Books in the Writing Science series

In this book, Rotman argues that mathematics is a vast and unique man-made imagination machine controlled by writing. It addresses both aspects-mental and linguistic-of this machine. The essays in this volume offer an insight into Rotman's project, one that has been called "one of the most original and important recent contributions to the philosophy of mathematics."

Arguing for the primacy of the material arrangements of the laboratory in the dynamics of modern molecular biology, the author develops a new epistemology of experimentation in which research is treated as a process for producing epistemic things.

Behind today's headlines stands an unobtrusive army of science advisors-panels of scientific, medical, and engineering experts evaluate the safety of the food we eat, the drugs we take, and the cars we drive. This book studies, theoretically and empirically, the social process through which the credibility of expert advice is produced, challenged, and sustained.

Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late 19th century, part theoretical discussion of the responses to these media-including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators-this book analyzes this momentous shift using insights from Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan.

This tells the story of Douglas Engelbart's revolutionary vision, reaching beyond conventional histories of Silicon Valley to probe the ideology that shaped some of the basic ingredients of contemporary life.

In this presentation of a general theory of systems, Germany's most prominent and controversial social thinker sets out a contribution to sociology that reworks our understanding of meaning and communication. It closely interrelates such different traditions as German idealism, phenomenology, systems theory, sociological functionalism, and the epistemology of contemporary biology.

This book is about wooden ships and plastic molecules, wax bodies and a perspex economy, monuments in cork and mathematics in plaster, casts of diseases, habitat dioramas and extinct monsters rebuilt in bricks and mortar. Considering such objects together for the first time, this interdisciplinary volume demonstrates how, in research as well as teaching, 3-D models played major roles in making knowledge.

How can science be brought to connect with experience? This book addresses two challenging problems facing contemporary neurobiology and cognitive science: understanding how we unconsciously execute habitual actions and creating an ethics adequate to our present awareness.