Mario Biagioli
Biographic Data
| ID | 223769 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mario Biagioli |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mario |
| FAMILY NAME | Biagioli |
| SIGNATURE | BIAGIOLI M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Davis |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0271-2979 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 204 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
What Is a Book? Kant and the Law of the Letter
Kant’s essay on the question of literary piracy has so far been read as a foundational text in the history of literary property. When Kant refers to the book as a “mute instrument,” scholars of intellectual property already know how to interpret that formulation because they presume the distinction that the contemporary jurisprudence of intellectual property makes between matter and form and its concomitant assumption that print is just an inert,…
Ghosts, brands, and influencers: Emergent trends in scientific authorship
This essay is about the unique role of proper nouns at the intersection of knowledge and property, both tangible and intangible. Nouns are central to any form of property and credit, from a person’s name listed on a property deed or copyright registration, to the name of an artist to whom a work is attributed, or that of a scientist after whom a discovery or theory is named. And names can also be found on the other end of the property spectrum, n…
Patenting Personalized Medicine: Molecules, Information, and the Body
The histories of patent law and medical practice in the United States have intersected in various ways over the past 150 years, beginning with the professional campaign against “patent medicines” in the late nineteenth century, and culminating, for now, in attempts to patent the diagnostic procedures discussed in this article. The patenting of diagnostic procedures provokes a set of fundamental questions about the episteme of patent law. These qu…
Weighing intellectual property: Can we balance the social costs and benefits of patenting
The scale is the most famous emblem of the law, including intellectual property (IP). Because IP rights impose social costs on the public by limiting access to protected work, the law can be justified only to the extent that, on balance, it encourages enough creation and dissemination of new works to offset those costs. The scale is thus a potent rhetorical trope of fairness and objectivity, but also an instrument the law thinks with - one that i…
Technologies of the law/ law as a technology
Historians of science and technology and STS practitioners have always taken intellectual property very seriously but, with some notable exceptions, they have typically refrained from looking "into" it. There is mounting evidence, however, that they can open up the black box of IP as effectively as they have done for the technosciences, enriching their discipline while making significant contributions to legal studies. One approach is to look at …
Justice Out of Balance
Plagiarism, Kinship and Slavery
In conversation with Marilyn Strathern's work on kinship and especially on metaphors of intellectual and reproductive creativity, this paper provides an analysis of plagiarism not as a violation of intellectual property but of the kinship relationships between author, work, and readers. It also analyzes the role of figures of kidnapped slaves and children in the genealogy of the modern concept of plagiarism
Between Risk and Credit
This chapter highlights the nexus between discoveries, their pictorial representations, and credit. It does so by looking at a dispute that flared up in 1612 between Galileo and the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner around the discovery of sunspots. Reflecting their different institutional affiliations, the two held different investments in the cosmological implications of this new discovery, as well as different views about the proper relatio…
The Supplemental Economy of Galileo's Book of Nature
Although the understanding of nature remained exceedingly complex and laborious, it was not a hermeneutical process. Since the late medieval period, nature had been represented as a book which, like the scripture, had signs, meanings, and secrets for the reader to interpret. In 1623, Galileo turned this topos on its head, stating that the understanding of the book of nature required reading, but not interpretation. One did not need to understand …
From Brass Instruments to Textual Supplements
This book proposes radical new interpretations of several key episodes of Galileo's career, including his early telescopic discoveries of 1610, the dispute over sunspots, and the conflict with the Holy Office over the relationship between Copernicanism and Scripture. Galileo's tactics during this time shifted as rapidly as his circumstances, and the pace of these changes forced him to respond swiftly to the opportunities and risks posed by unfore…
Financing the Aura
