How To Think About Science

Description

"For me, the power of the book is how editor David Cayley probes his guests, through his powerful questioning, to examine the fundamental nature of science and its role in history and modern society. I highly recommend this must read anthology of the world's leading thinkers on science Ideas on the Nature of Science edited by David Cayley. The ideas presented by the philosophers, historians, and practitioners of science will have a profound effect on how the reader views the role and nature of science in society. Indeed, the very myth of modernity, and of science as part of that concept, is called into serious question in several interviews." ― Business World TABLE OF CONTENTS 1: Simon Schaffer, co-author of Leviathan and the Air Pump and historian of science at Cambridge 2: Lorraine Daston, director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and co-author of Objectivity 3: Margaret Lock, medical anthropologist in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University and author of Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death 4: Ian Hacking, philosopher of science at the University of Toronto and the Collège de France, author of Representing and Intervening; Andrew Pickering, sociologist of science at the University of Exeter and author of The Mangle of Practice 5: Ulrich Beck, professor at the Institute of Sociology at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and author of Risk Society; Bruno Latour of Sciences Po in Paris, author of We Have Never Been Modern 6: James Lovelock, independent scientist, creator of the Gaia theory, author of The Revenge of Gaia 7: Arthur Zajonc, professor physics at Amherst University and author of Catching the Light 8: Novelist, essayist and poet Wendell Berry, author of Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition 9: Rupert Sheldrake, independent biologist, author of The Presence of the Past and A New Science of Life 10: Brian Wynne, associate director of the Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGEN) at Lancaster University, author of Rationality and Ritual, co-editor of Misunderstanding Science 11: Sajay Samuel, clinical professor in the College of Business at the Pennsylvania State University and essayist on science and common sense 12: David Abram, magician, independent scholar, founding member of the Alliance for Wild Ethics in Santa Fe, New Mexico, author of The Spell of the Sensuous 13: Dean Bavington, Canada Research Chair at Nipissing University, author of a doctoral dissertation on the role of science and managerial ecology in the collapse of the cod fishery 14: Evelyn Fox Keller, biologist, professor of the Philosophy and History of Science at MIT, author of Reflections on Gender and Science and The Century of the Gene 15: Barbara Duden, professor at the University of Hannover, author of The Woman Under the Skin and Disembodying Women; Silya Samerski, author of The Mathematization of Hope and essayist on the “pop gene,” the gene in everyday talk. 16: Peter Galison, professor of physics and the history of science at Harvard, author of How Experiments End, Image and Logic and Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps 17: Steven Shapin, historian and sociologist of science at Harvard University, co-author of Leviathan and the Air Pump, author of A Social History of Truth and The Scientific Life 18: Richard Lewontin, professor of biology at Harvard, co-author of The Dialectical Biologist, author of Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA 19: Ruth Hubbard, professor of biology at Harvard, author of The Politics of Women’s Biology and, with her son Elijah Wald, Exploding the Gene Myth 20: Michael Gibbons, professor of the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, co-author of Rethinking Science; Peter Scott, vice-chancellor of Kingston University, co-author of Rethinking Science; Janet Atkinson Grosjean, the Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia, author of Public Science, Private Interests 21: Christopher Norris, professor of philosophy at the University of Cardiff, author of Against Relativism and Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism; Mary Midgley, philosopher and author of Man and Beast, Science as Salvation and Science and Poetry 22: Allan Young, professor of anthropology in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill, author of The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder 23: Lee Smolin, Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics, author of The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of Science and What Comes Next 24: Nicholas Maxwell, professor of philosophy, University College London, author of From Knowledge to Wisdom and Is Science Neurotic?