You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The human sciences—including psychology, anthropology, and social theory—are widely held to have been born during the eighteenth century. This first full-length, English-language study of the Enlightenment sciences of humans explores the sources, context, and effects of this major intellectual development. The book argues that the most fundamental inspiration for the Enlightenment was the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Natural philosophers from Copernicus to Newton had created a magisterial science of nature based on the realization that the physical world operated according to orderly, discoverable laws. Eighteenth-century thinkers sought to cap this achievement with ...
The last few years has, within museums, witnessed nothing short of a revolution. Worried that the very institution was itself in danger of becoming a dusty, forgotten, culturally irrelevant exhibit, vigorous efforts have been made to reshape the museum mission. Fearing that history was coming to be ignored by modern society, many institutions have instead marketed a de-intellectualised heritage, overly relying on computer technology to captivate a contemporary audience. The theme of this work is that we can do much to reassess the rationale that inspires contemporary collections through a study of seventeenth century museums. England's first museums were quite literally wonderful; founded th...
Synthetic biology is becoming one of the most dynamic new fields of biology, with the potential to revolutionize the way we do biotechnology today. By applying the toolbox of engineering disciplines to biology, a whole set of potential applications become possible ranging very widely across scientific and engineering disciplines. Some of the potential benefits of synthetic biology, such as the development of low-cost drugs or the production of chemicals and energy by engineered bacteria are enormous. There are, however, also potential and perceived risks due to deliberate or accidental damage. Also, ethical issues of synthetic biology just start being explored, with hardly any ethicists spec...
Novel Beings is a forward-looking exploration into the divide between proactive and reactive regulatory approaches to the cross-section of biotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI) research. Addressing an innovative area of academic study, Novel Beings questions how this research, which has the potential to create new forms of morally valuable life, could be regulated.
This book explores how and when biology emerged as a science in Germany. Beginning with the debate about organism between Georg Ernst Stahl and Gottfried Leibniz at the start of the eighteenth century, John Zammito traces the development of a new research program, culminating in 1800, in the formulation of developmental morphology. He shows how over the course of the century, naturalists undertook to transform some domains of natural history into a distinct branch of natural philosophy, which attempted not only to describe but to explain the natural world and became, ultimately, the science of biology.
This book is open access under a CC-BY license. Policy-making to address grand challenges faces greater complexity than any previous project of modernization. Future scenarios are haunted by uncertainty and there is real ambivalence as to the values that policy should strive for. In this situation decision-makers look to research and innovation to provide answers and solutions. But neither can the great transitions ahead be planned by science, nor will conventional methods of innovation bring such transitions about. A turn to interactive governance is therefore underway with policy-makers and citizens becoming increasingly involved in processes of deliberating futures. Technology Assessment ...
Diagnostic procedures are emblematic of medical work. Scholars in the field of social studies of medicine identify diverse dimensions of diagnosis that point to controversies, processual qualities and contested evidence. In this anthology, diagnostic fluidity is seen to permeate diagnostic work in a wide range of contexts, from medical interactions in the clinic, domestic settings and other relations of affective work, to organizational structures, and in historical developments. The contributors demonstrate, each in their own way, how different agents ‘do diagnosis’, highlighting the multi-faceted elements of uncertainty and mutability integral to diagnostic work. At the same time, the contributors also show how in ‘doing diagnosis’ enactments of subjectivities, representations of cultural imaginaries, bodily processes, and socio-cultural changes contribute to configuring diagnostic fluidity in significant ways.
Gary Lee Downey investigates the body/machine interface in his remarkable ethnography of computer engineers. Drawing on interviews, observations and personal interaction with engineers, he documents the everyday power of technology's dominant image in our society, a force widely regarded as monolithically progressive. The Machine in Me will lead the reader to understand how deeply connected we are to The Machine and how beneficial it would be for us to really understand ourselves and machines as partially configured of the other--we as part machine, machines as part human. In this way, we can begin to see both the power and limitations of technology.
"Knowing" itself is a problematic concept and what was once seen as the clear objective of "knowing," that is to discover "truth" or "reality," has become increasingly less certain. This is even more the case when scholars move from the present to examine epistemology in the past. Two fundamental questions arise: What constituted knowledge in the context of early modern Germany and how was knowledge gathered, assembled, organized, deployed, and interpreted? Ways of Knowing seeks to answer these questions. Taking their cues from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, including art, German literature, social, political, medical, and religious history, the contributors offer readers a rich ...