“... or the nature of ‘science itself’? In posing these questions and seeking to answer them, Steven Shapin has produced a work of exceptional originality, power and significance. He has also given readers much to chew over in regard to contemporary developments and perennial issues. The Scientific Life departs along several lines from the more ...”

“... In the last issue of the LRB, Steven Shapin mentioned an anti-Darwinian organisation in California called the Institute for Creation Research. ‘Its leading lights call themselves Creation Scientists,’ he wrote, ‘and its website flaunts their doctoral degrees in natural science from distinguished universities ...”

“... learned how to do. What people find easy is, among other things, an indicator of social class. Steven Shapin’s previous book, A Social History of Truth, was about the sense in which – during the period covered by this new book, the late 16th and the 17th century – what people knew depended on who they knew. And who they knew, of course, and how ...”

“... the bodies qualities, and the soules affections.’ We incorporate matter, and it reincarnates us.Steven Shapin’s​ Eating and Being is a history of dietetics, and of the ideas about eating that succeeded it, all the way up to the unpoetic calorie. Shapin is an eminent historian of science whose work has taught us ...”

“... Erwin Chargaff, Jacob Bronowski, Gunther Stent, Brian Petley, and the trio of Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin. In a modest ‘anti-Sokal’ hoax, one of the contributors to The One Culture?, Steven Shapin, leads the reader initially to assume that the quotations come from critics of science in the arts ...”

“... and what as bad is often hard to discern without the benefit of hindsight. In this tradition, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have defended the first critics of Boyle’s famous air-pump experiments, which are supposed to have established the vacuum as a laboratory entity, on the grounds that their arguments were as good as any Boyle ...”

“... these doctrines are scholars like Harry Collins, Sandra Harding, Bruno Latour, Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin. Now whether these alleged enemies have anything in common, and whether there is a genuine package of claims about science that count as constructivism or relativism or Post-Modernism are serious questions that deserve careful analysis. At ...”

“... are not assumed always to have produced great practical breakthroughs. As one of the contributors, Steven Shapin, neatly turns it, Was ist Aufklärung? is now also Wofur ist Aufklärung? – what is it for? And the information gathered here will assist anyone wanting to see the myth behind the view that the sciences were spontaneously generated after the ...”

“... them, he won’t invest, no matter how attractive an opportunity their companies seem to present. Steven Shapin, in ongoing work on Californian venture capitalists, finds a similar approach: they judge the person, not just the business plan. It’s a perfectly rational attitude, Shapin points out: in a world in which ...”