Massimiliano Simons provides the first systematic study of Serres' work in the context of late 20th-century French philosophy of science. By proposing new readings of Serres' philosophy, Simons creates a synthesis between his predecessors, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Louis Althusser as well as contemporary Francophone philosophers of science such as Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Simons situates Serres' unique contribution through his notion of the quasi-object, a concept, he argues, organizes great parts of Serres' work into a promising philosophy (...) of science as well as a challenge to the narrower field of French epistemology, to which it has often been limited. Simons highlights how the concept encompasses Serres' commitment to positive relations between science and culture and his rejection of pleas to purify the scientific self from imaginative and cultural elements. It helps to situate Serres between the distinct traditions of Bachelard and Latour as well as progressing the innovative aspects of Serres' philosophy for current debates in the philosophy, history, and sociology of science. Showing how Serres' philosophy can serve as a normative approach to science and technology, Michel Serres and French Philosophy of Science takes in themes of materiality, religiosity, modernity and ecology to advance a timely alternative to philosophy of science for contemporary life. (shrink)

Gaston Bachelard occupies a unique position in the history of European thinking. As a philosopher of science, he developed a profound interest in genres of the imagination, notably poetry and novels. While emphatically acknowledging the strength, precision and reliability of scientific knowledge compared to every-day experience, he saw literary phantasies as important supplementary sources of insight. Although he significantly influenced authors such as Lacan, Althusser, Foucault and others, while some of his key concepts are still widely used, his oeuvre tends (...) to be overlooked. And yet, as I will argue, Bachelard’s extended series of books opens up an intriguing perspective on contemporary science. First, I will point to a remarkable duality that runs through Bachelard’s oeuvre. His philosophy of science consists of two sub-oeuvres: a psychoanalysis of technoscience, complemented by a poetics of elementary imagination. I will point out how these two branches deal with complementary themes: technoscientific artefacts and literary fictions, two realms of human experience separated by an epistemological rupture. Whereas Bachelard’s work initially entails a panegyric in praise of scientific practice, he becomes increasingly intrigued by the imaginary and its basic images, such as the Mother Earth archetype. (shrink)

The work of Gaston Bachelard is known for two crucial concepts, that of the epistemological rupture and that of phenomenotechnique. A crucial question is, however, how these two concepts relate to one another. Are they in fact essentially connected or must they be seen as two separate elements of Bachelard’s thinking? This paper aims to analyse the relation between these two Bachelardian moments and the significance of the concept of phenomenotechnique for today. This will be done by examining how the (...) concepts of Bachelard have been used from the 1960s on. From this historical perspective, one gets the impression that these two concepts are relatively independent from each other. The Althusserian school has exclusively focused on the concept of ‘epistemological break’, while scholars from Science & Technology Studies, such as Bruno Latour, seem to have only taken up the concept of phenomenotechnique. It in fact leads to two different models of how to think about science, namely the model of purification and the model of proliferation. The former starts from the idea that sciences are rational to the extent that they are purified and free from obstacles. Scientific objectivity, within this later model, is not achieved by eradicating all intermediaries, obstacles and distortions, but rather exactly by introducing as many relevant technical mediators as possible. Finally, such a strong distinction will be criticized and the argument will be made that both in Bachelard’s and Latour's thought both concepts are combined. This leads to a janus-headed view on science, where both the element of purification and the element of proliferation are combined. (shrink)

We live, according to some, in the century of biology, where we now understand ourselves in radically new ways as the insights of genomics and neuroscience have opened up the workings of our bodies and our minds to new kinds of knowledge and intervention. Is a new figure of the human, and of the social, taking shape in the 21st century? With what consequences for the politics of life today? And with what implications, if any, for the social, cultural and (...) human sciences? These are the issues that are discussed in this article, which argues that a new relation is requred with the life sciences, beyond commentary and critique, if the social and human sciences are to revitalize themselves for the 21st century. (shrink)

