Cited by T. Quick, 'Disciplining Physiological Psychology: Cinematographs as Epistemic Devices, 1897-1922', Science in Context 30 (4), pp. 423-474.
Description:

'Canales identifies a contentious set of debates between Bergson, his fellow Nobel laureate Albert Einstein, and their respective followers as the immediate cause of the decline in influence of the former. In so doing, her work opens up Bergson's philosophy to historians of science, medicine and technology. Along with that of Bruno Latour (2005) and Robert Brain, (2015, esp. 32-36) it is concerned with it not in relation to the articulation of a normative conception of existence, but rather insofar as it participated in broader intellectual and cultural developments.'

 

'The second part of the paper highlights however that it was not the implausibility for physiological researchers of Bergson’s claims that had the most significant implications for the status of his contentions, but rather a set of epistemological and institutional changes that occurred within physiology and psychology. The establishment of technical epistemic commitments within these sciences during the late nineteenth century contributed to the emergence of disciplinary boundaries between these fields. Drawing on recent historical work addressing the roles of media tools in physiological and psychological investigation (de Chadarevian 1993; Brain and Wise 1994; Otis 2001; Schmidgen [2009] 2014; Cat 2013; Brain 2015), it shows how the engagement by Sherrington and others with devices that emerged from within the cinema of attractions contributed to the break-down of the physiological psychological presumption that philosophic and physiologic investigation shared common categories of analysis.'