Few scientists have been enshrouded by an aura of greatness, genius, and perhaps even sacredness. This chapter takes the effects of the aura very seriously and looks at its genealogy from a distinctly mundane point of view. It does not connect the aura to a mythical evocation of the wholeness of a long-gone era but treats it as the mappable effect of negotiations carried out over distance and the delays produced by such a distance—negotiations in…
Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present
This volume gathers essays that focus on the worldliness of science, its inseparable engagement in the major institutional bases of social life: law, market, church, school, and nation. With a chronol
From ciphers to confidentiality: Secrecy, openness and priority in science
I make three related claims. First, certain seemingly secretive behaviours displayed by scientists and inventors are expression neither of socio-professional values nor of strategies for the maximization of the economic value of their knowledge. They are, instead, protective responses to unavoidable risks inherent in the process of publication and priority claiming. Scientists and inventors fear being scooped by direct competitors, but have also …
Recycling Texts or Stealing Time: Plagiarism, Authorship, and Credit in Science
Scientific plagiarism is as sui generis as the author function in science. A study of the specificity of scientific plagiarism and the ways in which it diverges from appropriation in other disciplines allows us to question traditional definitions that focus on the copying of published copyrighted materials. The form of plagiarism that is most damaging to scientists does not involve publications, is largely outside the scope of copyright law, and …
Between Knowledge And Technology: Patenting Methods, Rethinking Materiality
How does the law construe certain things and activities as knowledge that can become the object of intellectual property? When we look at the quantitative trends in recent patenting activities—more people patenting many more things—we tend to view that, in part, as an effect of the law's ability to construe new kinds of innovation (software, genetic sequences, etc.) in ways that conform to established legal concepts of patentable invention. The a…
Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property: Creative Production in Legal and Cultural Perspective
Rules regulating access to knowledge are no longer the exclusive province of lawyers and policymakers and instead command the attention of anthropologists, economists, literary theorists, political scientists, artists, historians, and cultural critics. This burgeoning interdisciplinary interest in 'intellectual property' has also expanded beyond the conventional categories of patent, copyright, and trademark to encompass a diverse array of topics…
Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities
Bringing peer review to patents
Tougher examination of patent applications reduces anti–commons effects while reducing the frequency and costs of litigation. Modelled after open source/free software collaborations, the “Peer to Patent” initiative seeks to improve the quality of patents by developing a Web–based infrastructure whereby volunteer experts external to the PTO’s review applications, assemble prior art information, and submit the results of their collective work back …
From Print to Patents: Living on Instruments in Early Modern Europe
Surprisingly, patents are nowhere as central to the history of scientific instruments as they are to the history of technology. It will take much archival work to fill such an historiographical gap. My goal here is substantially more modest: to outline some patterns and chronological trends emerging from a comparison of printed patent rolls up to 1800 (which I am making available electronically) and other tactics used by instrument makers and des…
Patent Republic: Representing Inventions, Constructing Rights and Authors
Mario Biagioli Patent Republic: Representing Inventions, Constructing Rights and Authors COMPARED TO CASTING A VOTE, APPLYING FOR A PATENT IS SLOW, costly, and tedious. Still, both practices play out in different ways w hat it m eans to operate in a regim e of political representation. In colo nial America (as well as in early m odem France, England, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Russia), patents were gifts the sovereigns could either grant or withh…
Galileo's Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy
Stress in the Book of Nature: The Supplemental Logic of Galileo's Realism
This essay looks at the genealogy of Galileo's famous topos of the "book of nature" written in geometrical characters and open in front of anyone willing to read it. It shows that what has been traditionally read as an emblem of Galileo's method and mathematical realism was, in fact, the result of Galileo's difficult confrontation with another divine book: the Scripture. I argue that, behind the effect of transparency one experiences when reading…
The science studies reader
The Reader focuses on the practices of modern and contemporary and technology located in different national and institutional settings, with some attention to non- Western contexts. By mapping some of the open questions and points of tension likely to occupy the field for years to come, the essays in the Readercast fresh light on what science means at the end of the twentieth century