ArgumentWe continue our analysis of modeling practices that focus more on qualitative understanding of system behavior than the attempt to provide sharp forecasts. The argument here is built around three episodes: the ambitious work of the Princeton Meteorological Project; the seemingly simple models of convection in weather systems by Edward Lorenz at MIT; and then finally analysis of the dripping faucet by Robert Shaw and the Dynamical Systems Collective at UC Santa Cruz. Using the Princeton Meteorological Project as an argumentative (...) foil for the later chaos work of Lorenz and Shaw, we first show how the epistemological interest of modeling came to shift fromissuingpredictions toprobingthe very meaning and limits of prediction. The second step of our argument shows that what may be seen in one context of use as a modeling technology that is error ridden, imprecise, or inadequate, may be parsed completely differently in another context. This argument about technology and practice, we argue, feeds through to epistemological conceptions of error. Far from being something that can be defined in the absolute, the notion of error is shown to be contextually plastic. (shrink)

The importance given by historian and philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem to the role of practice, techniques, and experimentation in concept-formation was largely overlooked by commentators. After placing Canguilhem’s contributions within the larger history of historical epistemology in France, and clarifying his views regarding this expression, I re-evaluate the relation between concepts and experimental practices in Canguilhem’s philosophy of science. Drawing on his early writings on the relations between science and technology in the 1930s, on the Essai sur quelques problèmes (...) concernant le normal et le pathologique , and on La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles , I argue that the formation and rectification of concepts in Canguilhem’s sense are intrinsically bound with the experimental, material, technical, and cultural contexts in which concepts are operationalized. (shrink)

We provide an overview of three ways in which the expression “Historical epistemology” (HE) is often understood: (1) HE as a study of the history of higher-order epistemic concepts such as objectivity, observation, experimentation, or probability; (2) HE as a study of the historical trajectories of the objects of research, such as the electron, DNA, or phlogiston; (3) HE as the long-term study of scientific developments. After laying out various ways in which these agendas touch on current debates within both (...) epistemology and philosophy of science (e.g., skepticism, realism, rationality of scientific change), we conclude by highlighting three topics as especially worthy of further philosophical investigation. The first concerns the methods, aims and systematic ambitions of the history of epistemology. The second concerns the ways in versions of HE can be connected to versions of naturalized and social epistemologies. The third concerns the philosophy of history, and in particular the level of analysis at which a historical analysis should aim. (shrink)

Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar made use of Gaston Bachelard’s concept of phenomenotechnique in Laboratory Life. Stating that this use of a Bachelardian concept contrasts with the sharp criticism Latour made of Bachelard in his later work, I consider whether it belongs to an early Bachelardian stage of Latour’s study of science or whether Latour and Woolgar made, from the beginning, an original and anti-Bachelardian use of the concept of phenomenotechnique. I address this question by offering two symmetrical readings of (...) Laboratory Life: one reading adopts a Bachelardian perspective, in which Latour and Woolgar’s ethnological and sociological investigation appears as an empirical corroboration of Bachelard’s epistemological theses, whereas the other reading insists on the way in which Latour and Woolgar depart from Bachelard, as the sociological study of the way in which power relations shape scientific practice challenges the latter’s rationalist convictions. Although I contrast Bachelard’s epistemological use of the concept of phenomenotechnique with Latour and Woolgar’s sociological one, I wonder in the conclusion whether these approaches to science may be regarded as complements rather than antagonists and find in Pierre Bourdieu’s theses on the specificity of the scientific field resources to combine them. (shrink)

Large part of contemporary science is in fact technoscience, in the sense that it crucially depends on several technologies for the generation, collection, and analysis of data. This prompts a re-examination of the relations between science and technologies. In this essay, I advance the view that we’d better move beyond the ‘subordination view’ and the ‘instrumental’ view. The first aims to establish the primacy of science over technology, and the second uses technology instrumentally to support a realist position about theoretical (...) entities. I suggest that we should instead concentrate on how science and technology interact. This will reveal that technology has a poietic character, namely it actively partakes in the production of knowledge. But this poietic character can only be understood within the cognitive activity of scientific communities. Current research in molecular epidemiology, notably the projects funded within the ‘European exposome initiative’, serves as a motivation for such discussion and as an illustration of the claims made. (shrink)

