Leviathan and the Air-Pump

"Yes, much more. This is an incredibly influential book, really, really brilliant. I argue against it in everything I write, which just shows how much I admire it, because I wouldn’t choose to argue with it if I didn’t think it was a great book. Once again, this comes from that rejection of the Cold War view of the scientific revolution. This is written by a historian of science and a sociologist of science. What they’re doing is trying to look at how social identity and political issues play a role in the types of arguments that people make, and in the way they approach science and, in particular, whether they embrace experimentalism or not. I’ve been choosing all kinds of experimentally related sciences rather than, say mathematical sciences, because that’s been another shift in the way that we think about the scientific revolution. It used to be very much seen as a mathematical and astronomical phenomenon. But there’s been a lot more attention in recent decades paid to the rise of the experimental sciences as one of the big changes. This book is all about whether you accept experimentalism or reject it, viewed through a social lens. Shapin and Schaffer, like Eamon, draw attention to the media of knowledge. They talk a lot about the genre of the experimental essay, for example, and why it takes the form that it does and how it can be related to a particular social type, the gentleman philosopher of the early Royal Society , and the way that they wish to present their knowledge in a particular social mode that would contrast with, for example, the raging revolutionaries from the Interregnum . They do a great job thinking about science and its relationship to society and the genres of knowledge. Hobbes had a huge fight with the Royal Society about experimentalism. The Royal Society (although they were perhaps more diverse in their approach than is shown in this book), embraced experimentalism as their primary approach. Hobbes wanted to establish a scientific logic that was not based on experiment in the same way. And so that was the kernel of the fight here. Shapin and Schaffer have a sociological view of why they were fighting over this issue. Yes."