The Scientific Revolution is Undead
Configurations - Volume 6, Number 2, Spring 1998
Playing With the Evidence
Reasonable people will no doubt disagree about the relative success of Biagioli's explanatory models. Unfortunately, his attitude toward historical evidence falls into another category altogether. His handling of textual and iconographical evidence and his inference from these sources not only leave some of his most original claims without a foundation, but often disregard the basic values of the historian's craft.2
Patent Republic: Representing Inventions, Constructing Rights and Authors
Mario Biagioli Patent Republic: Representing Inventions, Constructing Rights and Authors COMPARED TO CASTING A VOTE, APPLYING FOR A PATENT IS SLOW, costly, and tedious. Still, both practices play out in different ways w hat it m eans to operate in a regim e of political representation. In colo nial America (as well as in early m odem France, England, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Russia), patents were gifts the sovereigns could either grant or withh…
Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities
The Social Status of Italian Mathematicians, 1450-1600
Galileo the Emblem Maker
Plagiarism, Kinship and Slavery
In conversation with Marilyn Strathern's work on kinship and especially on metaphors of intellectual and reproductive creativity, this paper provides an analysis of plagiarism not as a violation of intellectual property but of the kinship relationships between author, work, and readers. It also analyzes the role of figures of kidnapped slaves and children in the genealogy of the modern concept of plagiarism
Galileo's Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy
Etiquette, Interdependence, and Sociability in Seventeenth-Century Science
From ciphers to confidentiality: Secrecy, openness and priority in science
I make three related claims. First, certain seemingly secretive behaviours displayed by scientists and inventors are expression neither of socio-professional values nor of strategies for the maximization of the economic value of their knowledge. They are, instead, protective responses to unavoidable risks inherent in the process of publication and priority claiming. Scientists and inventors fear being scooped by direct competitors, but have also …
The anthropology of incommensurability
Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property: Creative Production in Legal and Cultural Perspective
Rules regulating access to knowledge are no longer the exclusive province of lawyers and policymakers and instead command the attention of anthropologists, economists, literary theorists, political scientists, artists, historians, and cultural critics. This burgeoning interdisciplinary interest in 'intellectual property' has also expanded beyond the conventional categories of patent, copyright, and trademark to encompass a diverse array of topics…
Le Prince et Les Savants la Civilité Scientifique au 17eSiècle
La création d'académies scientifiques en Italie, en Angleterre et en France au 17esiècle s'accompagne d'un débat sur les protocoles de bonne conduite auxquels les académiciens devaient se soumettre lors de la présentation, de l'approbation ou de la publication des propositions des savants concernant la connaissance des choses de la nature. Ces institutions produisaient leurs résultats en s'obligeant à une mise en commun des preuves, ainsi qu'à un…
Galileo's System of Patronage
Knowledge, Freedom, and Brotherly Love: Homosociality and the Accademia dei Lincei
Knowledge, Freedom, and Brotherly Love: Homosociality and the Accademia dei Lincei Mario Biagioli (bio) The Accademia dei Lincei, often considered the earliest of scientific organizations, was established in 1603 by Federico Cesi, a young Roman aristocrat who was soon to become prince of San Polo and Sant'Angelo, duke of Aquasparta, and marquis of Monticelli. 1 After a period of very limited activity, which lasted until 1609, the academy quickly …
Weighing intellectual property: Can we balance the social costs and benefits of patenting
The scale is the most famous emblem of the law, including intellectual property (IP). Because IP rights impose social costs on the public by limiting access to protected work, the law can be justified only to the extent that, on balance, it encourages enough creation and dissemination of new works to offset those costs. The scale is thus a potent rhetorical trope of fairness and objectivity, but also an instrument the law thinks with - one that i…
From Print to Patents: Living on Instruments in Early Modern Europe
Surprisingly, patents are nowhere as central to the history of scientific instruments as they are to the history of technology. It will take much archival work to fill such an historiographical gap. My goal here is substantially more modest: to outline some patterns and chronological trends emerging from a comparison of printed patent rolls up to 1800 (which I am making available electronically) and other tactics used by instrument makers and des…
Ghosts, brands, and influencers: Emergent trends in scientific authorship
