Simon Schaffer
Biographic Data
| ID | 216856 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Simon Schaffer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Simon |
| FAMILY NAME | Schaffer |
| SIGNATURE | SCHAFFER S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6653-0560 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 73 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 866 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The Board of Longitude: Science, Innovation and Empire
In the first book-length history of the Board of Longitude, a distinguished team of historians of science bring to life one of Georgian Britain's most important scientific institutions. Having developed in the eighteenth century following legislation offering rewards for methods to determine longitude at sea, the Board came to support the work of navigators, instrument makers, clockmakers and surveyors, and assembled the Nautical Almanac. Utilizi…
Board of Longitude: Science, Innovation and Empire
Cruel works of many wheels: Prison treadmills and nineteenth-century sciences of productive labor
Treadmills were introduced into British jails in the early decades of the nineteenth century to meet legislative demands that prisoners be subject to systems of hard labor. Mechanisms were designed so that treadmill work would continue, even if entirely unproductive, and systems applied that allegedly permitted precise scrutiny of labor performed and of prisoners' bodily conditions. In the plentiful publicity and fierce controversy that raged aro…
Keeping the Books at Paramatta Observatory
The Arts, Environmental Justice, and the Ecological Crisis
Nineteenth-century survey sciences: Enterprises, expeditions and exhibitions
This special issue of Notes and Records of the Royal Society addresses important aspects of the new kinds of intensive and ambitious schemes launched by early nineteenth-century British public agencies for worldwide surveys of the phenomena of astronomy and geography, physics and meteorology.Historians and historical geographers of science have already provided separate and increasingly detailed studies of several of these initiatives. 1Such focu…
Traveling Machines and Colonial Times
In colonial and cross-cultural encounters, different time-scales and variable means for registering time's passage come into relation with each other, often deliberately. An important and aggressive tradition supposed that distant and exotic cultures were to be understood as belonging to remote and antique pasts. The use and fate of devices designed to register time within these encounters therefore become significant for a better understanding o…
Late Enlightenment Crises of Facts: Mesmerism and Meteorites
Scientific communities have frequently denied claims that later prove justified: such episodes are used in debates about the conventions that govern decisions about matters of fact. Instructive cases of such decisions and reversals occurred during a serious crisis of facts that erupted in Enlightenment Europe from the 1780s. Establishment of scientific facts relied on appropriate groups to produce and judge them, but during such periods of radica…
Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge
Oriental Metrology and the Politics of Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Survey Sciences
ArgumentMetrological techniques to establish shared quantitative measures have often been seen as signs of rational modernization. The cases considered here show instead the close relation of such techniques with antiquarian and revivalist programs under imperial regimes. Enterprises in survey sciences in Egypt in the wake of the French invasion of 1798 and in India during the East India Company's revenue surveys involved the promotion of a new k…
Final Comment: Authors’ Response
Previous articleNext article FreeSecond LookFinal Comment Authors’ ResponseSimon Schaffer and Steven ShapinSimon Schaffer Search for more articles by this author and Steven Shapin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTo have your book looked at once is satisfying; to have it looked at twice—and…
Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge
The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences
In this book the eighteenth century Enlightenment receives an important reassessment, using an astonishing range of materials and objects drawn from Europe and beyond, including artefacts from India a
Origins and Barriers: Reflections on Subrahmanyam
It has been said that if completely known and understood, a historical phenomenon is therefore dead. Yet how perverse, so it might seem, that the scholarly revelation of the complex history of a powerful concept might therefore be taken as an argument that it should therefore be entirely abandoned. This is, of course, not Sanjay Subrahmanyam's conclusion about the notion of Asia. The choice he poses is not between one Asia or none, but between a …
Les cérémonies de la mesure
Longtemps, les pratiques de la mesure ont été prises comme des techniques autorisées qui traversent particulièrement bien et facilement les frontières culturelles, des techniques prises aussi comme un signe et une cause de la prédominance apparente des modes occidentales des sciences. L'attention aux rituels de la mesure et à l'émergence des formes de savoir qui accompagnaient la mesure, les sciences de métrologie notamment, aide à remettre en ca…
La Fabrique des sciences modernes (XVIIe-XIXe siècle)
Transport phenomena: Space and visibility in Victorian physics
