2013/11/15 by Mi Gyung Kim · 6 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Argument (complex analysis) #Art #Art history #Australian Indigenous Culture and History #Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies #Epistemology #Historiography #History #History and philosophy of science #History of Science and Medicine #History of ideas #History of science #Intellectual history #Literature #Narrative #Philosophy #Philosophy of history #Philosophy of science #Sociology
paper · doi:10.1177/0306312713507329
published in Social Studies of Science 44(1), 150-162 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2013/11/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
It would be uncontroversial to say that Leviathan and the Air-Pump by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer opened a new era in the history of science and technology despite its slow, filtered assimilation into the historiography.1 By configuring the ‘experimental space’ of Restoration England, the authors created a new epistemological space for the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, which helped destabilize the intellectual/ institutional marriage between the history and the philosophy of science (Laudan, 1992), reform the sociology of knowledge in tune with the Strong Programme (Barnes, 1974; Barnes et al., 1996; Bloor, 1976), bridge the sharp division between the history of science and the history of technology, and provide impetus for a comparative anthropology of science (Latour, 1990, 1993). It also helped legitimize localism and microsociological inquiry, make instrumental biography fashionable, and challenge the accepted narrative of the Scientific Revolution. Owen Hannaway (1988) thus characterized the book as ‘a rich and rewarding fruit of the Kuhnian revolution’ that had liberated history of science from philosophy of science by showing ‘science as a communal experimental activity’. The book’s impact across disciplines was recognized by the Erasmus prize in 2005, two decades after its publication. As can be expected of a visionary work, some completely missed its significance, as when Marie Boas Hall (1986) characterized the Hobbes–Boyle exchange as an argument between a philosopher and a scientist – rather than hybrid philosopher–scientists – who could only misunderstand each other, as always. The book’s relationship to the history of