Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science: Announcements

Call for Contributions: Leviathan and the Air-Pump

Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science — 2024-07-05

After 40 Years: Reception, Criticism and Impacts

In 1985, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer published Leviathan and the Air-Pump, a book that became emblematic and not just for the history of science. It was the last book they wrote with a typewriter and a paper manuscript (Shapin and Schaffer 2011). That work was produced in the world of the typewriter, in an academic culture that expressed the skills and limitations of those who worked with a typewriter and the intellectual and social orders which that technology enabled. It was a production with a different tempo, surrounded by a set of indispensable objects – today wholly unnecessary and almost unknown – to avoid typographical errors and to correct the sloppiness caused by the clumsiness of urgent hands. To sum up, Leviathan burst into academic circles as an act of intervention, seeking to provoke significant changes: “it is a product of its time (...) it is a historical document. It is a moment in changing scholarly traditions, changing cultural and institutional settings, changing conventions, problems and purposes” (Shapin and Schaffer 2011, xiii). Before becoming a canonical historical work, it was simultaneously configured into a promise to be fulfilled and a field of controversies, promoting rewritings, appropriations, and discordances.

In that light, we suggest some guidelines for contributions to this special issue. One such line is aimed at reviewing the work’s reception, since its publication and especially in the 1990s, in different areas of science studies. Paradigmatic cases are Bruno Latour’s critical appropriation in Nous n’avons jamais été modernes (1991); Ian Hacking’s rewriting and appropriations (1991; 2006; 2009) in his philosophy of science; Donna Haraway’s critiques (1997) from feminist theory; Elizabeth Potter’s (2000) rewriting of Boyle’s history, addressing the ways in which gender was at stake in the constitution of experimental philosophy; the contestations between philosophy of science, history of science, and science and technology studies (Daston 2009; Dear and Jasanoff 2010) around disciplinary boundaries that involved Leviathan and the Air-Pump as one of the protagonists; and the placing of value on that work in the weave of the history of the historiography of science (Golinski 1998). This line also includes the appropriations that historians in different countries have made of Leviathan in order to understand the histories of local sciences, the methodological revision of the historiography of science, and the mutual appropriations of history and the history of science permeated by the sense of heretical and worldly history implicit in Leviathan.

Another of the guides is directed to the lines of research that opened up after its publication. In that sense, the historiographical and sociological works of Steven Shapin (Shapin 1994, 2010; Shapin and Schaffer 1985) were fundamental to understanding the ineliminable role of testimony and trust in the constitution and maintenance of social orders and knowledge. They constitute the antecedents of critical contemporary developments in social epistemology, primarily the epistemology of testimony (Kusch 2002). Likewise, the thesis of the joint production of the social order, the natural order and the order of knowledge brings together a heterogeneous set of approaches in what Sheila Jasanoff (2004) called “the co

productionist languages of scientific knowledge”. One of the axes that runs through these studies can be summarized in Shapin and Schaffer’s thesis: solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order. Furthermore, it is worth noting the role Leviathan played regarding the centrality that the material nature of scientific practice has taken in current science studies. Neo-materialist philosophy proposes a performative understanding of discursive-material practices, challenging the belief in the power of words to represent pre-existing things (Barad 2007). Finally, we propose a reflection on the value of Leviathan for the future realizations of the historiography of science in light of the central themes and lines of research that this now canonical text has left as promises to fulfill: the contingency of science and the history of science, the mundanity of the history of science, controversies, the bodies of science, the spaces of science and credibility in science, the lack of boundaries to determine what is relevant or not in the historical investigation of science, among others.

We hope to receive contributions that discuss all the above possibilities and other similar topics concerning Leviathan and the Air-Pump reception, criticism and impacts.

References

Daston, Lorraine (2009). Science Studies and the History of Science. Critical Inquiry, 35:798– 813.

Dear, Peter and Sheila Jasanoff (2010). Dismantling Boundaries in Science and Technology Studies. Isis, 101:4, 759-774.

Hacking, Ian (1991). Artificial Phenomena. The British Journal for the History of Science 24 (2): 235-241.

Hacking, Ian (2006). Véracité et raison. Cours au Collége de France.
http ://www.ianhacking.com/collegedefrance.html (Accessed 10 July 2023).

Hacking, Ian (2009). Scientific Reason. Taiwan: National Taiwan University.

Jasanoff, Sheila (2004). States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order. London: Routledge.

Kusch, Martin. 2002. Knowledge by Agreement: The Programme of Communitarian Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Latour, Bruno (1991). Nous n’avons jamais été moderns. Essai d’anthropologie symétrique. Paris: Editions La Découverte.

Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer. (1985). Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer (2011). Introduction to the 2011 Edition. Up for air: Leviathan and the air-pump A Generation on. In Shapin, S. and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Submission details:

To be considered for the June 2025 issue, submissions must be received by March 15, 2025, via the journal webpage www.historiographyofscience.org .

Initial submissions can be made in one of the following languages: English, French, Spanish or Portuguese and prepared for double-anonymized review. If accepted, the authors must have them translated into English. Notification of acceptance will be sent on April 15, 2025.

For any further information concerning this Call for Papers, please contact:

María de los Ángeles Martini – Universidad de Buenos Aires/Universidad Nacional de Moreno, Buenos Aires, Argentina
E-mail: mariadelosangelesmartini@gmail.com

For any further information concerning this Journal, please contact: Marina S. Duarte – Federal University of Minas Gerais – UFMG E-mail: marinaduarte@ufmg.br

Fábio R. Leite – Federal University of São João del-Rei – UFSJ

E-mail: frleite@ufsj.edu.br

Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science 18 (June) 2025

Call for Contributions: History and philosophy of science in the Belle Époque (1871-1914) – Call for Papers

Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science — 2024-02-16

Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science will receive proposals for articles that seek to reflect on the History and philosophy of science in the Belle Époque for the December 2024 issue.

Characterized as a period of intense technological advances within the scope of the so-called Second Industrial Revolution, the Belle Époque was an era of material, intellectual and social transformations that changed European culture, giving rise to a new lifestyle in which science and technology assumed a prominent role. The impressive development of the electrical, chemical, metallurgical, pharmaceutical and transportation industries fostered the recognition of the transformative value of the sciences and, at the same time, their institutionalization, while urbanization and the railways that cut across the European and American landscapes favored the transit of ideas. In that climate of optimism, guided by the ideology of progress, new scientific theories and reflections on science came to light.

The emergence of thermodynamics and electromagnetism, fields of physics closely linked to technological evolution, called into question that strictly mechanistic framework and, in opposition to traditional realism, more sophisticated analyses revealed the hypothetical nature of theories, evident in philosophical positions such as conventionalisms and descriptivism and pointed out their analogical character. The advent of non-Euclidean geometries, transfinite numbers and the quarrel between logicism and intuitionism led philosophical interrogation to the very heart of knowledge. Also, the emergence of biological transformism mobilized enlightened thinking. While some post-Kantian philosophers had emphasized the idea of process in their pantheistic metaphysical conjectures, the scientific evolutionism of a Darwinian hue was seen as having broad implications for the anthropological model and the economic-political systems. Similarly, the relationships between the psychic/spiritual, the organic and the inorganic became a field of discussion and perplexity. Furthermore, by valuing the historical studies of the sciences, the savants-philosophes took the initial steps towards a historical epistemology and, simultaneously, were responsible for revealing the transitory and fallibilist nature of science and the importance of not strictly logical aspects of its foundations since they could be of a metaphysical, psychological, social or others nature.

This issue of Transversal aims to bring together studies on the prominent philosophers (H. von Helmholtz, E. Mach, C. Peirce, L. Boltzmann, W. Ostwald, H. Poincaré, M. Planck, P. Duhem…) and historians (M. Berthelot, M. Cantor, G. Schiaparelli, E. Mach, P. Tannery, G. Milhaud, P. Duhem…) of science from the Belle Époque and articles that explore their interrelations with the broader material and intellectual milieu. If we admit that scientific development can be seen as ideologically guided by social values, it is equally certain that, on several occasions in that period, science itself was used to justify ideologically nuanced theses.

We welcome submissions that explore the following thematic axes:

Historiographical narratives of scientific development;
Images of science and nature outlined by the main philosopher-scientists of the Belle Époque;
Scientific culture and its impacts on the sphere of values;
The debate between scientific conventionalism and scientific realism in the emergence of theoretical physics;
The interrelationships between university, industry and technology;
The multiple historical and epistemological classifications of the sciences and the place of metaphysics.

Submission details:

To be considered for the December 2024 issue, submissions must be received by August 15, 2024, via the journal webpage www.historiographyofscience.org .

For any further information concerning this Call for Papers, please contact:

Fábio R. Leite – Federal University of São João del-Rei – UFSJ

E-mail: frleite@ufsj.edu.br

João Príncipe – University of Évora – UE

E-mail: jpps@uevora.pt

For any further information concerning this Journal, please contact:

Marina S. Duarte – Federal University of Minas Gerais – UFMG

E-mail: marinaduarte@ufmg.br

Fábio R. Leite – Federal University of São João del-Rei – UFSJ

E-mail: frleite@ufsj.edu.br