Archeology, genealogy, and geography of experimental philosophy

摘要

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. 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.