The articles in this volume of ARCHIMEDES examine particular cases of `reception' in ways that emphasize pressing historiographical and methodological issues. Such issues arise in any consideration of the transmission and appropriation of scientific concepts and practices that originated in the several `centers' of European learning, subsequently to appear (often in considerably altered guise) in regions at the European periphery. They discuss the transfer of new scientific ideas, the mechanisms of their introduction, and the processes of their appropriation at the periphery. The themes that frame the discussions of the complex relationship between the origination of ideas and their reception include the ways in which the ideas of the Scientific Revolution were introduced, the particularities of their expression in each place, the specific forms of resistance encountered by these new ideas, the extent to which such expression and resistance displays national characteristics, the procedures through which new ways of dealing with nature were made legitimate, and the commonalities and differences between the methods developed by scholars for handling scientific issues.

Signs of Science: Literature, Science, and Spanish Modernity since 1868 traces how Spanish culture represented scientific activity from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The book combines the global perspective afforded by historical narrative with detailed rhetorical analyses of images of science in specific literary and scientific texts. As literary criticism it seeks to illuminate similarities and differences in how science and scientists are pictured; as cultural history it follows the course of a centuries-long dialogue about Spain and science.

Ensayo que trata de la época de la ilustración y el fluir de ideas entre Europa y América que antecedieron a la independencia de México, haciendo énfasis en el papel que desempeñó el pensador mexicano José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez y la vigencia que tiene en nuestros días su pensamiento vanguardista que alcanzó reconocimiento mundial, basándose en el aprovechamiento de los recursos propios y en la fe ciega de la capacidad de los propios mexicanos de poder estar a la par que cualquier académico a nivel mundial. Al final de la obra se analiza la aplicabilidad actual del pensamiento de Alzate en nuestro país.

Este trabajo reúne la experiencia y la reflexión de uno de los académicos que se ha destacado por tener acceso, producir información y tomar decisiones muy interesantes sobre lo que ha pasado en los últimos años en la ciencia, la docencia universitaria y la evolución de la medicina en México. Aparte nos ofrece trabajos alrededor de los tres grandes rubros que se entrelazan en las correspondientes tres partes que dan cuerpo al libro: el quehacer científico en México; la relación entre la ciencia y la universidad; y la encrucijada actual de la medicina.

Includes entries for maps and atlases.