A range of image machines, including projectors, cameras, spark devices and cinematographs, were important resources in later Victorian physics. These devices were not solely used to display the backstage results of physics experiments to a wider public, but were also investigative tools well within the scientific workplace: this science’s scope was widely understood as being defined by the scope of the visible, and changed when new kinds of visi…
Communicating Climate Knowledge: Proxies, Processes, Politics
This forum article is the product of interdisciplinary discussion at a conference on climate histories held in Cambridge, United Kingdom, in early 2011, with the specific aim of building a network around the issue of communicating cultural knowledge of environmental change. The lead articles, by Kirsten Hastrup as an anthropologist and Simon Schaffer as a historian of science, highlight the role of agents and proxies. These are followed by five i…
Newtonian Angels
In his very widely read 'moral survey of the heavens', a reconciliation of a plurality of inhabited worlds with the principles of Trinitarian Christianity, the Hertfordshire parson Edward Young invoked angels as guides to the universal system. Important sources for this passage included the morning hymn from the fifth book of Paradise Lost, with its appeal to those 'Sons of Light, / Angels, for ye behold him'. But Young's were now Newtonian angel…
Easily Cracked: Scientific Instruments in States of Disrepair
There has been much scholarly attention to definitions of the term "scientific instrument." Rather more mundane work by makers, curators, and users is devoted to instruments' maintenance and repair. A familiar argument holds that when a tool breaks, its character and recalcitrance become evident. Much can be gained from historical study of instruments' breakages, defects, and recuperation. Maintenance and repair technologies have been a vital asp…
Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life
Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-p…
Exact sciences and colonialism: Southern India in 1900
The astrological roots of mesmerism
Opposition is True Friendship
This contribution is part of a special issue on History and Human Nature, comprising an essay by G.E.R. Lloyd and fifteen invited responses
Lovejoy's Series
Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life
Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-p…
Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation
The ArgumentIt is often assumed that all sciences travel the path of increasing precision and quantification. It is also assumed that such processes transcend the boundaries of rival scientific disciplines. The history of the personal equation has been cited as an example: the "personal equation" was the name given by astronomers after Bessel to the differences in measured transit times recorded by observers in the same situation. Later in the ni…
Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century
Exploration des liens entre philosophie naturelle et spectacle au 18 siecle. L'A. exploite trois themes: la notion de production scientifique comme performance, les liens entre les styles de la philosophie et de l'histoire naturelle, et les liens entre philosophie naturelle et pouvoir politique
Babbage's Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System
The pasteurization of France
Self Evidence
Scientific Discoveries and the End of Natural Philosophy
Recent sociological studies of scientific discovery have challenged the assumption that such discoveries are easily identifiable processes which take place in the mind of heroic discoverers. In this paper, four examples of discovery stories are chosen from the critical period of transition from natural philosophy to the nineteenth-century scientific disciplines. In each case it is impossible to find any criterion for discovery apart from the loca…
Seriality and Scientific Objects in the Nineteenth Century
Perhaps the ‘book’, as it has been called, of nature is regularly paged; if so, no doubt the introductory parts will explain those that follow, and the methods taught in the first chapters will be taken for granted and used as illustrations in the more advanced parts of the course; but if it is not a ‘book’ at all, but a magazine, nothing is more foolish to suppose [than] that one part can throw light on another. James Clerk Maxwell, 1856
Easily Cracked: Scientific Instruments in States of Disrepair
There has been much scholarly attention to definitions of the term "scientific instrument." Rather more mundane work by makers, curators, and users is devoted to instruments' maintenance and repair. A familiar argument holds that when a tool breaks, its character and recalcitrance become evident. Much can be gained from historical study of instruments' breakages, defects, and recuperation. Maintenance and repair technologies have been a vital asp…
Communicating Climate Knowledge: Proxies, Processes, Politics
This forum article is the product of interdisciplinary discussion at a conference on climate histories held in Cambridge, United Kingdom, in early 2011, with the specific aim of building a network around the issue of communicating cultural knowledge of environmental change. The lead articles, by Kirsten Hastrup as an anthropologist and Simon Schaffer as a historian of science, highlight the role of agents and proxies. These are followed by five i…
Herschel in Bedlam: Natural History and Stellar Astronomy
