The development of science studies has an important message for political theory. This message has not yet been fully articulated. It seems that the science studies field is often considered as the extension of politics to science. In reality, case studies show that it is a redefinition of politics that we are witnessing in the laboratories. To the political representatives should be added the scientific representatives. Thanks to a book by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, it is possible to reconstruct (...) the origin of this divide between the two sets of representatives. A definition of modernism is offered. Then the article explains how to interpret the shift to "nonmodernism, " that is, a historical period when the two branches of politics get together again. (shrink)

Engineering sketches and drawings are the building blocks of technological design and production. These visual representations act as the means for organizing the design to production process, hence serving as a "social glue" both between individuals and between groups. The author discusses two main capacities such visual representations serve in facilitating distributed cognition in team design work As conscription devices, they enlist and organize group participation. As boundary objects, they facilitate the reading of alternative meanings by various groups involved in (...) the design process. The introduction of computer-aided design into this visual culture of engineering restructures relationships between workers in ways that can hamper the flexibility necessary for these crucial capacities to take place. The data are drawn from a study of the daily practices of engineers engaged in redesigning a turbine engine package. The method is participant observation. (shrink)

This intelligent and often subtle introduction to rationalist metaphysics focuses on the development of the concept of substance in Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. After briefly reviewing the Aristotelian background in the introduction, Woolhouse spends the first three chapters presenting the broad outlines of each thinker’s account of substance. These are followed by three chapters devoted more specifically to the metaphysics of extended substance and to foundational issues in early modern physics. Next come two chapters on thinking substance and its relation (...) to extended substance, and finally a chapter on the relation between created and uncreated substance, which Woolhouse describes as "an organizing centre of the whole book". (shrink)

This essay challenges the thesis that the modern world is a ‘disenchanted’ one. I contend that enchantment has outlasted the Enlightenment; that it endures despite the demise of the ontology that allowed it paradigmatic expression in the sixteenth century writings of Paracelsus. I present two post‐medieval pictures of an enchanted world: the first appears, of all places, in Kant's Critique of Judgment, where a peculiar magic is required of nature if humans are to gain access to the ‘supersensible’ realm of (...) freedom and rational ideas; the second focuses upon the strange beauty of late modernity's admixtures of animal and human, organism and machine, the given and made. Here I use a little Kafka and lot of Deleuze to explore these hybrids as ‘technoenchantments’ operative in a world that fascinates without being expressive of a design or a will. I spotlight contemporary sites of enchantment in order to intensify the experience of them, and thus perhaps to erode the conviction that an undesigned universe calls above all for a cold‐eyed instrumentalism. (shrink)