The Scientific Life

by Shapin, Steven

• ISBN13: 9780226750255
• ISBN10: 0226750256
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-09-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Who are scientists? What kind of people are they? What capacities and virtues are thought to stand behind their considerable authority?The Scientific Lifeis historian Steven Shapin's story about who scientists are, who we think they are, and why our sensibilities about such things matter. From the early twentieth-century origins of corporate research laboratories to the high-flying scientific entrepreneurship of the present, Shapin argues that the radical uncertainties of much contemporary science have made personal virtuesmorecentral to its practice than ever before, and he also reveals how radically novel aspects of late modern science have unexpectedly deep historical roots. His elegantly conceived history of the scientific career and character ultimately encourages us to reconsider the very nature of the technical and moral worlds in which we now live. "Remarkably rich in detail and revelation. . . . Shapin may not be doing a conventional history of the 'scientific life,' but what he has done is both novel and provocative."New YorkReview of Books "[A] thought-provoking challenge to the assumptions of scientific objectivity by science's practitioners and an acknowledgment of just how important the morality of scientists may be in the advancement and authority of knowledge."Library Journal "The Scientific Lifeprovokes us to discard worn-out understandings that science outside universities is necessarily aberrant. . . . The book succeeds masterfully."Science "A stunning antidote to the naive portraits of how science is or should be done."Choice ". . . . Required reading for all scientists and those studying the social activity of science."Nature

Author Biography

Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is the author of A Social History of Truth and The Scientific Revolution, and with Simon Schaffer, the coauthor of Leviathan and the Air-Pump. He has also written for the New Yorker and is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Preface	p. xiii
Knowledge and Virtue	p. 1
The Way We Live Now
From Calling to Job	p. 21
Nature, Truth, Method, and Vocation from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries
The Moral Equivalence of the Scientist	p. 47
A History of the Very Idea
Who Is the Industrial Scientist?	p. 93
The View from the Tower
Who Is the Industrial Scientist?	p. 127
The View from the Managers
The Scientist and the Civic Virtues	p. 165
The Moral Life of Organized Science
The Scientific Entrepreneur	p. 209
Money, Motives, and the Place of Virtue
Visions of the Future	p. 269
Uncertainty and Virtue in the World of High-Tech and Venture Capital
The Way We Live Now	p. 305
Epilogue
Notes	p. 315
Bibliography	p. 401
Index	p. 441
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