Simon Schaffer

Simon Schaffer (born 1955) is a professor of the history and philosophy of science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University and was until recently editor of The British Journal for the History of Science.

Schaffer was born in Southampton and attended Varndean Grammar School for Boys (now Varndean College) in Brighton. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge and went to Harvard as a Kennedy Scholar. In 1974 he was captain of the Trinity College team which won University Challenge. He previously taught at Imperial College London and UCLA. He is also a supporter of Tottenham Hotspur. He has been a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge since 1985.

He is the co-author, along with Steven Shapin, of the 1985 book Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, for which they where awarded the prestigious Erasmus Prize in 2005. In addition to his work at Cambridge, he has been a presenter on the BBC, in particular the series Light Fantastic broadcast on BBC Four in 2004.

Literature

Authored books

• From Physics to Anthropology -- And Back Again, Cambridge: Prickly Pear Press, 1994, 53 pp.
• with Steven Shapin, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, 440 pp. Introduction to the 2011 edition.

Book chapters

• "Glass works: Newton's prisms and the uses of experiment", in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, edited by David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp 67-104.
• "The History and Geography of the Intellectual World: Whewell's Politics of Language", in William Whewell: A Composite Portrait, edited by Menachem Fisch and Simon Schaffer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp 201-31.
• "Making Up Discovery", in Dimensions of Creativity, edited by Margaret A. Boden, MIT Press, 1994, pp 13-51.
• "The Leviathan of Parsonstown: literary technology and scientific representation", in Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication, edited by Timothy Lenoir, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, pp 182-222.
• "Enlightened Automata", in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, University of Chicago Press, 1999, pp 126-165.
• "OK Computer", in Ansichten der Wissenschaftsgeschichte, edited by Michael Hagner, Frankfurt/M.: S.Fischer, 2001, pp 393-429. (in German)
• "The charter'd Thames': naval architecture and experimental spaces in Georgian Britain", in The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention From the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation, edited by Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2007, pp 278-305.
• "Keeping the Books at Paramatta Observatory", in The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture, Duke University Press, 2010, pp 118-147.

Journal articles

• "Newton at the Crossroads", Radical Philosophy, No. 37 (Summer 1984), pp 23-28.
• "Babbage's intelligence: calculating engines and the factory system", Critical Inquiry 21 (1994), pp 203-227.
• "Die Reichweite experimenteller Wissenschaften: Modelle, Mikrogeschichten, Mikrokosmen", Historische Anthropologie: Kultur, Gesellschaft, Alltag, Vol. 13, No. 3, Cologne: Böhlau, 2005, pp 343-366. (in German)
• "Himmlische Mächte", Bildwelten des Wissens. Kunsthistorisches Jahrbuch für Bildkritik, Vol. 5, No. 2, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 2007, pp 40-49. (in German)
• with Nick Hopwood and Jim Secord, "Seriality and Scientific Objects in the Nineteenth Century", Hist. Sci., Vol. 48 (2010), pp 251-285.
• "Easily cracked: scientific instruments in states of disrepair", Isis 102(4) (Dec 2011), pp 706-717.

Other writings

• "The Information Order of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica", Uppsala University, 2008, lecture.
• "Indiscipline and Interdisciplines: some exotic genealogies of modern knowledge", 2010, lecture.

External links

• Schaffer's page at the University of Cambridge
• Schaffer at Wikipedia