This essay is about the unique role of proper nouns at the intersection of knowledge and property, both tangible and intangible. Nouns are central to any form of property and credit, from a person’s name listed on a property deed or copyright registration, to the name of an artist to whom a work is attributed, or that of a scientist after whom a discovery or theory is named. And names can also be found on the other end of the property spectrum, n…
Patenting Personalized Medicine: Molecules, Information, and the Body
The histories of patent law and medical practice in the United States have intersected in various ways over the past 150 years, beginning with the professional campaign against “patent medicines” in the late nineteenth century, and culminating, for now, in attempts to patent the diagnostic procedures discussed in this article. The patenting of diagnostic procedures provokes a set of fundamental questions about the episteme of patent law. These qu…
Technologies of the law/ law as a technology
Historians of science and technology and STS practitioners have always taken intellectual property very seriously but, with some notable exceptions, they have typically refrained from looking "into" it. There is mounting evidence, however, that they can open up the black box of IP as effectively as they have done for the technosciences, enriching their discipline while making significant contributions to legal studies. One approach is to look at …
The Scientific Revolution is Undead
Configurations - Volume 6, Number 2, Spring 1998
Between Knowledge And Technology: Patenting Methods, Rethinking Materiality
How does the law construe certain things and activities as knowledge that can become the object of intellectual property? When we look at the quantitative trends in recent patenting activities—more people patenting many more things—we tend to view that, in part, as an effect of the law's ability to construe new kinds of innovation (software, genetic sequences, etc.) in ways that conform to established legal concepts of patentable invention. The a…
What Is a Book? Kant and the Law of the Letter
Kant’s essay on the question of literary piracy has so far been read as a foundational text in the history of literary property. When Kant refers to the book as a “mute instrument,” scholars of intellectual property already know how to interpret that formulation because they presume the distinction that the contemporary jurisprudence of intellectual property makes between matter and form and its concomitant assumption that print is just an inert,…
Recycling Texts or Stealing Time: Plagiarism, Authorship, and Credit in Science
Scientific plagiarism is as sui generis as the author function in science. A study of the specificity of scientific plagiarism and the ways in which it diverges from appropriation in other disciplines allows us to question traditional definitions that focus on the copying of published copyrighted materials. The form of plagiarism that is most damaging to scientists does not involve publications, is largely outside the scope of copyright law, and …
Playing With the Evidence
Reasonable people will no doubt disagree about the relative success of Biagioli's explanatory models. Unfortunately, his attitude toward historical evidence falls into another category altogether. His handling of textual and iconographical evidence and his inference from these sources not only leave some of his most original claims without a foundation, but often disregard the basic values of the historian's craft.2
Meyerson: Science and the “irrational”
Meyerson and Koyré: Toward a dialectic of scientific change
6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11
Meyerson: Science and the “irrational”
The Social Status of Italian Mathematicians, 1450-1600
The anthropology of incommensurability
Galileo's System of Patronage
Galileo the Emblem Maker
The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History . Maurice A. Finocchiaro
Galilée bricoleur
Galilée bricoleur Cet article présente une analyse des stratégies de Galilée pour créer une nouvelle position professionnelle et sociale, celle de philosophe et mathématicien des phénomènes naturels. Au fondement de ces stratégies, la représentation qu'il donne de lui-même et de ses découvertes présentées comme des produits parfaitement ajustés à la culture de cour des Médicis. Il est indéniable qu'en cherchant à se créer cette nouvelle position,…
Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism
Knowledge, Freedom, and Brotherly Love: Homosociality and the Accademia dei Lincei
Knowledge, Freedom, and Brotherly Love: Homosociality and the Accademia dei Lincei Mario Biagioli (bio) The Accademia dei Lincei, often considered the earliest of scientific organizations, was established in 1603 by Federico Cesi, a young Roman aristocrat who was soon to become prince of San Polo and Sant'Angelo, duke of Aquasparta, and marquis of Monticelli. 1 After a period of very limited activity, which lasted until 1609, the academy quickly …
Le Prince et Les Savants la Civilité Scientifique au 17eSiècle
