The original title of the book was On Limit. My editor resisted the title; it wasn’t searchable, you know. But this remains the book’s central theme. I see the play of infinity and limit as the central dynamic of our… Read More ›
Books and Book Reviews
Book Review contributions are single-authored or multiple-authored reviews of recent books in the area of social epistemology.
Review: How History Gets Things Wrong by Alex Rosenberg, Matthew Goodrum
Rosenberg begins by distinguishing between narrative history and other forms of history where historical subjects are treated in ways shaped by social science research. It is the first type of history, which offers explanations of historical events and the actions… Read More ›
A Translator’s Response to Reviewers’ Comments: On Li Zehou’s A History of Classical Chinese Thought, Andrew Lambert
I am grateful for this opportunity to discuss Li Zehou’s work in this interdisciplinary forum, particularly because Li’s ideas are well suited to a cross-cultural and multi-perspectival approach. His bold ideas seek to bridge cultural traditions; yet their suggestiveness is… Read More ›
Review of Transhumanism, Nature, and the Ends of Science by Robert Frodeman, Mark Coeckelbergh
Partly due to sustained and energetic promotion by transhumanist thinkers themselves … transhumanism and related topics such as human enhancement are by now widely known in academic communities that reflect on technology. For example, there is ongoing work on the… Read More ›
Belonging to the Land: A Review of Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth, Eric Kerr
Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth explores the way in which global political action today embodies multiple contradictions in our relationship to land. More precisely, our relationship to that part of the Earth that comprises the crust and the atmosphere, where… Read More ›
The Relevance of Lab Studies and STS in a Changed Universe? A Response to Kant’s Review of Instrumental Lives, Pankaj Sekhsaria
I started to first think of my response to Vivek Kant’s review (Kant 2020) of Instrumental Lives about 15 days ago. Some ideas and lines of thought were beginning to emerge when other more important things took over—another editing deadline… Read More ›
Meditations on a Theme: A Review of Steve Fuller’s Nietzschean Meditations, Des Hewitt
At the time of writing this review, Steve Fuller’s latest book appears in the face of what the World Health Organisation (WHO) now officially describes as a pandemic. By pure coincidence, the threat posed by Coronavirus or Covid-19 to humanity… Read More ›
Review of Pankaj Sekhsaria’s Instrumental Lives: An Intimate Biography of an Indian Laboratory, Vivek Kant
Pankaj Sekhsaria’s Instrumental Lives: An Intimate Biography of an Indian Laboratory presents an important study at the intersection of contemporary issues in Science and Technology Studies (STS), instrumentation and knowledge, and Indian Science and Technology (S&T) practice. The book provides… Read More ›
Reimagining Li Zehou’s A History of Chinese Classical Thought, Part 3, Michael Nylan
One of the best things about reading this particular masterwork of Li Zehou—several of his writings have secured that status—is Li’s steadfast refusal to ignore the material basis for realities in the remote past. Li’s history may be the perfect… Read More ›
Reimagining Li Zehou’s A History of Chinese Classical Thought, Part 2, Michael Nylan
The historian in me surveys the academic fads of the last forty years in her field, including the overblown and rather dubious celebrations of cultural memory and cultural representation. Come and gone is the craze for the digital humanities (merrily… Read More ›