1st Edition

Worlds of ScienceCraft New Horizons in Sociology, Philosophy, and Science Studies

    250 Pages
    by Routledge

    250 Pages
    by Routledge

    A response to complex problems spanning disciplinary boundaries, Worlds of ScienceCraft offers bold new ways of conceptualizing ideas of science, sociology, and philosophy. Beginning with the historical foundations of civilization and progress, assumptions about the categories we use to talk about minds, identities, and bodies are challenged through case studies from mathematics, social cognition, and medical ethics. Offering innovative approaches to these issues, such as an integrated social brain-mind-body model and a critique of divisions between the natural and technological, this book provides novel conceptions of self, society and an emerging ’cyborg’ generation. From the micro level of brains and expanding all the way out to biopolitical civics, disciplinary boundaries are made permeable, emphasizing the increased need for interdisciplinary scholarship. By rejecting outdated and restrictive categories and classifications, new horizons in studies of science, technology, and medicine can be explored through the incorporation of feminist, international, and postmodern perspectives. A truly interdisciplinary examination of science and technology as cultural phenomena, Worlds of ScienceCraft will appeal to scholars and students of science and technology studies, as well as philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science, technology, and medicine.

    Contents: Prologue; Mathematics, society, and social change; The social ecology of brain and mind; Veiling the modest cyborg: more than a new witness; Sibling saviors: a Hohfeldian critique of sibling donor conception; Local biopolities of solidarity, epistemic cultures of empathy, and the civil sphere; Conclusions: harder better faster stronger: an epilogue in the mask of four human problems; Bibliography; Index.

    Biography

    Sal Restivo is Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ghent, Belgium and Special Lecturer in Science and Technology Studies at Northeastern University in Shenyang, China. He has held special professor positions and endowed chairs at the University of Nottingham, UK, Harvey Mudd College, USA, the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, The University of Gothenburg, Sweden and Roskilde University, Denmark. He is a founding member and former president of the Society for Social Studies of Science and editor of Science, Technology and Society: An Encyclopedia. He is the author of Red, Black, and Objective: Science, Sociology, and Anarchism; Science, Technology and Society; Science, Society and Values, and The Sociological Worldview, and co-author of Asphalt Children. Sabrina M. Weiss is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Science and Technology Studies Department at Rochester Institute of Technology, USA. Alexander I. Stingl is Affiliated Research Faculty with the Center for Science, Technology & Society at Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA, Visiting Researcher with the Faculty for Social Sciences FB 05 at the University of Kassel, Germany, a research collaborator of the Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (CLWF) at Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium, and Contract Lecturer at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany.

    ’In seeking to understand the human condition, we can reach out to particular disciplines. This book is different. Coming from varying traditions, the authors take us on a fascinating journey through mathematics, biology, truth, the mind, brain, human interaction and online gaming. The result is a highly illuminating discussion that will appeal to philosophers and social and physical scientists.’ Tim May, University of Salford, UK