Reflections on History from Below

Natural history and temporalization: reflections on Buffon's Natural history.

This article presents a rereading of Buffon's Natural History in the light of the concepts of temporal reversibility and irreversibility. The goal is to determine to what extent Buffon introduces a transformationist concept of natural forms in this work. To that effect, the main points of classical natural history and the doctrine of preformed germs are analyzed. Subsequently, Buffon's use of t...

Reflections on the history of psychoanalysis.

The proliferation of psychoanalytic schools demands the reexamination of the history of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis emerged at the intersection between the rational heritage of the enlightenment and the interest in the morbid that was the hallmark of romanticism. This paper focuses on moments when psychoanalysis was poised at a crossroads where various routes could have been taken. Different...

The patient's view: doing medical history from below.

Reflections on the History and Present State of Machine Translation

When machine translation was in its infancy, in the early 1950s, research was necessarily modest in its aims. It was constrained by the limitations of hardware, in particular inadequate memories and slow access to storage, and the unavailability of high-level programming languages. Even more crucially it could look to no assistance from the language experts. Syntax was a relatively neglected ar...

The End of History? Reflections on Some International Legal Theses

Democracy used to be a word that international legal commentators preferred to avoid. At least by the second half of the present century, this was not because too few governments identified themselves as democratic. It was rather because too many did so. The world's most repressive regimes joined their more representative counterparts in claiming a title that had become synonymous with praisewo...