An Epistemology of the Concrete brings together case
studies and theoretical reflections on the history and
epistemology of the life sciences by Hans-Jorg
Rheinberger, one of the world's foremost philosophers of
science. In these essays he examines the history of
experiments, concepts, model organisms, instruments, and
the gamut of epistemological, institutional, political,
and social factors that determine the actual course of
the development of knowledge. Building on ideas in his
influential book Toward a History of Epistemic Things,
Rheinberger considers ways of historicizing scientific
knowledge, different configurations of genetic
experimentation in the first half of the twentieth
century, and the interaction between apparatuses,
experiments, and concept formation in molecular biology
in the second half of the twentieth century. He delves
into fundamental epistemological issues bearing on the
relationship between instruments and objects of
knowledge, laboratory preparations as a special class of
epistemic objects, and the note-taking and write-up
techniques utilized in research labs.He takes up topics
from the French ''historical epistemologists'' Gaston
Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem to the liquid
scintillation counter, a radioactivity measuring device
that became a crucial tool for molecular biology and
biomedicine in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout An
Epistemology of the Concrete, Rheinberger shows how
assemblagesohistorical conjuncturesoset the conditions
for the emergence of epistemic novelty. He also conveys
the fascination of scientific things: those organisms,
spaces, apparatuses, and techniques transformed by
research and transforming research in turn. |
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