Group Members Discussed Texts by Carlo Ginzburg, Robert Merton, and Elinor Barber

On October 26 another research seminar «Magic, Astrology, and Science in Russian Modernism» was held. 

In the context of the forthcoming collective publication provisionally entitled «Why did Sherlock Holmes forget Copernicus? Contexts of Perception of Heliocentrism in the Late 19th and First Half of the 20th Century», the participants discussed Carlo Ginzburg's classic article «Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm» (1979) and several chapters from Robert Merton and Elinor Barber's «The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science» (2004). Why did the actualization of the «evidential paradigm» occur precisely at the turn of the twentieth century? Does Sherlock Holmes have much in common, from the point of view of the man of that time, with the ancient hunter-trackers? Is it possible to fit astronomy into the network of «evidential» disciplines marked out by Ginzburg? These and other questions were the subjects of discussion at the seminar.