This paper considers the theoretical circumstances that urged Michel Foucault to analyse modern societies in terms of biopower. Georges Canguilhem’s account of the relations between science and the living forms an essential starting point for Foucault’s own later explorations, though the challenges posed by the molecular revolution in biology and François Jacob’s history of it allowed Foucault to extend and transform Canguilhem’s philosophy of error. Using archival research into his 1955–1956 course on “Science and Error,” I show that, for Canguilhem, (...) it is inauthentic to treat a living being as an error, even if living things are capable of making errors in the domain of knowledge. The emergent molecular biology in the 1960s posed a grave challenge, however, since it suggested that individuals could indeed be errors of genetic reproduction. The paper discusses how Canguilhem and Foucault each responded to this by examining, among other texts, their respective reviews of Jacob’s The Logic of the Living. For Canguilhem this was an opportunity to reaffirm the creativity of life in the living individual, which is not a thing to be evaluated, but the source of values. For Foucault, drawing on Jacob’s work, this was the opportunity to develop a transformed account of valuation by posing biopower as the DNA of society. Despite their disagreements, the paper examines these three authors as different iterations of a historical epistemology attuned to errancy, error, and experimentation. (shrink)

Se explican dos ideas capitales de la epistemología de Bachelard y su relación mutua: la ciencia es fenomenotécnica, la ciencia inventa sus conceptos La producción de fenómenos con arreglo a esos conceptos certifica su idoneidad.We explain two main ideas of Bachelard’s philosophy of science and their mutual relation. Science produces phenomena and creates its own concepts. Production of phenomena according to these concepts certifies their aptness.

Field theory is often criticized because sociologists applying it fail to follow two seminal rules: the three key concepts of field theory—capital, habitus, and field structure—must be implemented in relation to each other and reconstructed for the historically specific moment of their application. I claim that Bourdieu developed his conceptual tools in response to Bachelard’s insight that scientific progress requires a break from common sense. Once we appreciate the epistemological foundation of field theory concepts, we can better appreciate the rules (...) for their application, avoid their typical criticism, and further improve them. (shrink)

My paper examines the potential of Gaston Bachelard’s concept of phenomenotechnique through a critique of its historical reception and an analysis of its epistemological implications. Vis-a-vis constructivist and pragmatist interpretations, I argue that the core issue at stake in this concept is not just to regard scientific knowledge as ‘fabricated’ through technical means, but also to understand the radical difference that lies between the experience of a world given to and measured by scientists, and one that is ontologically expanded by (...) the conceptual creations of science. In his reflections on the ‘phenomenotechnical realisation’ of noumena in microphysics, mathematics and chemistry, Bachelard not only anticipated a new epistemic modality which has become eminent now in computerised, data-centric approaches to nature and culture; he also became one of the first philosophers to explore the human experience of a reality inherently built from, and no longer just described by mathematical tools and models. (shrink)

Bachelard regarded the scientific changes that took place in the early twentieth century as the beginning of a new era, not only for science, but also for philosophy. For him, the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics had shown that a new philosophical ontology and a new epistemology were required. I show that the type of philosophy with which he was more closely associated, in particular that of Léon Brunschvicg, offered to him a crucial starting point. Brunschvicg never considered scientific (...) objects as independent of the mind, and as a consequence questions such as the existence of particles independently of the mind, theory or apparatus, were absent from his philosophy, which was rather aimed at analyzing the mind critically, and above all historically. Bachelard accepted the fundamental ideas of Brunschvicg’s philosophy; however, his own reading of contemporary science enabled him to go beyond it, as shown by his emphasis on the social production of knowledge, and by his removal of the distinction between ideas and technologically produced objects of knowledge. For him, modern science teaches philosophy that knowledge is not a phenomenology but rather a ‘phenomenotechnique’. I argue that Bachelard’s view that philosophy ‘should follow science’ stems from moral considerations.Keywords: Gaston Bachelard; Léon Brunschvicg; Phenomenotechnique; Chosisme; Theory of relativity; Quantum mechanics. (shrink)