The Evolution of Knowledge - A Scientific Meeting in Honor of Jürgen Renn

Jul 14, 2025, 8:00 AM → Jul 16, 2025, 10:30 PM Europe/Rome

Main Hall (SISSA)

Trieste, Italy - July 14th-16th 2022

Main Hall - SISSA Building - Miramare Campus - Via Beirut 2-4

The proceedings of the meeting are available at the link:
https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/publications-resources/preprints

Jürgen’s conceptualization of the evolution of knowledge goes against the mood of “micro history” and joins the emerging field of “world history”. The idea behind a public event to be organized in his honor focuses on his work on the evolution of knowledge. It opens up six major directions of thought:

a) "Science" is not an intellectual product "sui generis" born in the West, but a kind of knowledge rooted in basic human (and even animal) experiences.

 

b) The concept “evolution of knowledge” posits basic mechanisms of knowledge acquisition, consolidation, transmission, transformation, innovation and dissemination such as:

Practicing with objects; first order symbolization/representation in language.

Application to new contexts resulting in the creation of new objects such as simple machines (external representations).

Second order reflection on practical experiences and inventions leading to abstraction/conceptualization.

Creation of mental models (internal representations) and their inscription in texts.

Creation of social and institutional niches for the survival and transmission of knowledge.

Integration of old and new knowledge, and its re-organization.

Constituting intellectual and institutional structures necessary for the dissemination of knowledge.

The sum of practical, intellectual, socio-political and market conditions allowing for the construction, integration, consolidation, re-organization and dissemination of knowledge to be analyzed in terms of "economies of knowledge".

 

c)  Investigating the above-mentioned mechanisms entails a thorough research of historical cases that are not limited to a certain historical period or geographical territory.

 

d) From the discussion of historical case studies within a well-developed conceptual framework emerges the theoretical language that guides and enables a long- term narrative of global knowledge. The main terms of this new theoretical language are:

• Challenging objects – namely those objects whose nature and mode of behavior challenges accepted intuitive and practical assumptions about the world.
• Internal and external representations: the first (internal representations) developed into signs of things in the mind and may be analyzed in terms of mental models; the second (external representations) consist in texts, tools, visual representations, machines, institutions, social and political contexts given to reconstruction and constituting shared public knowledge.

 

e) Within such conceptual framework, knowledge is examined as always on the move, and in terms of its transformations, resulting in the conclusion that knowledge has always been global.

 

f) The urge for writing on the evolution of knowledge is rooted in an analysis of the era of Anthropocene – a new human-geological age, according to some contemporary scientists – and the challenges it poses to humanity. Thinking about the Anthropocene presupposesthe need to re-think the impact of human activities on the Earth system. It is rooted in the view that knowledge may provide a key to solve contemporary problems. It points out the possibilities opened up by digital globalization and its dangers; relates to artificial intelligence and the risks it entails; promotes consciousness of the need to connect knowledge of the natural sciences to knowledge of the humanities and to develop a new economy of knowledge.

 

It may not be superfluous to add that Jürgen’s perspective on studying the evolution of knowledge expresses the view that history of science can provide a vision for coping with the huge challenges of our era and may serve as a model of for new types of knowledge required now.

 

This event is organized in cooperation with:






 

Hotel-BB_per evento luglio 2022.pdf

Monday, July 14

9:00 AM → 9:30 AM Opening session: Welcome & Introduction

9:30 AM → 11:45 AM Origins & Evolution of Knowledge

9:30 AM Chair: Benjamin Steininger

Speaker: Benjamin Steininger

9:35 AM On cognitive artefacts

“All this hints at the role of material culture as the backbone of an evolution of knowledge ... what if the game-changing role of material culture as a means of cognition also extends to the symbolic means of our thinking...?” (Renn, Evolution of Knowledge 2020:50-1)
Wearing the hat of a cognitive anthropologist rather than an historian, I will try to amplify these ideas of Renn’s. I argue that a particular subclass of material objects, namely ‘cognitive artefacts’, involves a close coupling of mind and artefact that acts like a brain prosthesis. Simple cognitive artefacts are external objects that act as aids to internal computation, and not all cultures have extended inventories of these. Cognitive artefacts in this sense (e.g. calculating or measuring devices) have clearly played a critical role in the history of science. But the notion can be widened to take in less material externalizations of cognition, like writing and language itself. A critical question here is how and why this close coupling of internal computation and external device actually works, a rather neglected question to which I’ll suggest some answers.

