Inhaltsverzeichnis: Ber. Wissenschaftsgesch. 3/2022
Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 289-290, September 2022.
Quelle: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.202280311?af=R
Approaches in Post‐Experimental Science. The Case of Precision Medicine
Abstract
In the introduction to his Spalt und Fuge, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger points to the possibility that we are currently experiencing a new turning point regarding forms of experimentation, which is characterized by the growing importance of high-throughput methods and big data analytics. This essay will explore the thesis that data-intensive research indeed constitutes a form of post-experimental research by interrogating research practices in precision medicine. Section 1 will introduce this thesis and highlight salient features of precision medicine as an example of post-experimental research. Section 2 suggests approach as a category that is broader than experimental system, as discussed by Rheinberger, and can serve to analyze and compare diverse forms of research, including experimental and post-experimental practices. The essay concludes with a reflection on how categories developed for the historiography of recent science might require an update when the science or its context changes (section 3).
Quelle: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.202200020?af=R
Glückliche Fügung: Experiments’ Potential to Integrate Disciplines
Abstract
This essay reviews the discipline-connecting potential of experimentation. Two examples are used to illustrate how researchers in the first half of the twentieth century profitably combined resources from different disciplines in their experiments. These experiments were designed to test mechanism models describing chemical processes underlying the behavior of biological systems. The researchers had clear expectations about how certain interventions should affect the behavior of the organisms studied, if that behavior was indeed based on the presumed chemical processes. They manipulated the organisms in the relevant ways and determined how the behavior of the organisms changed as a result.
Quelle: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.202200015?af=R
Fumbling for the New and Unknown. On the Emergence of Epistemic Things in G. Ch. Lichtenberg’s Sudelbücher
Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 452-461, September 2022.
Quelle: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.202200033?af=R
An Epistemology of Scientific Practice: Positioning Hans‐Jörg Rheinberger in Twentieth‐Century History and Philosophy of Biology
Abstract
In this article, I first outline the professionalization of the history and philosophy of biology from the 1960s onward. Then, I attempt to situate the work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger with respect to this field. On the one hand, Rheinberger was marginal with respect to Anglo-American philosophical tradition; on the other, he was very influential in building up an integrated history and philosophy of the life sciences community at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and beyond. This marginality results, I suggest, from three main sources: his use of concepts coming from continental traditions in the study of the life sciences, which are foreign to Anglo-American philosophers of science; his focus on practices instead of theories; and his research trajectory as a molecular biologist, which led him to be critical of disciplinary boundaries. As a first step in situating and historicizing Rheinberger's trajectory, this article invites comparative studies and calls for a history of “continental philosophy of biology” in the twentieth century.
Quelle: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.202200017?af=R
From Organismic Biology as History and Philosophy to the History and Philosophy of Biology—the Work of Hans‐Jörg Rheinberger in the German Context
Abstract
In this paper, I ask about the broader context of the history and philosophy of biology in the German-speaking world as the place in which Hans-Jörg Rheinberger began his work. Three German philosophical traditions—neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and Lebensphilosophie—were interested in the developments and conceptual challenges of the life sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their reflections were taken up by life scientists under the terms theoretische Biologie (theoretical biology) and allgemeine Biologie (general biology), i. e., for theoretical and methodological reflections. They used historical and philosophical perspectives to develop vitalistic, organicist, or holistic approaches to life. In my paper, I argue that the resulting discourse did not come to an end in 1945. Increasingly detached from biological research, it formed an important context for the formation of the field of history and philosophy of biology. In Rheinberger's work, we can see the “Spalten” and “Fugen”—the continuities and discontinuities—that this tradition left there.
Quelle: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.202200018?af=R
In the Circulation Sphere of the Biomolecular Age: Economics and Gender Matter
Abstract
This contribution draws attention to the circulation of materialities and persons as a central feature in the constitution of experimental cultures. The protein and ribosome research at the Max Planck Society (MPG)—with a main focus on the research conducted by Brigitte Wittmann-Liebold at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics—serves as an example to highlight some of the central conditions that determined the material circulation in molecular biology: the very organizational framework of gender and economics. In doing so, this contribution argues for a historical narrative that stresses the conditions facilitating the circulation of technologies, materials, and personnel. Histories of this kind contribute to an integrated view of the scientific, technological, social, political, economic, and cultural specificities of experimental cultures.
Quelle: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.202200043?af=R