Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

How reason found its common sense in Latin Aristotelianism: Commentary practice and the problem of universality in latin aristotelianism

Argument A history of “common sense” concerns as much the epistemological concept as the very architecture of human rational judgment. The historian of medieval philosophy Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) cast nineteenth-century Jesuit appeals to common sense as a costly defense agains...

How Many PM2.5 Sensors are Needed to Estimate Daily and Annual Deployed-Network Mean Concentrations in City-Scale Sensor Networks?

Abstract Low-cost PM2.5 sensors make it possible to deploy dense networks, but the density required depends on the monitoring objective and local variability. We examined how well smaller subnetworks reproduce deployed-network daily and annual or study-period mean concentrations...

A Computational Turn? Reflections on Digital and Computational History of Science, Knowledge and Technology

With digital and computational methods becoming more visible both in scholarly and everyday contexts, it is timely to ask whether a distinct field of digital and computational history of science, knowledge, and technology can meaningfully be said to exist. This epilogue to the sp...