Synopses & Reviews
Who are scientists? What kind of people are they? What capacities and virtues are thought to stand behind their considerable authority? The Scientific Life is historian Steven Shapinand#8217;s story about who scientists are, who we think they are, and why our sensibilities about such things matter. From the early twentieth-century origins of corporate research laboratories to the high-flying scientific entrepreneurship of the present, Shapin argues that the radical uncertainties of much contemporary science have made personal virtues more central to its practice than ever before, and he also reveals how radically novel aspects of late modern science have unexpectedly deep historical roots. His elegantly conceived history of the scientific career and character ultimately encourages us to reconsider the very nature of the technical and moral worlds in which we now live.
and#8220;Remarkably rich in detail and revelation. . . . Shapin may not be doing a conventional history of the and#8216;scientific life,and#8217; but what he has done is both novel and provocative.and#8221;and#8212;New York Review of Books
and#8220;[A] thought-provoking challenge to the assumptions of scientific objectivity by science's practitioners and an acknowledgment of just how important the morality of scientists may be in the advancement and authority of knowledge.and#8221;and#8212;Library Journal
"The Scientific Life provokes us to discard worn-out understandings that science outside universities is necessarily aberrant. . . . The book succeeds masterfully.and#8221;and#8212;Science
and#8220;A stunning antidote to the naive portraits of how science is or should be done.and#8221;and#8212;Choice
". . . . Required reading for all scientists and those studying the social activity of science.and#8221;and#8212;Nature
Review
"Shapin's The Scientific Life glitters with deep knowledge of the realities of contemporary science as practiced in academe, industry, and government. Lucidly written, it upsets much conventional thinking about the ways and workings of science. It is a terrific book, a welcome addition to a crowded genre, and adds greatly to Shapin's formidable reputation as a leading historian of science." Daniel S. Greenberg, author of Science for Sale
Review
and#8220;Shapin is at his most insightfully mature in this magisterial book. He leads us through a century long tour of the changing figure of the scientist in a remarkably clear and deeply learned manner. The result adroitly bypasses innumerable sterile debates by showing through scholarship and thoughtfulness the place of the scientists in the and#8216;way we live now.and#8217; A tour de force!and#8221;
Review
"The pockets of science that are unaffected by commerce, or by the state, are steadily shrinking. To ignore this would be to deny the realities of todays science. After this book, that cannot happen again. The Scientific Life should therefore be required reading for all scientists and those studying the social activity of science.. . . . Shapins study is neither a sources-based history of the past nor an empirical social science analysis of the present. It is instead an extended insightful essay. This genre enriches public debate."
Review
and#8220;In
The Scientific Life, Steven Shapin writes masterfully about the evolution of what he calls and#8216;the world of making the worlds to come.and#8217; Broadly historic, yet deftly nuanced, Shapin constructs a journey that begins with the lone investigators and solitary altruists of lore, through the mutually disdainful academic purists and Organization Men of the mid-twentieth century, to todayand#8217;s technoscientific movers and shakers, who roam an ambiguous moral cosmos of university classrooms, high-tech boardrooms, research hospitals, and Wall Street. He illuminates at each step along the way how men and women of science, who more than any other vocation present us with flashes of the future, have come to regard their pursuits, their times, and, most intriguingly, themselves. I greatly admire the learnedness and dexterity with which Shapin has pulled this off. A forceful, revealing, vital work.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;In this brilliant book Shapin takes us from celebration and criticism to description and understanding of one of the most important phenomena of the twentieth centuryand#8212;the creation of technical novelties. Richly paradoxical and entertaining, The Scientific Life contrasts the evidence-free moralizing of the cultural critics and early sociologists of science with the often insightful analyses of the despised industrial researchers. He shows that when adequately described the worlds of technoscientific research and venture capital are not the soulless, routinized, bureaucratic antithesis of the academic ideal, but ones where the necessary uncertainties of innovation are dealt with using face-time, trust, charisma, and even proverbs, things our narratives mistakenly consign to a pre-modern era. This is a book where the doers get their due and the contemplators their comeuppance; where the quotidian is richer than the transcendent.and#8221;
Review
"Shapin here examines science as a vocation. The practice of science, once a calling from God or, perhaps, a mere amateur's hobby, has come into its own as a profession, particularly following World War II. Shapin's sociological history documents this vocational evolution as he raises the following questions: How does the practice and authority of science relate to the virtues of its practitioners? Is academic science superior to the commercialization of science? How does industry compete for the best minds in science? Can the practice of scientific research be organized, team driven, and accountable to investors? Shapin addresses all these questions without weighing in with his personal opinions on the topic. The result is a thought-provoking challenge to the assumptions of scientific objectivity by science's practitioners and an acknowledgment of just how important the morality of scientists may be in the advancement and authority of knowledge."
