2017/03/01 by H. Floris Cohen · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Psychology · Mathematics · #Political Economy and Marxism #Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics #LEVIATHAN (cipher) #Metaphysics #Value (mathematics) #Classics #Philosophy #Section (typography) #History #Art history #Literature #Epistemology #Art #Mathematics #Computer science
paper · doi:10.1086/691397
published in Isis 108(1), 107 (University of Chicago Press)
openalex publication_date 2017/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Previous articleNext article FreeSecond LookA Second Look: Leviathan and the Air-Pump Editor’s IntroductionH. Floris CohenH. Floris Cohen Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe idea of “A Second Look” stems from one of my predecessors, Ron Numbers. Between December 1990 and June 1994 Isis published five essays in which an invited author reread a given “classic” in the history of science (successively, Marshall Clagett’s Greek Science in Antiquity, E. A. Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, A. C. Crombie’s Augustine to Galileo, Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution, and Charles C. Gillispie’s Genesis and Geology) and reflected on its value not only in the past but also in the present.In the “Second Look” section that follows, the reader will find Ron’s original idea taken up again, but in a somewhat altered format. The series, to be continued in irregular alternation with new “Focus” and “Viewpoint” sections, opens with a book that has without doubt become a classic—Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump. The book came out in 1985 and received in a few years’ time no fewer than thirty-one reviews.I have invited Azadeh Achbari (currently one of Isis’s Editorial Assistants) to write an introductory survey. She has identified the main themes in these book reviews, and she sums up in a deliberately impartial manner the principal points made by these various reviewers. Her survey, sent to all the contributors and printed at the beginning of the section, is followed by five short essays in which some of the original reviewers look back at their own review, reconsider the book they wrote about some thirty years ago, and reflect on its current status. The authors are Thomas L. Hankins, Dominique Pestre, John L. Heilbron, Paul B. Wood, and Trevor Pinch. I also invited four “youngsters” to reflect both on the survey of all thirty-one reviews and on the book itself, which of course they have never known other than as a classic. These pieces are by Jeroen Bouterse, Li Jing Jiang, Vivette García Deister, and Alex Wellerstein. Once all these pieces were in, I sent the entire file thus created to Shapin and Shaffer, whose comments complete this first installment of the second series of pieces taking “A Second Look.” Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 108, Number 1March 2017 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOI10.1086/691397 © 2017 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:William Thomas Scientists’ Imagined Pasts and Historians’ Appreciation of Scientific Thought, Isis 108, no.44 (Dec 2017): 830–835.10.1086/695605