Speaker: Stephen Levinson (Director Emeritus, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)

10:05 AM The tangled roots of the mathematics of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution

Much new happened to European mathematics in the 17th–18th centuries. Not all of it (in particular number theory) entered interaction with the general scientific revolution, though they can be counted on their own as ingredients in the development. On the other hand, the new double analysis – algebra and infinitesimal analysis – can be regarded as decisive infrastructure of the astronomical and physical ingredients. The second new analysis, moreover, only matured as a tool when it had integrated the first, the new, mainly Cartesian algebra.
The talk will concentrate on the interactions, from the 12th century onward, that shaped and contditioned the 17th-century innovations in algebra – the 12th-century translations of algebraic writings, Fibonacci’s Liber abbaci, the algebra of the abbacus school and the reshaping of the latter in German Coß, the conditions of mathematics within Latin/universitarian learning, and the 16th-century translations of Greek mathematics.

Speaker: Jens Høyrup (Honorary Research Fellow, Institute for the History of Natural Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

10:30 AM Inheritance and innovation: casting technology and craft production of bronzes in Shang dynasty (16th BC-11th BC), China

The piece-mold casting technology in China was initially formed in Erlitou period （18th BC-16th BC）and went to the first climax in late Shang dynasty（13th BC-11th BC）, but the details of the evolution path were not clearly known so far. The formation of piece-mold casting technology tradition in ancient China, which is very different from mainly using the forging method and lost-wax process to make bronze wares in West Asia and Central Asia, is closely related to the craftsman’s technological choice. Since bronzes production is a complex process, the investigation of casting technology, manufacturing sequence, and the organization of production would contribute to a better understanding of technology, economy, labor organization, social structure and cultural interaction in ancient societies of China. Several foundry sites with remains and a lot of bronze wares of Shang dynasty were found in the central plains of China. From observation of those excavations and many further research, especially the analysis of the excavation of foundry sites with remains and bronze vessels, the casting technology and the craft production of bronzes in central plains in Shang dynasty（16th BC-11th BC）were studied. The inheritance and evolution of the casting technology, the distribution of the foundry workshops，the extent of the large manufacturing scale，which has profound and lasting influence on the subsequent development of the metal technology, were also discussed.

Speaker: Prof. Yu Liu (Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing)

10:50 AM Coffee Break

11:15 AM Discussion

Speaker: Svend Hansen

11:45 AM → 2:00 PM Lunch Break

2:00 PM → 4:40 PM Science & Society

2:00 PM Chair: Robert Schulmann

2:05 PM Theatre of science. Solving mathematical problems in early modern jesuit colleges

My lecture will focus on practices of dissemination of scientific literacy by Jesuit educators of the 17th century. The Jesuits were prominent carriers of the pre-modern scientific tradition that crystallized in medieval universities around Aristotle’s books of nature. These, they taught as introduction to metaphysics, theology and interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. The Jesuits, however, took upon themselves to update that tradition with contemporary innovations. Among those innovations was the institutionalization of the mathematical disciplines as a separate field that was necessary for teaching natural philosophy. Thus, they taught arithmetics, geometry and algebra, astronomy, optics and mechanics. Within this framework, they included many of the scientific innovations of that time, including the results of Galilean and Keplerian science, wrapped in a Jesuit interpretation.
As an example of the kind of science, between the old and the new, purporting to reshape the tradition while still adhering to it, I shall present a peculiar Baroque cultural form of solving scientific problems in front of mixed audiences of students, professors, Church functionaries and members of the highest political echelons.

Speaker: Rivka Feldhay (Associate Professor, Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University.)

2:35 PM Geopraxis

In my talk, I will illustrate a concept that is freely inspired by Jürgen’s recent book on the Evolution of Knowledge. I will take examples from the long-durèe history of Venice, in order to argue for the fruitfulness of a historical inquiry into the geo-anthropological nexus which puts material human agency at the center. In my presentation, I will privilege early modernity as a time of historical transition to the techno-scientific societies of the Anthropocene.