Review
"The Scientific Life provokes us to discard worn-out understandings that science outside universities is necessarily aberrant and that the credibility of scientific knowledge no longer depends upon moral judgments about the experts who make reality claims. In that task, the book succeeds masterfully."
Review
"A stunning antidote to the naive portraits of how science is or should be done."
Review
"Shapin has produced a work of exceptional originality, power and significance. He has also given readers much to chew over in regard to contemporary developments and perennial issues. . . . Shapin tells this story exceedingly well, framing its episodes richly and developing them through vivid depictions of representative figures, texts, incidents and anecdotes."
Review
"Remarkably rich in detail and revelation. . . . Shapin may not be doing a conventional history of the 'scientific life,' but what he has done is both novel and provocative."
Review
"An evocative look at both the history of sociology of science and of lives in science." H. Allen Orr - New York Review of Books
Review
and#8220;Galileoand#8217;s Idol is an engaging, original, and important work, and it makes several crucial contributions to early modern history of science. First and foremost, Wilding revises in significant ways our understanding of the two main protagonists, Galileo Galilei and Gianfrancesco Sagredo, bringing into focus a great deal of new information about their relationship to each other, to the Venetian Republic, to other natural philosophers of their day, to the bookmen whose business it was to import and export such knowledge, and to that looming exilic community, the Society of Jesus. In addition, he uses new information, much of it painstakingly reconstructed from archival materials, to argue for something other than a prescient, far-sighted, single-minded Galileoand#8212;that is, for one whose multiple strategies and various allegiances were contingent moves, not always successful and occasionally in conflict with each other. Wildingand#8217;s study brings attention to issues such as the relationship of natural philosophy to statecraft; the establishment, shaping, and distortion of authorial identity; and the relevance of book and manuscript history to our understanding of how information traveled and was consumed by a vast range of readers.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Best known as the sidekick in Galileoand#8217;s Dialogue, Sagredo comes to life here as a real person. Wildingand#8217;s careful sleuthing reveals the crucial roles that Sagredo and other intermediaries played in facilitating the flow of books and letters, of information and disinformation, from Aleppo to Venice and beyond around the turn of the seventeenth century. This book sheds brilliant new light on Galileoand#8217;s entangled efforts to gain money, reputation, and scientific knowledge.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;In Wildingand#8217;s hands, Sagredo becomes a window onto two overlapping worlds: the culture of European baroque science and that of the Venetian patriciate. In both cases we are treated to new, powerful, and surprising insights, not to mention unexpected evidence that most historians thought unavailable. Through Sagredo, we see Galileo at an angle that no previous study or biography has been able to capture, and we also watch the Venetian patriciate from the ground up, through the mundane daily practices that made that culture so unique. The locus of Galileoand#8217;s Idol is remarkably localand#8212;a few small islands in a lagoonand#8212;but the picture we see is quite different: a small insular community that is what it is because of its vast networksand#8212;not only military and commercial, but also networks of oral and printed communication. Through an emphasis on technologies of communications, Wilding demonstrates how much the Venetian patriciate and Galileoand#8217;s career were a result of mediaand#8212;both the production and circulation of books, manuscripts, notes, and gossip and their skilled and often subversive readings. Galileoand#8217;s Idol is detective work at its best, building new complex tableaux from newly found or noticed traces and indexes scattered far and wide. A must read for anybody interested in Galileo, early modern science, Venetian history, and Mediterranean studies.and#8221;
Review
andquot;Brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read.andquot;
Review
"Steven Shapin, one of our most creative and productive historians of science, has spent much of his career writing about the 17th century against the background of the 20th. In The Scientific Life he reverses field, drawing on perspectives he worked out in writings on Robert Boyle, the Royal Society and the early-modern invention of laboratory science to comprehend the scientific role in our age of technoscience." Theodore M. Porter, American Scientist (read the entire )
Synopsis
Who are scientists? What kind of people are they? What capacities and virtues are thought to stand behind their considerable authority? They are experts indeed, highly respected experts authorized to describe and interpret the natural world and widely trusted to help transform knowledge into power and profit. But are they morally different from other people?
