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What kind of stuff is the world made of? What is the nature or substance of things? These are ontological questions, and they are usually answered with respect to the objects of science. The objects of technoscience tell a different story that concerns the power, promise and potential of things - not what they are but what they can be. Seventeen scholars from history and philosophy of science, epistemology, social anthropology, cultural studies and ethics each explore a research object in its technological setting, ranging from carbon to cardboard, from arctic ice cores to nuclear waste, from wetlands to GMO seeds, from fuel cells to the great Pacific garbage patch. Together they offer fascinating stories and novel analytic concepts, all the while opening up a space for reflecting on the specific character of technoscientific objects. With their promise of sustainable innovation and a technologically transformed future, these objects are highly charged with values and design expectations. By clarifying their mode of existence, we are learning to come to terms more generally with the furniture of the technoscientific world - where, for example, the 'dead matter' of classical physics is becoming the 'smart material' of emerging and converging technologies.
Sommario
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Introduction: The Genesis and Ontology of Technoscientific Objects
PART I
Horizon of Possibilities
1 The Pyramid and the Ring: A Physics Indifferent to Ontology
Peter Galison
2 Cancer Stem Cells: Ontology Matters
Lucie Laplane
3 Robots Behaving Badly: Simulation and Participation in the Study of Life
Christopher Kelty
4 Vanishing Friction Events and the Inverted Platonism of Technoscience
Alfred Nordmann
5 From the Birth of Fuel Cells to the Utopia of the Hydrogen World
Pierre Teissier
PART II
Arenas of Contestation
6 Heroin: Taming a Drug and Losing Control
Jens Soentgen
7 Long Live Play: The Playstation Network and Technogenic Life
Colin Milburn
8 A Biography of a Disorder that Didn’t Want to be Diagnosed
Simone van den Burg
9 The Plasticity and Recalcitrance of Wetlands
Kevin C. Elliott
10 The Life and Times of Transgenics
Hugh Lacey
11 Cardboard: Thinking the Box
Cheryce von Xylander
PART III
Multiple Temporalities
12 The Multiple Signatures of Carbon
Sacha Loeve and Bernadette Bensaude Vincent
13 Monitoring and Remediating a Garbage Patch
Jennifer Gabrys
14 Polar Ice Cores: Climate Change Messengers
Aant Elzinga
15 Nuclear Waste: An Untreatable Technoscientific Product
Sophie Poirot-Delpech
16 Biography of a ‘Sand Heap’: Staging the Beginnings of Nature
Astrid Schwarz
Index
Info autore
Bernadette Bensaude Vincent is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her research topics span from the history and philosophy of chemistry to materials science and nanotechnology with a continuous interest in science and the public issues. Among her recent publications: Chemistry. The Impure Science, (co-author J. Simon, 2008); Matière à penser. (2008). Bionanoéthique (2008), Les Vertiges de la technocience. (2009), Fabriquer la vie. Où va la biologie de synthèse (co-author D. Benoit-Browayes, 2011).
Sacha Loeve is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Technology at University Lyon 3. Since his Ph.D. on molecular nanomachines (2009), he practices a ‘fieldwork philosophy’ centred on objects and primarily interested in rethinking technology as a narrative logos of technics. His publications include works on Gilbert Simondon, nano-objects, images and technology, pharmacotechnology, synthetic biology, Moore’s Law and electronic waste.
Alfred Nordmann is Professor of Philosophy at Darmstadt Technical University, after receiving his Ph.D. in Hamburg (1986) and several years on the faculty at the University of South Carolina (1988-2002). In the field of History and Philosophy of Science and of Technoscience he is interested primarily in the questions of knowledge and objectivity, explanation and understanding under representational and technological conditions of knowledge production, see Science Transformed (co-edited with Hans Radder and Gregor Schiemann, 2011) and Science in the Context Application (co-edited with Martin Carrier, 2011).
Astrid Schwarz holds the chair of General Science of Technology at Brandenburg Technische Universität Cottbus-Senftenberg. In her resarch she asks questions about the status and power of concepts, models, and objects in the process of generating, stabilizing and demarcating scientific knowledge. Recently, she focuses on debates around green cultures and ecotechnology, as well as on gardens as models to act in the Anthropocene. Her last book was Experiments in Practice (2014).
Riassunto
By examining objects that hold a prominent place in contemporary science and technology, contributors to this collection present a new direction in the philosophy of technoscience. Core concepts from research in emerging disciplines such as nanotechnology, molecular medicine and the environmental sciences are explored via a range of case studies.