Speaker: Pietro Daniel Omodeo

3:05 PM Coffee Break

3:25 PM Chair: Jürgen Jost

3:30 PM Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution

Throughout the Holocene, societies developed additional layers of administration and more information-rich instruments for managing and recording transactions and events as they grew in population and territory. Yet, while such increases seem inevitable, they are not. Here we use the Seshat database to investigate the development of hundreds of polities, from multiple continents, over thousands of years. We find that sociopolitical development is dominated first by growth in polity scale, then by improvements in information processing and economic systems, and then by further increases in scale. We thus define a Scale Threshold for societies, beyond which growth in information processing becomes paramount, and an Information
Threshold, which once crossed facilitates additional growth in scale. Polities diverge in socio-political features below the Information Threshold, but reconverge beyond it. We suggest an explanation
for the evolutionary divergence between Old and New World polities based on phased growth in scale and information processing. We also suggest a mechanism to help explain social collapses with no evident external causes.

Speaker: David Wolpert (professor at the Santa Fe Institute)

3:50 PM Discussion

Speakers: Jürgen Jost, Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Robert Schulmann

7:00 PM → 9:00 PM Evening concert

Luca Lombardi’s concert performed by Alessandra Ammara. (pianist).
Introduced by Marco Maria Tosolini, Professor of the “Tartini Conservatory” of Trieste

Tuesday, July 15

9:30 AM → 12:15 PM Modes and Material Conditions of Evolution of Knowledge

9:30 AM Chair: Gabriel Motzkin

Speaker: Gabriel Motzkin

9:35 AM Science and the industrial revolution

The topic “Science and the Industrial Revolution” has been much discussed. I would just like to address a few aspects of the topic that are of particular interest to the history of science and that, I believe, have not yet been sufficiently discussed. At the center of my short and often very pointed remarks is the question: How did some sciences – here Mechanics and Chemistry – develop in the early modern period of the West in such a way that they became what they are today, namely an indispensable factor of material production and thus of modern civilization.

Speaker: Wolfgang Lefèvre (Emeritus Scholar, Max Planck Istitute for The History of Science)

9:55 AM Means and ends in the history of science

Twentieth-century historiography of science was often characterized by a conflict between internalism and externalism. Comparing two fundamental historical alternatives, I will examine the role of the means of research in mediating the external determination of the internal ends of science.

Speaker: Peter McLaughlin

10:20 AM Two views of excellence in research, two views of zionist nation-building: pure mathematics at the Hebrew University, applied mathematics at the Weizmann Institute

I will present a comparative analysis of the early years of two world-class centers of mathematical research in Mandatory Palestine, and then in the recently created State of Israel. They pursued different ideals of mathematical excellence which were strongly associated with two different views of Zionism and of the role that science institutions should play in the national project envisioned by each.

The Einstein Institute of Mathematics was established in 1925 at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (HUJI). Edmond Landau came in 1937 as the first professor and scientific leader, and was succeeded by Avraham Halevy Fraenkel. The neo-humanistic spirit of German pure mathematics dominated activities in Jerusalem and it was very much in accordance with a view of Zionism that sought to establish a leading intellectual and spiritual center for the Jewish people in Palestine with a Hebrew University as its flagship.

The Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS) was established about twenty years later in the rural town of Rehovot. It had a thoroughly practical and applied orientation meant to serve the aims of political Zionism in its most activist version, which saw in the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine the most urgent and significant task. A Department of Applied Mathematics was established at WIS in 1948 under the leadership of Chaim Leib Pekeris, whose mathematical views consolidated against the background of his wartime activities at MIT and Columbia, and under the marked influence of John von Neumann. His purpose when joining WIS was to build a high-speed electronic computer and to implement a wide-ranging program of research in various fields of applied mathematics based on computing-intensive methods. This talk is partly based on joint work with Dr. Raya Levithan.

Speaker: Leo Corry (Full Professor, Faculty of Humanities, History & Philosophy of Science Inst., Tel Aviv University)

10:45 AM Coffee Break

11:00 AM Engineering musical aesthetics: science, technology, and the trautonium"

