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
- with Steven Shapin, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton University Press, 1985, 440 pp.
- "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.
- "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.
- External links