The Scientific Life is historian Steven Shapin's story about who scientists are, who we think they are, and why our sensibilities about such things matter.
Conventional wisdom has long held that scientists are neither better nor worse than anyone else, that personal virtue does not necessarily accompany technical expertise, and that scientific practice is profoundly impersonal. Shapin, however, here shows how the uncertainties attending scientific research make the virtues of individual researchers intrinsic to scientific work. From the early twentieth-century origins of corporate research laboratories to the high-flying scientific entrepreneurship of the present, Shapin argues that the radical uncertainties of much contemporary science have made personal virtues more central to its practice than ever before, and he also reveals how radically novel aspects of late modern science have unexpectedly deep historical roots. His elegantly conceived history of the scientific career and character ultimately encourages us to reconsider the very nature of the technical and moral worlds in which we now live.
Building on the insights of Shapin's last three influential books, featuring an utterly fascinating cast of characters, and brimming with bold and original claims, The Scientific Life is essential reading for anyone wanting to reflect on late modern American culture and how it has been shaped.
Synopsis
Galileoand#8217;s Idol offers a vivid depiction of Galileoand#8217;s friend, student, and patron, Gianfrancesco Sagredo (1571and#150;1620). Sagredoand#8217;s life, which has never before been studied in depth, brings to light the inextricable relationship between the production, distribution, and reception of political information and scientific knowledge.
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Nick Wilding uses as wide a variety of sources as possibleand#151;paintings, ornamental woodcuts, epistolary hoaxes, intercepted letters, murder case files, and othersand#151;to challenge the picture of early modern science as pious, serious, and ecumenical. Through his analysis of the figure of Sagredo, Wilding offers a fresh perspective on Galileo as well as new questions and techniques for the study of science. The result is a book that turns our attention from actors as individuals to shifting collective subjects, often operating under false identities; from a world made of sturdy print to one of frail instruments and mistranscribed manuscripts; from a complacent Europe to an emerging system of complex geopolitics and globalizing information systems; and from an epistemology based on the stolid problem of eternal truths to one generated through and in the service of playful, politically engaged, and cunning schemes.
About the Author
Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is the author of A Social History of Truth and The Scientific Revolution, and with Simon Schaffer, the coauthor of Leviathan and the Air-Pump. He has also written for the New Yorker and is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Preface
and#160;
1 Knowledge and Virtue
The Way We Live Now
and#160;
2 From Calling to Job
Nature, Truth, Method, and Vocation from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries
and#160;
3 The Moral Equivalence of the Scientist
A History of the Very Idea
and#160;
4 Who Is the Industrial Scientist?
The View from the Tower
and#160;
5 Who Is the Industrial Scientist?
The View from the Managers
and#160;
6 The Scientist and the Civic Virtues
The Moral Life of Organized Science
and#160;
7 The Scientific Entrepreneur
Money, Motives, and the Place of Virtue
and#160;
8 Visions of the Future
Uncertainty and Virtue in the World of High-Tech and Venture Capital
and#160;
The Way We Live Now
Epilogue
and#160;
Notes
Bibliography
Index