Delaporte, The History of Yellow Fever, Chs. 2 and 3

 (Meeting Date: April 1st)

Questions

1. “…Now we had an object of which it remained to form a concept” (31). What does he mean by concept here? Is “the mosquito” a concept?

2. He is quite keen on the language of analogy. Can we track some of his analogies? What is the methodological function of analogy here?

3. At the end of Chapter 3 he says, “It was necessary to adopt the standpoint of…” Why did he think historical epistemology was necessary to refute "the legend” in question? How to connect his historical epistemology point with the larger context about the importance of Manson, the context of Cuban medicine versus American medicine, etc.?

4.  Is doing historical epistemology like writing a mystery novel? (remembering the publisher's description of this text as mystery and Deleuze’s description of reading philosophy like a mystery novel)

5. What is Delaporte trying to teach us about scientific discovery? If we had to come up with a description of scientific discovery, what would that look like according to him?

6. He uses the word problematic in a really specific way. How does it connect or not with Foucault’s use of the word? 

 

Discussion (and more questions!)

- What is happening such that there is something about the object which allows it to not be a concept prior to it showing up? What is involved in the transformation from object to conceptualization?  

- What is a research object and how does it differ from discipline to discipline?  How do research objects change across scholarly contexts? 

- Page 33. Delaporte makes a claim about the work of historians and then spends the next 10 pages reflecting on how, despite what the literature says, Finlay was actually familiar with Manson’s work. This whole section is kind of odd. Why did Finlay hide his familiarity with Manson’s work? This familiarity might have led him to make the claims that he did, but that doesn’t even seem to be Delaporte’s claim...

- Further on the point of hiding his familiarity with Manson’s work: According to a naïve view of the history of science, no reasonable scientist would have any reason to conceal their indebtedness to another thinker. One reason to make so much about this point might be that it teaches us something about the psychology of science. Perhaps we get a snapshot of scientists as not just driven by the pursuit of truth as some shared goal but as concerned with things like social prestige.

- Delaporte aims to describe the conditions of possibility of Finlay thinking what he was able to think. He is tracking an epistemic problem and the epistemic conditions which make sense of certain kinds of theories. In a way, the historical work is deeper than tracking who cited who.

- In Chapter 2, his methodological approach is to focus on the problems Finlay is trying to solve. But he also considers the problems Finlay isn’t trying to solve…Delaporte reads the inconsistencies in Finlay’s memoir to tease out the problem Finlay didn’t want to go to.

- Some context: Delaporte was a student of Foucault. He was also close to Canguilhem. He went to the US for a while, and there are references to  Kuhn and some other American philosophers in another one of his pieces.