Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science Technology and Medicine

About this book

In Ways of Knowing John V. Pickstone provides a new and accessible framework for understanding science technology and medicine (STM) in the West from the Renaissance to the present. Pickstones approach has four key features. First he synthesizes the long-term histories and philosophies of disciplines that are normally studied separately. Second he dissects STM into specific ways of knowingnatural history analysis and experimentalismwith separate but interlinked elements. Third he explores these ways of knowing as forms of work related to our various technologies for making mending and destroying. And finally he relates scientific and technical knowledges to popular understandings and to politics. Covering an incredibly wide range of subjects from minerals and machines to patients and pharmaceuticals and from experimental physics to genetic engineering Pickstones Ways of Knowing challenges the reader to reexamine traditional conceptualizations of the history philosophy and social studies of science technology and medicine.