competition-driven scientific research practices. This article demonstrates the implications of the Matilda Effect in relation to gender, misinformation, and epistemic injustice using case studies from the development of quantum optics and laser technology—fields in which women’s contributions are often overlooked.
Abstract Gnomon shadow measurement was a fundamental method in ancient Chinese astronomy, used to determine the seasons and later to construct cosmological models. From the Han Dynasty onward, the “one cun per thousand li ” principle—asserting that the sun’s shadow changes by 1 cun every 1,000 li—became central to theories like the Gaitian (Canopy Heaven) model, as seen in the Zhoubi Suanjing . Although this assumption was inaccurate, it explained certain phenomena effectively and remained influential. A new hypothesis suggests this idea may have originated from using a sighting tube to observe the sun. Despite growing skepticism, the principle continued to underpin calculations about the universe’s size well into the sixth century. The Huntian (Spherical Heaven) theory eventually replaced the Gaitian model, yet reliance on shadow measurements persisted. Not until the Tang Dynasty, through Yi Xing’s large-scale meridian surveys, did Chinese astronomy adopt more accurate geographic methods, breaking away from the one- cun -per-thousand- li framework. However, this shift did not lead to a spherical model of the Earth, and cosmological understanding largely remained within traditional paradigms.
Our research is focused on the missing, but important and necessary Draconic gearing of the Antikythera Mechanism. The three Lunar cycles Sidereal, Synodic and Anomalistic are represented on the Mechanism by correlating the Fragments A and C (part of the Front plate), whereas the fourth Lunar cycle Draconic results after correlating the unplaced Fragment D with Fragment A. Considering the deformation of the Mechanism s parts during 2000 years underwater and their shrinkage after their retraction from the sea bottom, we present a revised gearing scheme of the Draconic scale. The existence of the Draconic gearing is crucial, because both the preserved and the missing eclipse events can be precalculated by the phase correlation of three pointers: of the Lunar Disc, of the Golden sphere/Sun-ray and the Draconic. This means that the eclipse events are calculated by pure mechanical processing and that they are not documented observed events. The phase coordination of the three lunar cycles can be used as a quality criterion for a functional model of the Mechanism. Eudoxus papyrus was the key for the lost words completion of the Back Plate inscriptions eclipse events classification of the Antikythera Mechanism.
Abstract This article challenges the prevailing notion that artificial intelligence (AI) can be understood within a single, all-encompassing paradigm. While acknowledging the coherence and influence of established historical frameworks in AI, it argues that such approaches risk flattening the cultural, political, and epistemological complexity of the field. These frameworks often culminate in a historiography of AI presented as a chronicle of linear progress. Drawing on an interview with neural network scientist Carlo Vittorio Cannistraci, this article proposes an alternative historiographical model—one that understands intelligence not as a universal algorithmic potential, but as a mirror of human societies, shaped by linguistic, cultural, and ethical differences. This conception emerges from a philosophical-historical reading of Cannistraci’s notion of “network shape intelligence.” By framing AI as a reflection of historical traditions and sociotechnical imaginaries, the article advocates for a historiography “from below,” integrating insights from philosophy and history of science. The interview’s exploration of Prometheus, toolmaking, training, and international contrasts—particularly between the US, Europe, and China—underscores the need for AI research to engage with questions of freedom, responsibility, and systemic justice. In contrast to dominant trends, the article calls for a pluralistic, historically grounded, and socially engaged understanding of intelligence—whether natural or artificial. The interview thus lays the groundwork for a new historiographical approach: one that resists linear genealogies and instead opens space for rethinking intelligence through the lenses of training, education, discipline, and cultural difference. In doing so, the article argues that the historicity of AI constitutes a shared field of inquiry for both humanists and scientists.
Abstract This paper argues that androcentrism in science means more than the absence of women and female perspectives. Instead, it means that a specific space is elevated to be the norm while its perspectives are historically and culturally contingent. This affects the scientific personae that such a space forms, such as the body-denying book scholar, the athletic field-scientist, or the battle-worn soldier-scientist. Based on 165 autobiographical texts from the Archive of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, this paper examines scientists’ male-coded writing styles, their self-fashioning as hegemonic, and their criticism of others as deficient. Academic competition, performance, and debate often center around fitness (for war or fieldwork) and closeness to nature (with the “laws of nature” understood as the pure truth). From a male perspective, women are supposed to be supportive, self-sacrificing, and not transgressive or competitive. Thus, hegemonic masculinities stabilize and orient gender constellations in academia towards efficiency and elitism.
This article aims to revisit the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to establish a new interpretation of the constitution of what we call science in its relationship with what we call nature. This interpretation provides a better understanding of scientific developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly the emergence in the mid-nineteenth century of the consubstantial link between economics and science, established through the invention of the modern concept of work. This is how what I call the “order of technology” was constructed and found its fulfillment in the industrialism that reigns today.
In this article, we present a new conception of the astronomical revolution accomplished by Philolaus. Like Copernicus against the geocentric system accounting for the alternation of days and nights by the movement of the sun around the earth, Philolaus reversed Empedocles’s system and the Presocratic paradigm that involved fire directly or indirectly in the alternation of days and nights. He transferred fire from the periphery to the center of the universe and endowed the earth with a movement around this central fire, like the other celestial bodies. This new physical conception allowed a fair evaluation of the Philolaic system by ridding it of the mythological and religious veil, at least as regards its foundation.
