Muslims and their critics tend to explain their differences in terms of Koranic teachings. But all practical precepts from holy scriptures are constantly contested. Most of these controversial practices concern the position of women in the family and in society at large; they derive not so much from religion as from the traditions of patriarchal, pre-industrial society the world over. Tensions between men and women, parents and children have much increased due to the recent educational revolution that now has girls competing on equal terms with boys for diplomas and jobs, both in their countries of origin and in the countries of immigration. As a result, many men attempt to cling to their superior position by invoking a patriarchal interpretation of the holy book and many women avoid a full confrontation out of loyalty to their men, their faith and their group origins.

Although inquiry in philosophy and some social sciences has attended closely to the question of how investigators use language to describe and explain phenomena of interest, less attention has been devoted to questions of language use in psychological science. This essay explores language use in a major subfield of psychology, the psychology of personality. We identify three descriptive and explanatory languages in the field and critique them from the perspective of scholarship outside of psychology that has explored language use. We conclude with a call for greater exchange between investigators who embrace discursive accounts of persons and social action, and those who posit social-cognitive accounts of the knowledge that individuals use when they create discourse in their efforts to understand the world and to direct their experiences and actions.

Historical inquiry today is robust at multiple levels and celebrates novel interpretation and the rich complexity of the past. Although historians show no signs of paralysis in the light of the epistemological challenges of the 1980s and 1990s, many remain disillusioned with traditional periodization schemes. In the case of the Scientific Revolution, this skittishness seems to translate into a sceptical resignation about the possibility that the new scholarship can ever reveal an underlying coherence. As the essays in this forum on the Scientific Revolution demonstrate, however, such resignation is an inadequate response to novelty and complexity. New findings ought to prod historians to search for more intricate and satisfactory patterns.

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Scientific Revolution came to be understood as a key period in Western history. Recently, historians have cast doubt upon this category, questioning whether the relevant institutions and practices of the seventeenth century are similar enough to modern science to warrant the label ‘scientific’. A central focus of their criticisms has been the identity of natural philosophy – the major discipline concerned with the study of nature in the early modern period – and its differences from modern science. This paper explores natural philosophy and its relation to philosophy more generally. It concludes that a significant philosophical revolution took place in the seventeenth century, and that this was important for the subsequent emergence of modern science.

The importance of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century has been queried in recent years and this paper attempts to show why the notion is still essential to a proper understanding of the twin advance in scientific conceptualization and factual discovery that began in the sixteenth century and led through such figures as Galileo to the new world view of Isaac Newton. The significance of the scholastic tradition, hermeticism and alchemy is not denied, but the major breakthrough that catapulted Europe into the modern age was the outcome of new conceptual tools and a fresh outlook on nature.

Was there a Scientific Revolution at any time between 1550 and 1800? The question comes to asking whether ‘revolution’ is a good metaphor for the course of natural knowledge during early modern times. According to the findings presented here, the metaphor is useful, that is, productive of insights, if it is taken in analogy to a major political revolution. It then suggests a later onset, and a swifter career, for the Scientific Revolution than is usually prescribed, and reveals Newton not as its culmination but as its counterpoise. The analysis also discloses an unexpected analogy between the universities of the thirteenth century and the learned societies of the seventeenth.

Academics all over the world rightly desire to understand how modern science has come about. Indeed there was a time when historians of science had on offer a clear-cut conception of how that happened. But ongoing innovation in historiographical approaches has rendered the period from Galileo to Newton ever more elusive. Its monolithic coherence has been dissolved, a mood of sceptical resignation reigns in the profession over the very possibility of treating seventeenth-century science as more than a string of loosely connected episodes. I argue that, without returning to a historiographical past definitively behind us, coherence may be restored at a higher level of sophistication. Cross-cultural comparison, and unusual ways of dealing with historical concepts and causes, are proper tools to revitalize the issue and come up with partly novel answers to a question that in any case refuses to go away.

Because of its clear-cut and logical narrative structure, the story of the Scientific Revolution from Copernicus to Newton is essential to an understanding of the shape of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European History. Moreover, the crucial role of scientific discovery in helping to bring about the victory of the ‘moderns’ over the ‘ancients’ in the late seventeenth century provides a central reason for marking this period as the end of the age of the Renaissance. Regardless of problems of definition, therefore, the Scientific Revolution is of crucial importance to the enterprise of organizing the past into distinct and coherent periods.

George Francis Fitzgerald is known to most students of physics for his proposal of the Fitzgerald (-Lorentz) Contraction, but this is a minor episode in a remarkable life. Many of his ideas found expression through others. His powerful influence on the physics of his time has been reconstructed from his correspondence, as leader of the Maxwellians.

Drawing on the traditions and perspectives of the author's own family and relatives, which included George Francis Fitzgerald, the society in which this notable physicist lived and worked in the late nineteenth century is sketched.

From the late 1870s until his death in 1901, the Irish physicist G. F. Fitzgerald was one of the most active and influential proponents of Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field. Along with Oliver Lodge, Oliver Heaviside, Heinrich Hertz, and other ‘Maxwellians’, Fitzgerald took the lead in extending Maxwell's theory, clarifying its expression, and subjecting it to experimental test. The surviving correspondence of this Maxwellian circle provides a window into the workings of late Victorian physics and into the private side of scientific communication.

In his celebrated 1888 experiment on standing waves, Hertz found the velocity of transmission along a wire line to depend on wavelength and to differ from that for wireless transmission, a result that was in contradiction to theory. Hertz called on others to repeat the experiments and verify or refute his results. The call was heard by two groups of scientists. In Dublin, George Francis Fitzgerald and associates repeated and elaborated Hertz's experimental discoveries. For wire transmission, their results were in good agreement with those of Hertz. On the other hand Édouard Sarasin and Lucien de la Rive of Geneva obtained the results required by theory. Hertz looked for an explanation of his own results in the ambient conditions of his apparatus. He corresponded with both Fitzgerald and with the Genevan scientists. These letters are an important historical source in reconstructing the circumstances of Hertz's experiment.

While George Francis Fitzgerald is celebrated today primarily for his contributions to theoretical physics, especially Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, his correspondence demonstrates that he was driven as much by a passion for new technologies and their potential to change the world as by the mathematical explanations that made him famous. He experimented with a wide range of technologies, educated a generation of engineers at Trinity College Dublin and advocated the importance of technical education for Ireland's future prosperity. But during his own lifetime, he struggled to convince the public of what many today believe to be self-evident – namely, that progress in industry depends on university-educated scientists and engineers and that every good university requires a well-equipped research laboratory. His dream for Ireland of prosperity through education, science and industry would not be realized until almost 90 years after his death.