Böcker av Hans-Jorg Rheinberger

Arguing for the primacy of the material arrangements of the laboratory in the dynamics of modern molecular biology, the author develops a new epistemology of experimentation in which research is treated as a process for producing epistemic things.

This book is the first to explore in detail the encounter between Albert Flocon and Gaston Bachelard in postwar Paris. Bachelard was a philosopher and historian of science who was also involved in literary studies and poetics. Flocon was a student of the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, who specialized in copper engraving. Both deeply ingrained in the surrealist avant-garde movements, each acted at the frontiers of their respective métiers in exploring uncharted territory. Bachelard experienced the sciences of his time as constantly undergoing radical changes, and he wanted to create a historical epistemology that would live up to this experience. He saw the elementary gesture of the copper engraver-the hand of the engraver-as meeting the challenge of resistant and resilient matter in an exemplary fashion. Flocon was fascinated by Bachelard's unconventional approach to the sciences and his poetics. Together, their relationship interrogated and celebrated the interplay of hand and matter as it occurs in poetic writing, in the art of engraving, and in scientific experimentation. In the form of a double biography, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger succeeds in writing a lucid intellectual history and at the same time presents a fascinating illustrated reading of Flocon's copper engravings.

It was only around 1800 that heredity began to enter debates among physicians, breeders, and naturalists. Soon thereafter it evolved into one of the most fundamental concepts of biology. In this book, the authors offer a succinct cultural history of the scientific concept of heredity.

This book shows how, from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, the philosophy of science was increasingly confronted with historical questions and how it became historicized accordingly.

Brings together case studies and theoretical reflections on the history and epistemology of the life sciences by Hans-Joerg Rheinberger, one of the foremost philosophers of science.