This talk proffers a history of an electronic musical instrument, the trautonium, and uses it as a heuristic tool to probe the contours between the natural sciences, radio engineering, musical aesthetics, and politics from the 1920s through the 1960s. Such a material and cultural history of an object forces us to rethink the notion of modernity by showing how an electronic musical instrument dissolves our preconceived and deeply entrenched notions of the boundaries between various bits of twentieth-century science, technology, and culture. Specifically, the instrument was forged in a crucible of the Radio Experimental Laboratory in Berlin where physicists, physiologists, radio engineers, and musicians all collaborated to improve the fidelity of human voices and musical instruments transmitted over the radio. Because of the instrument’s flexibility in terms of simulating the tone colors of traditional acoustical instruments as well as creating new sounds and timbres, it could appeal to diverse audiences throughout drastically different political regimes. Featured in musical performances, radio dramas, industry and cultural films, theater pieces, operas, and ballets, the trautonium represents a wonderful example of how scientists, engineers, and musicians were able to create a device that simultaneously embodied physical, physiological, and technological theories as well as indelibly changed the soundscapes of numerous twentieth-century cultural venues.

Speaker: Myles Jackson ( Professor of the History of Science at the Institute for Advanced Study)

11:25 AM Mathematics as a tool: Galilei and Huygens on the hanging chain

Speaker: Tilman Sauer (Professor of History of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)

11:45 AM Discussion

12:15 PM → 2:00 PM Lunch Break

2:00 PM → 4:00 PM Institutional Organization of Knowledge

2:00 PM Chair: Massimiliano Badino

Speaker: Massimiliano Badino

2:05 PM "Reflections in tranquillity” on the “Evolution of Knowledge”: Random remarks on “easy and not so easy” achievements and goals

In Pliny the Elder’s work is present the description of a plant called Silphium. Very famous and sought after at the time it disappeared long ago. Its memory survives in the recipies of Celio Apicio (4th century CE). Recent literature attributes its disappearance to climate change. Today’s problems are much more serious but Jürgen Renn is optimistic that a new Economy of Knowledge and especially a new History of Science can contribute to the solution of the challenges posed by the Anthropocene era. Actually he speaks of the possibility of an emancipatory role, I imagine both personal and social. Already in the past HoS has successfully changed under the pressure of relevant upheavals. Societies, research centers have been born (some also have died). Disciplinary barriers have been overcome and a global HoS and of Knowledge for many practitioners has been a “way of liberation”. An extraordinary large body of knowledge has been produced at scientific, historical, epistemological level. The impact of digital technologies and the fight for Open Access multiplies the possibilities of the diffusion of knowledge, but an institutional revolution is needed in the educational system, one of the sort that brought forward the German research University two hundred years ago. Can we promote such a change? Can we establish new more appropriate metrics? Jürgen Renn’s book and his life work is certainly an important contribution towards such ambitious goals.

Speaker: Fabio Bevilacqua

2:35 PM Combining physics and politics during the Cold War: The role of international scientific networks and institutions

The approach on historical epistemology pursued by Jürgen Renn and Department 1 has led to delve more and more into the question of the structural role of scientific institutions in the production, circulation, and certification of knowledge. The focus on scientific institutions, on the other hand, necessarily requires to comprehend the political, economic and social conditions that led to their establishment and shaped their activities. The process of integrating political and scientific matters is particularly central in international scientific institutions, as their scientific goals have necessarily to be integrated and negotiated with their diplomatic agendas in the context of changing international political relations. In the talk, I discuss a general framework based on network analysis and the concept of science diplomacy to analyze the relations between scientific and political aspects of international scientific institutions in their historical unfolding. This framework will be discussed in relation to case studies drawn from the activities of three different international scientific institutions devoted to physics during the Cold War: The International Committee on General Relativity and Gravitation, the European Physical Society, and the International Union of Pure and Applied physics.

Speaker: Roberto Lalli

3:05 PM Coffee Break

3:30 PM Discussion

7:00 PM → 8:00 PM Evening Lecture - Ten words on school and university - Nuccio Ordine

Speakers: Nuccio Ordine, Pierluigi Vercesi, Stefano Ruffo

Wednesday, July 16

9:40 AM → 10:25 AM The Spread of Knowledge

9:40 AM Chair:Gerd Grasshoff

Speaker: Gerd Grasshoff

9:45 AM How many climate zones? The spread of cosmographic knowledge in the early modern period

The ancient authoritative subdivision of the inhabitable regions of Earth into seven climate zones began to be challenged during the 16th century.
As the related knowledge was mostly displayed in the form of computational tables, and since the analysis of available sources exceeds human capacities because of their number and complexity, the sources relevant to the purpose of this paper are here first identified and analyzed by means of an unsupervised deep convolutional network.
Based on a description of some of the identified tables, it will be shown a) which new solutions started to spread in concomitance with a growing awareness—arising from the contemporary journeys of exploration—that the inhabitable region differed from that conceived by ancient scholars, and b) how the success of a new solution depended upon its capacity to harmonize with traditional, accepted knowledge.

