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]].
By Thomas Volker, Rasmus Slaattelid, Roger Strand
December 21, 2023
In 2020, a group of European researchers got an 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, and Catalonia....
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 ...
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 ...
Edited
By Armin Grunwald, Alfred Nordmann, Martin Sand
June 01, 2023
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
By Giora Hon, Bernard R. Goldstein
February 25, 2020
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...
Edited
By Julia Bursten
July 08, 2019
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 ...
By Arie Rip
June 10, 2019
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 ...
Edited
By Emily Herring, Kevin Jones, Konstantin Kiprijanov, Laura Sellers
May 20, 2019
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 ...
Edited
By Nadine de Courtenay, Olivier Darrigol, Oliver Schlaudt
January 21, 2019
Systems of units still fail to attract the philosophical attention they deserve, but this could change with the current reform of the International System of Units (SI). Most of the SI base units will henceforth be based on certain laws of nature and a choice of fundamental constants whose values ...