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This work aims to shed new light on the relations between Husserlian phenomenology and the present-day efforts toward a scientific theory of cognition with its complex structure of disciplines, levels of explanation, and conflicting hypotheses.

This collection of five essays by Germany's most prominent and influential social thinker both links Luhmann's social theory to the question "What is modern about modernity?" and shows the origins and context of his theory.In the introductory essay, "Modernity in Contemporary Society," Luhmann develops the thesis that the modern epistemological situation can be seen as the consequence of a radical change in social macrostructures that he calls "social differentiation," thereby designating the juxtaposition of and interaction between a growing number of social subsystems without any hierarchical structure. "European Rationality" defines rationality as the capacity to see the difference between systems and their environment as a unity. Luhmann argues that, in a world characterized by contingency, rationality tends to become coextensive with imagination, a view that challenges their classical binary opposition and opens up the possibility of seeing modern rationality as a paradox.In the third essay, "Contingency as Modern Society's Defining Attribute," Luhmann develops a further and probably even more important paradox: that the generalization of contingency or cognitive uncertainty is precisely what provides stability within modern societies. In the process, he argues that medieval and early modern theology can be seen as a "preadaptive advance" through which Western thinking prepared itself for the modern epistemological situation. In "Describing the Future," Luhmann claims that neither the traditional hope of learning from history nor the complementary hope of cognitively anticipating the future can be maintained, and that the classical concept of the future should be replaced by the notion of risk, defined as juxtaposing the expectation of realizing certain projects and the awareness that such projects might fail. The book concludes with "The Ecology of Ignorance," in which Luhmann outlines prospective research areas "for sponsors who have yet to be identified."

Sociology has long sought to find out how acting in a situation and observing that situation may differ and nevertheless belong to a single kind of social operation. Spencer-Brown's Law of Form provides one way to conceive of such an operation, and this book is the first to make sociological use of this mathematical calculus of form.

Psychoanalysis may be said to have been born in the 20th century, Freud said late in his career, but it did not drop from the skies ready-made. This is a re-assessment of Freud and the historical development of pyschoanalysis.

This is an extraordinarily imaginative analysis of the relations between literature and technique in Brazil from the 1880's to the 1920's.

Focusing on the "Einstein Tower," an architecturally historic observatory built in Potsdam in 1920, this book investigates German scientific life by blending biography, architectural history, scientific theory and research, and scientific politics.

Drawing on tools from rhetoric and poststructuralist theory, the author argues that the ascent of molecular biology, with its emphasis on molecules such as DNA rather than organisms, was enabled by crucial rhetorical "softwares."

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.

The history of one of the most important and dramatic episodes in modern science, recounted from the novel vantage point of the dawn of the information age and its impact on representations of nature, heredity, and society.

Six Stories is a radically new look at the intersection of science and art through "failed" images.

This book uses 103 illustrations from the 16th century onward and the history of obstetrical and embryological knowledge to argue that modes of visualizing science have profoundly determined "fetal politics" and the contemporary abortion debates.

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.

Metaphors of inscription and writing figure prominently in all levels of discourse in and about science. This volume of 16 essays examines the subject by juxtaposing work from historically focused science and literature studies with work inspired by poststructuralist philosophy and semiotics.

This work aims to shed new light on the relations between Husserlian phenomenology and the present-day efforts toward a scientific theory of cognition with its complex structure of disciplines, levels of explanation, and conflicting hypotheses.

The Technical Imagination explores how technology entered the popular imagination in the Argentina of the 1920s and 1930s and how its products helped to shape modern thinking at all levels of Argentine society.

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.

Here, sixteen prominent scientists examine whether the sciences are, or ever were, unified by a single theoretical view of nature or a methodological foundation.

Astronomy was a popular part of Victorian science, and British atronomers travelled to remote areas to watch the sun eclipsed by the moon. This book shows how the organization of science, advances in photography, and new printing technology remade the character of scientific observation.

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 examines how one aspect of the social and technological situation of literature-namely, the postal system as a mode of transmission-determined how literature was produced and what was produced within literature.

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.

This volume begins by describing how and why epigenesis came to replace the reigning model of biological origination, preformation the theory that all organisms were preformed at the creation of the world.

This is a broad-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink aesthetic and literary studies in terms of an "anthropology" of symbolic media generally.

Before Gertrude Stein became the twentieth century's preeminent experimental writer, she spent a decade conducting research at Harvard's psychological laboratory and the Johns Hopkins Medical School. This book shows how her extensive scientific training continued to exert a profound influence on the development of her extraordinary literary practices.

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.

Experimentalization in chemistry was driven by a sign system of chemical formulas invented by the Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius. By tracing the history of this "paper tool", this work shows how chemistry lost its orientation to natural history.

Diana E. Forsythe was a leading anthropologist of science, technology, and work who pioneered the field of the anthropology of artificial intelligence. This volume collects her best-known essays, along with other major works that remained unpublished upon her death in 1997. It is also an exemplar of how reflexive ethnography should be done.

This first detailed historical treatment of the electron microscope in biology advances an original philosophical argument on the relation of experimental technology to scientific change.