Speaker: Matteo Valleriani

10:05 AM The “Iron-eating bird” on the Silk Roads: the cross-cultural study of circulation of ostrich diet myths

Abstract: The ostrich was a representative species in the cross-cultural exchanges along the ancient Silk Road. In addition to its striking materiality, myths about ostriches swallowing charcoal and iron, and furthermore refining iron from their bellies, were spread across various cultures in a wide geographical area, including Hebrew, Islamic, Christian Europe and China. These myths have common features such as the positive affirmation of ostriches refining iron, the high efficiency of the immediately available, and the improvability by repeated feeding to obtain a better-quality product. As well as being influenced by socio-economic factors such as the uneven degree of development of iron-making technology in the Middle Ages and the widespread lack of quality steel across cultures, alchemical ideas such as material transformation also provide a fundamental ideaistic context for their existence and evolution. An analysis of the ostrich diet myths suggests that the various dimensions of context may provide explanations for the similarities and particularities that the myths present in various regions.
Key words: ostrich; cross-cultural study; the circulation of knowledge; iron making; alchemy; digestion.

Speaker: Wei Chen

10:25 AM → 10:45 AM Science & Society: Science and Society

10:25 AM What did Urban VIII and Galileo discuss during the “six long meetings” in 1624?

In this Conference honoring Jurgen Renn, one of the outstanding historians of science, I thought to deviate a little from the strict protocol in the presentation of papers. Since, thankfully, I was asked for an evening lecture, I would take the risk of talking about something I have not published anything before! At the end of April 1624, Galileo visited Rome to pay his respects to his old friend Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, who was elected Pope Urban VIII, in August 1623. As Galileo wrote to Frederico Cesi, the founder, funder and motive force of the Academia dei Lincei, he had “six long meetings” with the Pope before returning to Florence in June 1624. We know nothing of what was discussed in these meetings. Most historians assume that Galileo may have asked Urban to repeal the 1616 edict of the Congregation, something that Urban refused to do and that Urban gave him the go-ahead about his forthcoming book as long as the Copernican ideas were not treated as necessary truths but as hypotheses. In the talk I shall try to test a different assumption of what was discussed in these meetings: Urban proposed to Galileo to write a book where the (Aristotelian) philosopher would be the one who, as the narrative in the book unfolded, will be proclaiming and promoting the ideas that the astronomer had initially articulated. The philosopher in the proposed work would be neither a passive listener nor a straw man to be bashed about nor someone whose (counter)arguments would be too weak to merit serious discussion. Though in the beginning of the book it would be the astronomer who will be providing the evidence and the arguments in support of Copernicus’ ideas and the philosopher would be rather reserved in fully accepting them, as the book progressed it would be the philosopher who would become the hegemonic figure, embellishing and overindulging the new state of the cosmos. One of the justifications for the assumption put forward, is the “reading” of The Assayer as a political and social manifesto of the Linceans. Even though Urban had expressed his enthusiasm about The Assayer when it was first read to him in 1623, as the months passed the political exigencies of the office he held, forced him to change his opinion. Realizing that The Assayer expressed a social agenda aiming at marginalizing the Aristotelians, Urban was determined to suppress the agenda of Galileo and the Linceans as it was articulated in the The Assayer. It is, further argued, that the agenda expressed in The Assayer was very much the same as that expressed in Copernicus’ preface to De Revolutionibus and that the intensity with which the Aristotelians were attacked in The Assayer might be strongly related to the Congregation’s censure of the emblematic paragraph in De Revolutionibus containing the phrase “mathematics is written for the mathematicians” in 1620. Such an assumption of what went on during the meetings of Galileo and Urban provides more coherent explanations of a number of issues that historians have mostly ignored: the letters of Galileo to Cesi during his stay in Rome, the style of Galileo’s Reply to Ingoli, the delay in the writing of the Dialogue... , the total mess in the way the imprimatur of the Dialogue...was issued and some passages from the correspondence of the Tuscan Ambassador in Rome Francesco Niccolini in 1632 with the Tuscan Secretary of State, Bali Cioli.

