Historiographic discussions of the universality and regionality of science have to date focused on European cases for making regional science universal. This paper presents a new perspective by moving beyond European origins and illuminating a non-European scientist's engagement with the universality and regionality of science. It will examine the case of the Japanese botanist Nakai Takenoshin (1882–1952), an internationally recognized authority on Korean flora based at Tokyo Imperial University. Serving on the International Committee on Botanical Nomenclature in 1926, Nakai endorsed and acted upon European claims of universal science, whilst simultaneously unsettling them with his regionally shaped systematics. Eventually he came to promote his own systematics, built regionally on Korean flora, as the new universal. By analysing his shifting claims in relation to those of other European and non-European botanists, this paper makes two arguments. First, universalism and regionalism were not contradictory foundations of scientific practice but useful tools used by this non-European botanist in maintaining his scientific authority as a representative Japanese systematist. Second, his claims to universality and regionalism were both imperially charged. An imperially monopolized study of Korean plants left a regional imprint on Nakai's systematics. In order to maintain his scientific authority beyond its region of origin he had to assert either the expanding regionalism of ‘East Asia’ or universalism.

Liber de orbe, attributed to Māshā'allāh (d. c.815), a court astrologer of the Abbasid dynasty, was one of the earliest Latin sources of Aristotelian physics. Until recently, its Arabic original could not be identified among Arabic works. Through extensive examination of Arabic manuscripts on exact sciences, I found two manuscripts containing the Arabic text of this Latin work, although neither of them is ascribed to Māshā'allāh: Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Ms. or. oct. 273, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania University Library, MS LJS 439. In this paper, I describe these two manuscripts in great detail, so that I confirm their originality of the Liber de orbe, and then by analysing the contents of the Arabic text, I deny the attribution to Māshā'allāh, and identify the title and author as Book on the Configuration of the Orb by Dūnash ibn Tamīm, a disciple of Isaac Israeli (c.855–c.955).

For sound studies, the publication of a 593-page handbook, not to mention the establishment of at least one society – the European Sound Studies Association – might seem to signify the emergence of a new academic discipline. Certainly, the books under consideration here, alongside many others, testify to an intensification of concern with the aural dimensions of culture. Some of this work comes from HPS and STS, some from musicology and cultural studies. But all of it should concern members of our disciplines, as it represents a long-overdue foregrounding of the aural in how we think about the intersections of science, technology and culture.

This article documents the history of the Allais paradox, and shows that underneath the many discussions of the various protagonists lay different, irreconcilable epistemological positions. Savage, like his mentor von Neumann and similar to economist Friedman, worked from an epistemology of generalized characterizations. Allais, on the other hand, like economists Samuelson and Baumol, started from an epistemology of exact descriptions in which every axiom was an empirical claim that could be refuted directly by observations. As a result, the two sides failed to find a common ground. Only a few decades later was the now so-called Allais paradox rediscovered as an important precursor when a new behavioural economic subdiscipline started to adopt the epistemology of exact descriptions and its accompanying falsifications of rational choice theory.

There's just no deleting Darwin, not really. Even Peter Bowler, the title to whose delightful book purports to do just that, is quick to add in the subtitle that he is only imagining the history of science without Darwin. The sixty-three essays written by a like number of scholars, Bowler among them (some articles are co-authored and a handful of authors have contributed to more than one essay) in the recently published Cambridge Encyclopedia of Darwin and Evolutionary Thought bear additional witness to the fact that Darwin's ideas continue to exert a powerful influence on historians, philosophers and biologists alike.

When Linda Dalrymple Henderson's The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art first appeared in 1983 it generated a lively discussion, most conspicuously in the pages of the journal Leonardo. Here was a book that undermined two of the central tenets of modernist theory: first that developments in art and science were linked not by any real connections or strong form of shared endeavour but by the fact that both partook of the modern spirit or zeitgeist; second, and more specifically, that Einsteinian relativity and cubism were in some way analogous embodiments of that spirit. By relentlessly pursuing the fate of two nineteenth-century developments – the non-Euclidean geometries and higher dimensions of her title – Henderson clearly showed that many of the avant-garde artworks so admired by critics for their formal innovation were at once more literal and more bizarre than anyone had previously suspected. Some were attempts to expound the ‘geometrical occult’ or to engage in multidimensional communion, some projected the enhanced intellect of ‘four-dimensional man’ and others explored the lonely but profound reaches of hyperspace. As she puts it in the ‘Re-introduction’ to this new edition of The Fourth Dimension, ‘these works function as “windows” on an invisible meta-reality of higher dimensions and etherial energies' (p. 27), and, elsewhere, ‘belief in a fourth dimension encouraged artists to depart from visual reality and to reject completely the one-point perspective system that for centuries had portrayed the world as three-dimensional’ (p. 492).