https://hdl.handle.net/2123/7767 Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:50:53 GMT 2026-06-04T09:50:53Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/29260 ‘The border problems of science and philosophy’: Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider and post-World War 2 science in Australian academia and society Helbig, Daniela K.; O’Malley, Maureen A. Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider (1891–1990), a refugee immigrant to Australia in 1938, was a student of Nobel Prize-winning physicists, Einstein, Planck, and von Laue. She combined a background in physics, especially relativity theory, with a philosophical focus on the nature and possibilities of knowledge. As well as working at the University of Sydney to teach science students how to recognise philosophical issues in their subjects, she drove a major outreach programme to regional towns in New South Wales, where she was fêted by her audiences as a highly accomplished science communicator. Her best-known book, published in 1980, examined her interactions with Einstein, Planck, and von Laue by expanding on how all of them understood the relationship between science and philosophy. Rosenthal-Schneider never achieved a great deal of recognition, due in part to the limited opportunities for women of her era, but also due to her insistence on bridging disciplines and engaging in a scientific and philosophical dialogue beyond academia. We will show how Rosenthal-Schneider explored the borderlands of science and philosophy throughout her life, as she argued for the relevance of philosophical questions to practising scientists and non-academic publics in Australia. Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/2123/29260 2022-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/25639 Remaining Human in COVID-19: Dialogues on Psychogeography Degen, Johanna L.; Smart, Gemma Lucy; Quinnell, Rosanne; O'Doherty, Kieran C.; Rhodes, Paul Post-COVID-19 environments have challenged our embodied identities with these challenges coming from a variety of domains, that is, microbiological, semiotic, and digital. We are embedded in a new complex set of relations, with other species, with cultural signs, and with technology and venturing further into an era that pushes back on our anthropocentrism to create a post-human dystopia. This does not imply that we are less human or forfeit ethics in this state of flux, but can lead to considering new ways of being alive and humanists. The aim of this project was to explore walking through our associated psychogeographies as captured in photographs and text from individual walks, as the means by which to characterize responses to the distress of the pandemic and to assess resistance to non-being. The psychogeographies were the starting points for our dialogic enquiry between authors who each represent living theory, representing their own emergent knowledge, inseparable from personal commitments and history. Walking and the associated images and reflections, provided a way to regulate our affect, reconnecting with our bodies, leading to understand and adapt to new meanings of context and ways of coping and healing in this new becoming. The interdisciplinarity of philosophy, social psychology, botany, and clinical psychology is nonetheless rejected in favour of multi-vocality; each author representing their own emergent, living theory, inseparable from personal commitments, and history. Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/2123/25639 2021-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/24916 Llara subsoil constraint prediction dataset Filippi, Patrick; Whelan, Brett This dataset holds covariate data that was used for predicting subsoil constraints across the University of Sydney farm "Llara", Narrabri, NSW Australia. It includes terrain attributes, gamma radiometrics from an aerial survey and the 5th and 50th centile Landsat NDVI calculated from a 20 year assessment. Wed, 14 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/2123/24916 2021-04-14T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/7874 Empiricism Without the Senses: How the Instrument Replaced the Eye Gal, Ofer; Chen-Morris, Raz On receiving news of Galileo’s observations of the four satellites of Jupiter and the rugged face of the moon through his newly invented perspicillum, Kepler in great excitement exclaimed: Therefore let Galileo take his stand by Kepler’s side. Let the former observe the moon with his face turned skyward, while the latter studies the sun by looking down at a screen (lest the lens injure his eyes). Let each employ his own device, and from this partnership may there some day arise an absolutely perfect theory of the distances. This Hollywood-like scene of the two astronomers marching hand in hand toward the dawn of a new scientific era was no attempt by Kepler to appropriate Galileo’s success or to diminish the novelty of the telescope. On the contrary, Kepler repeatedly asserted how short sighted he was in misjudging the potential for astronomical observations inherent in lenses, and how radically Galileo’s instrument transformed the science of astronomy. It was a deep sense of recognition that beyond their different scientific temperaments and projects, they shared a common agenda of a new mode of empirical engagement with the phenomenal world: the instrument. For Kepler and Galileo, empirical investigation was no longer a direct engagement with nature, but an essentially mediated endeavor. The new instruments were not to assist the human senses, but to replace them. Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/2123/7874 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/7877 Constructivism for Philosophers (Be it a Remark on Realism) Gal, Ofer Bereft of the illusion of an epistemic vantage point external to science, what should be our commitment towards the categories, concepts and terms of that very science? Should we, despaired of the possibility to found these concepts on rock bottom, adopt empiricist skepticism? Or perhaps the inexistence of external foundations implies, rather, immunity for scientific ontology from epistemological criticism? Philosophy’s “realism debate” died out without providing a satisfactory answer to the dilemma, which was taken over by the neighboring disciplines. The “symmetry principle” of the “Strong Programme” for the sociology of science-the requirement that truth and error receive the same kind of causal explanations-offered one bold metaphysical answer, under the guise of a methodological decree. Recently, however, it has been argued that this solution is not bold enough, that the social constructivists replaced the naïve presumption of an independent nature which adjudicates our beliefs with a mirror-image presumption of a sui generis society which furnishes these beliefs autonomously. The proper metaphysics for a foundationless epistemology,argues Bruno Latour, is one which grants nature and society, object and subject, equal roles in the success and failure of science and technology; one in which history of society merges with a history of things-in-themselves. The paper analyzes the philosophical and methodological motivations and ramifications of this extraordinary suggestion. Wed, 01 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/2123/7877 2003-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/7876 The 'absolute existence' of phlogiston: the losing party's point of view. Gal, Ofer; Boantza, Victor Long after its alleged demise, phlogiston was still presented, discussed and defended by leading chemists. Even some of the leading proponents of the new chemistry admitted its ‘absolute existence’. We demonstrate that what was defended under the title ‘phlogiston’ was no longer a particular hypothesis about combustion and respiration. Rather, it was a set of ontological and epistemological assumptions and the empirical practices associated with them. Lavoisier’s gravimetric reduction, in the eyes of the phlogistians, annihilated the autonomy of chemistry together with its peculiar concepts of chemical substance and quality, chemical process and chemical affinity. The defence of phlogiston was the defence of a distinctly chemical conception of matter and its appearances, a conception which rejected the chemist’s acquaintance with details and particularities of substances, properties and processes and his skills of adducing causal relations from the interplay between their complexity and uniformity. Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/2123/7876 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/7873 Baroque Optics and the Disappearance of the Observer: From Kepler’s Optics to Descartes’ Doubt Gal, Ofer; Chen-Morris, Raz In the seventeenth century the human observer gradually disappeared from optical treatises. It was a paradoxical process: the naturalization of the eye estranged the mind from its objects. Turned into a material optical instrument, the eye no longer furnished the observer with genuine representations of visible objects. It became a mere screen, on which rested a blurry array of light stains, accidental effects of a purely causal process. It thus befell the intellect to decipher one natural object—a flat image of no inherent epistemic value—as the vague, reversed reflection of another, wholly independent object. In reflecting on and trespassing the boundaries between natural and artificial, orderly and disorderly, this optical paradox was a Baroque intellectual phenomenon; and it was the origin of Descartes’ celebrated doubt— whether we know anything at all. Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/2123/7873 2010-04-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/7875 The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge:Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science Gal, Ofer; Wolfe, Charles T. It was in 1660s England, according to the received view, in the Royal Society of London, that science acquired the form of empirical enquiry we recognize as our own: an open, collaborative experimental practice, mediated by specially-designed instruments, supported by civil discourse, stressing accuracy and replicability. Guided by the philosophy of Francis Bacon, by Protestant ideas of this worldly benevolence, by gentlemanly codes of decorum and by a dominant interest in mechanics and the mechanical structure of the universe, the members of the Royal Society created a novel experimental practice that superseded former modes of empirical inquiry, from Aristotelian observations to alchemical experimentation. Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/2123/7875 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/7216 The Return of Vitalism: Wolfe, Charles T. The eminent French biologist and historian of biology, François Jacob, once notoriously declared "On n‘interroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires": laboratory research no longer inquires into the notion of Life‘. Nowadays, as David Hull puts it, "both scientists and philosophers take ontological reduction for granted… Organisms are ‗nothing but‘ atoms, and that is that." In the mid-twentieth century, from the immediate post-war period to the late 1960s, French philosophers of science such as Georges Canguilhem, Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon returned to Jacob‘s statement with an odd kind of pathos: they were determined to reverse course. Not by imposing a different kind of research program in laboratories, but by an unusual combination of historical and philosophical inquiry into the foundations of the life sciences (particularly medicine, physiology and the cluster of activities that were termed 'biology' in the early 1800s). Even in as straightforwardly scholarly a work as La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (1955), Canguilhem speaks oddly of "defending vitalist biology," and declares that Life cannot be grasped by logic (or at least, "la vie déconcerte la logique"). Was all this historical and philosophical work merely a reassertion of 'mysterian‘, magical vitalism? In order to answer this question we need to achieve some perspective on Canguilhem‘s 'vitalism‘, notably with respect to its philosophical influences such as Kurt Goldstein. Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/2123/7216 2011-03-04T00:00:00Z