In his comprehensive survey of the work of William Herschel, published in the Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes for 1842, Dominique Arago argued that the life of the great astronomer ‘had the rare privilege of forming an epoch in an extended branch of astronomy’. Arago also noted, however, that Herschel's ideas were often taken as ‘the conceptions of a madman’, even if they were subsequently accepted. This fact, commented Arago, ‘seems to me one …
Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers: Souls and Spirits in Restoration Natural Philosophy
The ArgumentRecent historiography of the Scientific Revolution has challenged the assumption that the achievements of seventeenth-century natural philosophy can easily be described as the 'mechanization of the world-picture.' That assumption licensed a story which took mechanization as self-evidently progressive and so in no need of further historical analysis. The clock-work world was triumphant and inevitably so. However, a close examination of…
Newton on the Beach: The Information Order of Principia Mathematica
Les cérémonies de la mesure
Longtemps, les pratiques de la mesure ont été prises comme des techniques autorisées qui traversent particulièrement bien et facilement les frontières culturelles, des techniques prises aussi comme un signe et une cause de la prédominance apparente des modes occidentales des sciences. L'attention aux rituels de la mesure et à l'émergence des formes de savoir qui accompagnaient la mesure, les sciences de métrologie notamment, aide à remettre en ca…
Machine Philosophy: Demonstration Devices in Georgian Mechanics
Making Certain
Transport phenomena: Space and visibility in Victorian physics
A range of image machines, including projectors, cameras, spark devices and cinematographs, were important resources in later Victorian physics. These devices were not solely used to display the backstage results of physics experiments to a wider public, but were also investigative tools well within the scientific workplace: this science’s scope was widely understood as being defined by the scope of the visible, and changed when new kinds of visi…
On Seeing Me Write: Inscription Devices in the South Seas
Recent historical and sociological work has used the notion of the inscription device to account for European sciences' long-range powers. Such devices are supposed to generate traces of encounters and observations, which can then be mobilized and combined elsewhere along complex networks of travel and information transfer. Europeans' voyages in the South Seas have often been used to illuminate this process. This paper examines an episode of 1792…
The show that never ends: Perpetual motion in the early eighteenth century
During high summer 1721, while rioters and bankrupts gathered outside Parliament, Robert Walpole's new ministry forced through a bill to clear up the wreckage left by the stock-market crash, the South Sea Bubble, and the visionary projects swept away when it burst. In early August the President of the Royal Society Isaac Newton, a major investor in South Sea stock, and the Society's projectors, learned of a new commercial scheme promising apparen…
Priestley's Questions: An Historiography Survey
Oriental Metrology and the Politics of Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Survey Sciences
ArgumentMetrological techniques to establish shared quantitative measures have often been seen as signs of rational modernization. The cases considered here show instead the close relation of such techniques with antiquarian and revivalist programs under imperial regimes. Enterprises in survey sciences in Egypt in the wake of the French invasion of 1798 and in India during the East India Company's revenue surveys involved the promotion of a new k…
Late Enlightenment Crises of Facts: Mesmerism and Meteorites
Scientific communities have frequently denied claims that later prove justified: such episodes are used in debates about the conventions that govern decisions about matters of fact. Instructive cases of such decisions and reversals occurred during a serious crisis of facts that erupted in Enlightenment Europe from the 1780s. Establishment of scientific facts relied on appropriate groups to produce and judge them, but during such periods of radica…
The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences
In this book the eighteenth century Enlightenment receives an important reassessment, using an astonishing range of materials and objects drawn from Europe and beyond, including artefacts from India a
Opposition is True Friendship
This contribution is part of a special issue on History and Human Nature, comprising an essay by G.E.R. Lloyd and fifteen invited responses
Une science de l'éclat: Les bulles de savon et l’art de faire de la physique à l’époque victorienne
Les historiens de l'économie se sont intéressés à l'importance de l'industrie du savon au xixe siècle ; les historiens de l'art à la commercialisation des œuvres de Millais ; les historiens des sciences au rôle joué par les bulles de savon dans certaines expérimentations décisives de microphysique ;les historiens du cinéma àla part jouée par les scientifiques dans les origines de cet art nouveau et ceux de la littérature, à l'influence de son pro…
Halley’s Atheism and the end of the world
Edmond Halley’s views on theology and natural philosophy have often drawn puzzled attention both from his contemporaries and from subsequent scholars. There has seemed to be a contrast between some public statements he made when under pressure from ecclesiastical authority, and his continued, and privately-held, faith in the over-arching relevance of science (1). However, it now emerges from some unpublished papers which Halley read to the Royal …
