History and Philosophy of Technoscience
About the Book Series
Even though technoscientific research is as old as alchemy and pharmacy, agricultural research and synthetic chemistry, philosophers of science had little to say about it until recently. This book series is the first to explicitly accept the challenge to study not just technical aspects of theory development and hypothesis testing but the specific ways in which knowledge is produced in a technological setting. When one seeks to achieve basic capabilities of manipulation, visualization, or predictive control, how are problems defined and research fields established, what kinds of explanations are sought, how are findings validated, what are the contributions of different kinds of expertise, how do epistemic and social values enter into the research process? And most importantly for civic observers of contemporary research: how is robustness and reliability achieved even in the absence of complete scientific understanding?
Editorial Board: Hanne Andersen (University of Copenhagen), Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (University of Paris, Sorbonne), Martin Carrier (University of Bielefeld), Graeme Gooday (University of Leeds), Don Howard (University of Notre Dame), Ann Johnson (Cornell University), Cyrus Mody (Maastricht University), Maureen O'Malley (University of Sydney), Roger Strand (University of Bergen), Nancy Tuana (Pennsylvania State University).
Direct inquiries to Alfred Nordmann [e-mail link: [email protected]] or Robert Langham [e-mail link: [email protected]].
Translations of Responsibility: Innovation Governance in Three European Regions
1st Edition
By Thomas Völker, Rasmus Slaattelid, Roger Strand
May 05, 2025
In 2020, a group of European researchers got a European Union (EU) grant to do a project called TRANSFORM. The objective of TRANSFORM was to integrate the principle of responsible research and innovation (RRI) into the research and innovation policies of three European regions: Lombardy, Brussels, ...
Hermeneutics, History, and Technology: The Call of the Future
1st Edition
Edited
By Armin Grunwald, Alfred Nordmann, Martin Sand
November 28, 2024
For better and worse, the future is often conceived in technological terms. Technology is supposed to meet the challenge of climate change or resource depletion. And when one asks about the world in 20 or 100 years, answers typically revolve around AI, genome editing, or geoengineering. There is ...
Living in a Nuclear World: From Fukushima to Hiroshima
1st Edition
Edited
By Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Soraya Boudia, Kyoko Sato
September 25, 2023
The Fukushima disaster invites us to look back and probe how nuclear technology has shaped the world we live in, and how we have come to live with it. Since the first nuclear detonation (Trinity test) and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all in 1945, nuclear technology has profoundly ...
Philosophy of Interdisciplinarity: Studies in Science, Society and Sustainability
1st Edition
By Jan Cornelius Schmidt
September 25, 2023
Interdisciplinarity is a hallmark of contemporary knowledge production. This book introduces a Philosophy of Interdisciplinarity at the intersection of science, society and sustainability. In light of the ambivalence of the technosciences and the challenge of sustainable development in the ...
Material Hermeneutics: Reversing the Linguistic Turn
1st Edition
By Don Ihde
May 31, 2023
Material Hermeneutics explores the ways in which new imaging technologies and scientific instruments have changed our notions about ancient history. From the first lunar calendar to the black hole image, and from an ancient mummy in the Italian Alps to the irrigated valleys of Mesopotamia...
Post-Truth Imaginations: New Starting Points for Critique of Politics and Technoscience
1st Edition
Edited
By Kjetil Rommetveit
May 31, 2023
This book engages with post-truth as a problem of societal order and for scholarly analysis. It claims that post-truth discourse is more deeply entangled with main Western imaginations of knowledge societies than commonly recognised. Scholarly responses to post-truth have not fully addressed these ...
Visual Representations in Science: Concept and Epistemology
1st Edition
By Nicola Mößner
December 18, 2020
Visual representations (photographs, diagrams, etc.) play crucial roles in scientific processes. They help, for example, to communicate research results and hypotheses to scientific peers as well as to the lay audience. In genuine research activities they are used as evidence or as surrogates for ...
Reasoning in Measurement
1st Edition
Edited
By Nicola Mößner, Alfred Nordmann
August 14, 2018
This collection offers a new understanding of the epistemology of measurement. The interdisciplinary volume explores how measurements are produced, for example, in astronomy and seismology, in studies of human sexuality and ecology, in brain imaging and intelligence testing. It considers ...
Research Objects in their Technological Setting
1st Edition
Edited
By Bernadette Bensaude Vincent, Sacha Loeve, Alfred Nordmann, Astrid Schwarz
August 14, 2018
What kind of stuff is the world made of? What is the nature or substance of things? These are ontological questions, and they are usually answered with respect to the objects of science. The objects of technoscience tell a different story that concerns the power, promise and potential of things – ...
Experiments in Practice
1st Edition
By Astrid Schwarz
February 01, 2017
Traditionally experimentation has been understood as an activity performed within the laboratory, but in the twenty-first century this view is being challenged. Schwarz uses ecological and environmental case studies to show how scientific experiments can transcend the laboratory....
Philosophy, Computing and Information Science
1st Edition
Edited
By Ruth Hagengruber, Uwe Riss
January 06, 2017
Over the last four decades computers and the internet have become an intrinsic part of all our lives, but this speed of development has left related philosophical enquiry behind. Featuring the work of computer scientists and philosophers, these essays provide an overview of an exciting new area of ...
Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960–1990
1st Edition
By Sabine Höhler
January 06, 2017
The idea of the earth as a vessel in space came of age in an era shaped by space travel and the Cold War. Höhler’s study brings together technology, science and ecology to explore the way this latter-day ark was invoked by politicians, environmentalists, cultural historians, writers of science ...