Biographies of scientific objects
By: edited by Lorraine Daston
Contributors: Daston, Lorraine, 1951-
Publisher: University of Chicago Press; University Of Chicago Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Chicago
Language: eng
Number of pages: 307
Subjects: Knowledge, Theory of; Science -- Philosophy; Science -- History
Description: "This book explores the ways in which scientific objects are both real and historical. Whether discovered or invented, objects of inquiry broaden and deepen in meaning -- growing more 'real' -- as they become entangled in webs of cultural signficance, material practices, and theoretical derivations. Thus their biographies will matter to anyone concerned with the formation of scientific knowledge and with the reconciliation of ontology and history."--Page 4 of cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index
Table of contents: title: The coming into being of scientific objects / Lorraine Daston; title: Preternatural philosophy / Lorraine Daston; title: Mathematical entities in scientific discourse: Paulus Guldin and his Dissertatio de motu terrae / Rivka Feldhay; title: Dreams and self-consciousness: mapping the mind in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries / Doris Kaufmann; title: Mutations of the self in old regime and postrevolutionary France: from ame to moi to le moi / Jan Goldstein; title: The coming into being and passing away of value theories in economics (1776-1976) / Gérard Jorland; title: "An entirely new object of consciousness, of volition, of thought": the coming into being and (almost) passing away of "society" as a scientific object / Peter Wagner; title: "Sentimental pessimism" and ethnographic experience: or, why culture is not a disappearing "object" / Marshall Sahlins; title: How the ether spawned the microworld / Jed Z. Buchwald; title: Life insurance, medical testing, and the management of mortality / Theodore M. Porter; title: On the partial existence of existing and nonexisting objects / Bruno Latour; title: Cytoplasmic particles: the trajectory of a scientific object / Hans-Jörg Rheinberger