Herschel in Bedlam: Natural History and Stellar Astronomy
In his comprehensive survey of the work of William Herschel, published in the Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes for 1842, Dominique Arago argued that the life of the great astronomer ‘had the rare privilege of forming an epoch in an extended branch of astronomy’. Arago also noted, however, that Herschel's ideas were often taken as ‘the conceptions of a madman’, even if they were subsequently accepted. This fact, commented Arago, ‘seems to me one …
Essay Review: The Newtonian Revolution Revisited: The Newtonian Revolution
Essay Review: The Matter of Ether: Conceptions of Ether: Studies in the History of Ether Theories 1740–1900
Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens . Immanuel Kant , Stanley L. Jaki
Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century
Exploration des liens entre philosophie naturelle et spectacle au 18 siecle. L'A. exploite trois themes: la notion de production scientifique comme performance, les liens entre les styles de la philosophie et de l'histoire naturelle, et les liens entre philosophie naturelle et pouvoir politique
Uranus and the Outer Planets. Garry Hunt
Making Certain
Essay Review: Newton's Undergraduate Notebook
Science and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Society. Joseph Agassi The Rationality of Science. W. H. Newton-Smith
Priestley's Questions: An Historiography Survey
Henry Stubbe, radical protestantism and the early enlightenment
Reviewslast few years by Jetter himself, show hospitals as they now appear.There are also architectural sketches, floorplans from different historical periods, and detailed photographs of stained-glass windows and commemorative crests.In addition, the book contains a sixteen-page historical survey that integrates the accounts of the ten individual hospitals and discusses some of the other important institutions.There are five maps, showing the lo…
Scientific Discoveries and the End of Natural Philosophy
Recent sociological studies of scientific discovery have challenged the assumption that such discoveries are easily identifiable processes which take place in the mind of heroic discoverers. In this paper, four examples of discovery stories are chosen from the critical period of transition from natural philosophy to the nineteenth-century scientific disciplines. In each case it is impossible to find any criterion for discovery apart from the loca…
Mapping the Edges of the Abyss The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico . Paolo Rossi , Lydia C. Cochrane
Introductory Note
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Scientific Controversy as Moral/Political Discourse: From Restoration Science to Sociobiology
Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers: Souls and Spirits in Restoration Natural Philosophy
The ArgumentRecent historiography of the Scientific Revolution has challenged the assumption that the achievements of seventeenth-century natural philosophy can easily be described as the 'mechanization of the world-picture.' That assumption licensed a story which took mechanization as self-evidently progressive and so in no need of further historical analysis. The clock-work world was triumphant and inevitably so. However, a close examination of…
Science and Puritanism
The debate about the relation between science and Puritanism is one of the oldest topics in social studies of science. The development of this debate is informative about some of the assumptions which produced the discipline of the social history of science. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Robert Merton's celebrated essay, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England. 1 Since then much attention has been devoted to c…
Wallifaction: Thomas Hobbes on school divinity and experimental pneumatics
Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation
The ArgumentIt is often assumed that all sciences travel the path of increasing precision and quantification. It is also assumed that such processes transcend the boundaries of rival scientific disciplines. The history of the personal equation has been cited as an example: the "personal equation" was the name given by astronomers after Bessel to the differences in measured transit times recorded by observers in the same situation. Later in the ni…
The Glorious Revolution and medicine in Britain and the Netherlands
During the 17th century, the universities of The Netherlands, and especially that at Leiden, rose to dominate European medical culture. Equipped with an excellent botanical garden and anatomy theatre, established following Italian models in the late 16th century, and with an observatory and chemical laboratory, built in the mid-17th century, Leiden represented the model of the innovative academy. Its clinical course, inaugurated in 1638, was wide…
The pasteurization of France
Self Evidence
Machine Philosophy: Demonstration Devices in Georgian Mechanics
Babbage's Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System
Philosophy (41 works) · History (32 works) · Epistemology (29 works) · Philosophy (26 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Art (25 works) · Political science (19 works) · Art history (17 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · History (17 works)