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]].
Living Techno-Natures: Biohybrid Objects, Life, and Technology
1st Edition
Edited
By Josef Barla, Marco Tamborini
February 25, 2026
Evolutionary algorithms that imitate nature to solve technical problems, synthetic DNA that turns plants into living data archives, and the use of autonomous machines inside living bodies are just a few examples suggesting that the boundaries between life and technology have become fundamentally ...
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 ...
Reflections on the Practice of Physics: James Clerk Maxwell’s Methodological Odyssey in Electromagnetism
1st Edition
By Giora Hon, Bernard R. Goldstein
September 30, 2021
This monograph examines James Clerk Maxwell’s contributions to electromagnetism to gain insight into the practice of science by focusing on scientific methodology as applied by scientists. First and foremost, this study is concerned with practices that are reflected in scientific texts and the ways...
The Mysterious Science of the Sea, 1775–1943
1st Edition
By Natascha Adamowsky
June 30, 2021
The depths of the oceans are the last example of terra incognita on earth. Adamowsky presents a study of the sea, arguing that – contrary to popular belief – post-Enlightenment discourse on the sea was still subject to mystery and wonder, and not wholly rationalized by science....
Nanotechnology and Its Governance
1st Edition
By Arie Rip
March 31, 2021
This book charts the development of nanotechnology in relation to society from the early years of the twenty-first century. It offers a sustained analysis of the life of nanotechnology, from the laboratory to society, from scientific promises to societal governance, and attempts to modulate ...
Perspectives on Classification in Synthetic Sciences: Unnatural Kinds
1st Edition
Edited
By Julia Bursten
March 31, 2021
This volume launches a new series of contemporary conversations about scientific classification. Most philosophical conversations about kinds have focused centrally or solely on natural kinds, that is, kinds whose existence is not dependent on the scientific process of synthesis. This volume ...
The Past, Present, and Future of Integrated History and Philosophy of Science
1st Edition
Edited
By Emily Herring, Kevin Jones, Konstantin Kiprijanov, Laura Sellers
March 31, 2021
Integrated History and Philosophy of Science (iHPS) is commonly understood as the study of science from a combined historical and philosophical perspective. Yet, since its gradual formation as a research field, the question of how to suitably integrate both perspectives remains open. This volume ...