Max Planck Institute (ed.): Epistemology and History: From Bachelard and Canguilhem to Today’s History of Science (2012) [EN, FR, DE]

“Over the past few years, “historical epistemology” has had quite a successful international career. Starting with a week-long conference organized by Ian Hacking in Toronto in 1993, historical epistemology was and continues to be used as a label for a wide variety of projects and programs: from Hacking’s own discussion of styles of scientific reasoning to Lorraine Daston’s historicization of epistemological categories and values, Arnold Davidson’s investigations into the conceptual formation of new kinds of knowledge and experience and the attempt undertaken by Peter Damerow et al. to broaden the scope of Jean Piaget’s “genetic epistemology” by historical means.

These conference proceedings attempt to historicize and contextualize historical epistemology and, by the same token, to create a prerequisite for concrete and critical updates.” (from the Introduction)

Contributions by Camille Limoges, François Delaporte, Monika Wulz, Thomas Ebke, Stefanos Geroulanos & Todd Meyers, Claude Debru, Pierre-Olivier Méthot, Françoise Balibar, Sandra Pravica, Cornelius Borck, Andrea Cavazzini, Maria Muhle, Cristina Chimisso, Frieder Otto Wolf, and Anselm Haverkamp.

Publisher Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, 2012
MPG Preprint 434
Open Access
232 pages

PDF (1.4 MB)

Ellen Røed: Skyvelære (2014)

Composed of the words sliding and knowing, the Norwegian term skyvelære means caliper, a device for measuring distance. In her research Ellen Røed reflects on devices and procedures that are used in video art and in the natural sciences. She considers various relationships involved in creating representations; field trips, story telling, gathering or capturing of data, measuring and calibrating.

Critical Reflection on Artistic Results of a Fellowship Project in Artistic Research
Bergen Academy of Art and Design, 2014
143 pages

Book version (added on 2016-10-13)

PDF (15 MB)
Accompanying video Skyvelære (While Attempting to Balance) (2013, 276 MB, MOV)

N. Katherine Hayles: Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (1990)

“At the same time that the study of nonlinear dynamics came into its own in the sciences, the focus of literary studies shifted toward local, fragmentary modes of analysis in which texts were no longer regarded as deterministic or predictable. N. Katherine Hayles here investigates parallels between contemporary litera­ture and critical theory and the emerging interdisciplinary field known as the science of chaos. She finds in both scientific and literary discourse new interpre­tations of chaos, which is seen no longer as disorder but as a locus of maximum information and complexity. The new paradigm of chaos includes elements that, Hayles shows, were evident in literary theory and literature before they became prominent in the sciences. She asserts that such similarities between the natural and human sciences are the result not of direct influence but of roots in a common cultural matrix.

Hayles traces the evolution of the concept of chaos and evaluates the work of such theorists as Prigogine, Feigenbaum, and Mandelbrot, for whom chaos entails an unpredictably open universe in which knowledge is limited to local sites and scientific models can never exhaust the possibilities of the actual. But this view does not imply that scientists have given up the search for global ex­planations of natural phenomena, for chaos is conceived of as containing its own form of order. Hayles envisions chaos as a double-edged sword: it can be viewed either as a recognition that disorder plays a more important role in natural processes than had hitherto been recognized or as an extension of order into areas that had hitherto resisted formalization. She examines structures and themes of disorder in The Education of Henry Adams, Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, and works by Stanislaw Lem. Hayles concludes by showing how the writings of poststructuralist theorists incorporate central features of chaos theory-such as an interest in relating local sites to global structures; a conception of order and disorder as interpenetrating rather than opposed; an awareness that in complex systems small causes can lead to massive effects; and an understanding that complex systems can be both deterministic and unpredictable.

Chaos Bound contributes to and enliven current debates among chaos theorists, cultural critics and cultural historians, critical theorists, literary critics interested in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, researchers in nonlinear dynamics, and others concerned with the relation between science and culture.” (from the back cover)

Publisher Cornell University Press, 1990
ISBN 0801497019, 9780801497018
309 pages
via author

Review: Tom LeClair (SubStance, 1991)

PDF, PDF

See also Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century, 1984.