Steven Shapin

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Steven Shapin (2008)

Steven Shapin (born September 11, 1943 in New York City ) is an American science historian and sociologist and professor of the history of science at Harvard University .

Life

Shapin received his bachelor's degree in biology in 1966 and his Ph.D. 1971 with a study of the history of science for the Royal Society of Edinburgh . He then held various academic positions in Great Britain, Israel and the USA and has been Professor of Science History at Harvard University since 2004.

Together with Simon Schaffer , he made an influential contribution to the sociological history and theory of science in 1985 : Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life . In it, the authors trace the controversy between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle about methodology and the relationship between state power and science. The historians take the position in the work that Boyle enforced his scientifically untenable position on the air pump with the help of the Royal Society . The work not only strengthened the controversial point of view that social factors dominate the scientific community, and received the Erasmus Prize in 2005 , but was also criticized methodologically. A public debate arose with Cassandra L. Pinnick , which the two authors a. a. held an overemphasis on the conflict in the relationship between the antagonists. His book The Scientific Revolution , published in 1996, has been translated into 14 languages. Shapin reviews books for the New Yorker and London Review of Books .

Honors

Fonts (selection)

  • with Barry Barnes : Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture. Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, Calif. 1979.
  • with Simon Schaffer , Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. including a translation (Schaffer) by Thomas Hobbes: Dialogus physicus de natura aeris. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 1985; 1989.
  • A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1994.
  • The Scientific Revolution. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill. 1996.
  • with Christopher Lawrence : Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill. 1998.
  • The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill. 2008.
  • Never pure. Historical Studies of Science as if It was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore , Maryland 2010. ISBN 978-0-8018-9420-6

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Cassandra L. Pinnick: Caught in a Sandy Shoal of the Shallow: Reply to Shapin and Schaffer in Social Studies of Science, Volume 29 No. 2, April 1999, pp. 253-257; P. 254.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Shapin, Steven
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American historian and sociologist of science
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City