Speaker: Kostas Gavroglu (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)

10:45 AM → 12:40 PM The Spread of Knowledge

10:45 AM Coffee Break

11:00 AM Re-orienting studies of knowledge dissemination in and from Islamicate societies

Most studies of the dissemination of knowledge among Islamicate societies have focused on the early Abbasid period, as well as the transport of manuscripts and the travel of people between al-Andalus, North Africa and the central Muslim lands until about the end of the Abbasid caliphate. A second field of research concerns their translations into Latin, derived vernaculars and into Hebrew in different parts of Europe.
In contrast, the dissemination of knowledge and its material objects into other regions to the South, East and North of the Abbasid capital until the mid-thirteenth century and among other centers of knowledge in the subsequent centuries has at best been investigated in a very limited number of cases. A major exception is the Ottoman Empire whose intellectual relationships to other Islamicate societies and across the Mediterranean have attracted substantial attention in the last three decades. A minor exception concerns the impact of Muslim scholars and knowledge objects in Yuan and Ming China.
I plan to give a small survey on these studies, point to recent work on the triangle of relationships between Iran, Central Asia and India, as well as the networks between Cairo, the North African coast and sub-Saharan Africa, and add some reflections on how we can lern more about the dissemination of knowledge to Islamicate societies in eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.

Speaker: Sonja Brentjes (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

11:30 AM Alphabets, dictionaries and grammars

The talk will investigate the role of scholarly philological activity in the evolution and spread of knowledge by posing a number of historical cases for analysing the crucial importance of linguistic tools for the globalisation of knowledge. The cases will include that of Armenia, further of Georgia and Tibet, as well as the activities around creating the Cyrillic writing system, but will put emphasis of the Old Norse adoption of the Latin alphabet, and the intellectual endeavour connected therewith.

Speaker: Jens Braarvig (University of Oslo)

11:50 AM Speaker: José Montesinos

Speaker: José Montesinos

12:10 PM Discussion

Speaker: Matteo Valleriani

12:40 PM → 2:00 PM Lunch Break

2:00 PM → 4:10 PM Knowledge Evolution and The Anthropocene: Knowledge Evolution and the Anthropocene

2:00 PM Chair: Elena Bougleux

Speaker: Elena Bougleux

2:05 PM Earth System science in political context

Since the 1980s, Earth System science (ESS) has become an umbrella for research carried out in a variety of disciplines such as climatology, biogeochemistry, geology, oceanography, and ecology. The concept of a single Earth System developed in ESS is a central contribution of basic research to the current political and scientific debate about the Anthropocene. Even though this concept is closely tied to numerical climate modeling, it is underdetermined by this activity. This can be seen, in particular, in scientific debates and publications that aim at synthesizing ESS insights and addressing the broader scientific community and policy makers. International scientific and hybrid political-scientific organizations provide the main institutional framework for these debates. My contribution will show that in this context ESS scientists’ understanding of the Earth System as well as their framing of their social role as scientific experts have undergone silent changes.

Speaker: Ursula Klein (Senior research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

2:40 PM Speaker: Ricarda Winkelmann/Manfred Laubichler

Speaker: Ricarda Winkelmann

3:00 PM Crises and the Anthropocene

In this talk we use the theoretical background provided by the Science and Technology in the European Periphery (STEP)and Tensions of Europe (ToE), two independent research networks which coexisted in time, from 1999 to 2014, two address two topics – crises and Anthropocene. Both STEP’s and ToE’s agendas and the debates on crises and the Anthropocene call for a longue durée approach and for an attitude of resilience against both technophobia and technophilia, contributing to ongoing debates by revealing past decisions, strategies and options that shaped contemporary societies. We deem they are critical to better understand today’s society and propose active agendas that may influence public opinion and policy makers. As such, it is our contention that these two interrelated topics deserve particular attention from scholars in our field.

Speakers: Ana Simões, Maria Paula Diogo

3:20 PM Discussion

3:45 PM Closing Remarks

Speaker: Bernd Scherer

7:00 PM → 8:00 PM Book presentation “Einstein on Einstein”

Speakers: Hanoch Gutfreund, Jürgen Renn, Vincenzo Barone

8:30 PM → 9:30 PM Ottodix - Entanglement - Special concert