La création d'académies scientifiques en Italie, en Angleterre et en France au 17esiècle s'accompagne d'un débat sur les protocoles de bonne conduite auxquels les académiciens devaient se soumettre lors de la présentation, de l'approbation ou de la publication des propositions des savants concernant la connaissance des choses de la nature. Ces institutions produisaient leurs résultats en s'obligeant à une mise en commun des preuves, ainsi qu'à un…
Playing With the Evidence
Reasonable people will no doubt disagree about the relative success of Biagioli's explanatory models. Unfortunately, his attitude toward historical evidence falls into another category altogether. His handling of textual and iconographical evidence and his inference from these sources not only leave some of his most original claims without a foundation, but often disregard the basic values of the historian's craft.2
Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism
Etiquette, Interdependence, and Sociability in Seventeenth-Century Science
The Scientific Revolution is Undead
Configurations - Volume 6, Number 2, Spring 1998
The science studies reader
The Reader focuses on the practices of modern and contemporary and technology located in different national and institutional settings, with some attention to non- Western contexts. By mapping some of the open questions and points of tension likely to occupy the field for years to come, the essays in the Readercast fresh light on what science means at the end of the twentieth century
Stress in the Book of Nature: The Supplemental Logic of Galileo's Realism
This essay looks at the genealogy of Galileo's famous topos of the "book of nature" written in geometrical characters and open in front of anyone willing to read it. It shows that what has been traditionally read as an emblem of Galileo's method and mathematical realism was, in fact, the result of Galileo's difficult confrontation with another divine book: the Scripture. I argue that, behind the effect of transparency one experiences when reading…
From Print to Patents: Living on Instruments in Early Modern Europe
Surprisingly, patents are nowhere as central to the history of scientific instruments as they are to the history of technology. It will take much archival work to fill such an historiographical gap. My goal here is substantially more modest: to outline some patterns and chronological trends emerging from a comparison of printed patent rolls up to 1800 (which I am making available electronically) and other tactics used by instrument makers and des…
Patent Republic: Representing Inventions, Constructing Rights and Authors
Mario Biagioli Patent Republic: Representing Inventions, Constructing Rights and Authors COMPARED TO CASTING A VOTE, APPLYING FOR A PATENT IS SLOW, costly, and tedious. Still, both practices play out in different ways w hat it m eans to operate in a regim e of political representation. In colo nial America (as well as in early m odem France, England, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Russia), patents were gifts the sovereigns could either grant or withh…
Galileo's Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy
Bringing peer review to patents
Tougher examination of patent applications reduces anti–commons effects while reducing the frequency and costs of litigation. Modelled after open source/free software collaborations, the “Peer to Patent” initiative seeks to improve the quality of patents by developing a Web–based infrastructure whereby volunteer experts external to the PTO’s review applications, assemble prior art information, and submit the results of their collective work back …
Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities
Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property: Creative Production in Legal and Cultural Perspective
Rules regulating access to knowledge are no longer the exclusive province of lawyers and policymakers and instead command the attention of anthropologists, economists, literary theorists, political scientists, artists, historians, and cultural critics. This burgeoning interdisciplinary interest in 'intellectual property' has also expanded beyond the conventional categories of patent, copyright, and trademark to encompass a diverse array of topics…
Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present
This volume gathers essays that focus on the worldliness of science, its inseparable engagement in the major institutional bases of social life: law, market, church, school, and nation. With a chronol
From ciphers to confidentiality: Secrecy, openness and priority in science
I make three related claims. First, certain seemingly secretive behaviours displayed by scientists and inventors are expression neither of socio-professional values nor of strategies for the maximization of the economic value of their knowledge. They are, instead, protective responses to unavoidable risks inherent in the process of publication and priority claiming. Scientists and inventors fear being scooped by direct competitors, but have also …
Political science (24 works) · Philosophy (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · History (13 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Geography (10 works) · History of Science and Medicine (10 works)