Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory


Book Description

Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory is a unique collection of essays dealing with the intersections between science and mathematics and the radical reconceptions of knowledge, language, proof, truth, and reality currently emerging from poststructuralist literary theory, constructivist history and sociology of science, and related work in contemporary philosophy. Featuring a distinguished group of international contributors, this volume engages themes and issues central to current theoretical debates in virtually all disciplines: agency, causality, determinacy, representation, and the social dynamics of knowledge. In a substantive introductory essay, the editors explain the notion of "postclassical theory" and discuss the significance of ideas such as emergence and undecidability in current work in and on science and mathematics. Other essays include a witty examination of the relations among mathematical thinking, writing, and the technologies of virtual reality; an essay that reconstructs the conceptual practices that led to a crucial mathematical discovery—or construction—in the 19th century; a discussion of the implications of Bohr’s complementarity principle for classical ideas of reality; an examination of scientific laboratories as "hybrid" communities of humans and nonhumans; an analysis of metaphors of control, purpose, and necessity in contemporary biology; an exploration of truth and lies, and the play of words and numbers in Shakespeare, Frege, Wittgenstein, and Beckett; and a final chapter on recent engagements, or nonengagements, between rationalist/realist philosophy of science and contemporary science studies. Contributors. Malcolm Ashmore, Michel Callon, Owen Flanagan, John Law, Susan Oyama, Andrew Pickering, Arkady Plotnitsky, Brian Rotman, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, John Vignaux Smyth, E. Roy Weintraub




Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory


Book Description

Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory is a unique collection of essays dealing with the intersections between science and mathematics and the radical reconceptions of knowledge, language, proof, truth, and reality currently emerging from poststructuralist literary theory, constructivist history and sociology of science, and related work in contemporary philosophy. Featuring a distinguished group of international contributors, this volume engages themes and issues central to current theoretical debates in virtually all disciplines: agency, causality, determinacy, representation, and the social dynamics of knowledge. In a substantive introductory essay, the editors explain the notion of "postclassical theory" and discuss the significance of ideas such as emergence and undecidability in current work in and on science and mathematics. Other essays include a witty examination of the relations among mathematical thinking, writing, and the technologies of virtual reality; an essay that reconstructs the conceptual practices that led to a crucial mathematical discovery—or construction—in the 19th century; a discussion of the implications of Bohr’s complementarity principle for classical ideas of reality; an examination of scientific laboratories as "hybrid" communities of humans and nonhumans; an analysis of metaphors of control, purpose, and necessity in contemporary biology; an exploration of truth and lies, and the play of words and numbers in Shakespeare, Frege, Wittgenstein, and Beckett; and a final chapter on recent engagements, or nonengagements, between rationalist/realist philosophy of science and contemporary science studies. Contributors. Malcolm Ashmore, Michel Callon, Owen Flanagan, John Law, Susan Oyama, Andrew Pickering, Arkady Plotnitsky, Brian Rotman, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, John Vignaux Smyth, E. Roy Weintraub




The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics


Book Description

This handbook features essays written by both literary scholars and mathematicians that examine multiple facets of the connections between literature and mathematics. These connections range from mathematics and poetic meter to mathematics and modernism to mathematics as literature. Some chapters focus on a single author, such as mathematics and Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, or Charles Dickens, while others consider a mathematical topic common to two or more authors, such as squaring the circle, chaos theory, Newton’s calculus, or stochastic processes. With appeal for scholars and students in literature, mathematics, cultural history, and history of mathematics, this important volume aims to introduce the range, fertility, and complexity of the connections between mathematics, literature, and literary theory. Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via [link.springer.com|http://link.springer.com/].




Educational Leadership, Management, and Administration through Actor-Network Theory


Book Description

Educational Leadership, Management, and Administration through Actor-Network Theory presents how actor-network theory (ANT) and the related vocabularies have much to offer to a critical re-imagination of the dynamics of management in education and educational leadership. It extends the growing contemporary perspective of ANT into the study of educational administration and management. This book draws on case studies focusing on new configurations of educational management and leadership. It presents new developments of ANT ("After ANT" and "Near ANT") and clarifies how these "sensibilities" can contribute to thinking critically and intervening in the current dynamics of education. The book proposes that ANT can offer an ecological understanding of educational leadership which is helpful in abandoning the narrow humanistic world of managerialism, considering a post-anthropocentric scenario where it is necessary to compose together new "liveable" assemblages of humans and nonhumans. This book will be of great interest to academics, scholars and post-graduate students in the fields of educational management, leadership and administration, as well as education policy. It will also be highly relevant to policy makers and experts of education policy at the national, European and international levels.




Environmental Apocalypse in Science and Art


Book Description

At a time when it is clear that climate change adaptation and mitigation are failing, this book examines how our assumptions about (valid and usable) knowledge are preventing effective climate action. Through a cross-disciplinary, empirically-based analysis of climate science and policy, the book situates the failures of climate policy in the cultural history of prediction and its interfaces with policy. Fava calls into question the current interfaces between scientific research and climate policy by tracing multiple connections between modelling, epistemology, politics, food security, religion, art, and the apocalyptic. Demonstrating how the current domination of climate policy by models and scenarios is part of the problem, the book examines how artistic practices are a critical location to ask questions differently, rethink environmental futures, and activate social change. The analysis starts with another moment of climatic change in recent western history: the overlap of the Little Ice Age and the "scientific revolution," during which intense climatic, scientific and political change were contemporary with mathematical calculation of the apocalypse. Dealing with the need for complex answers to complex and urgent questions, this is essential reading for those interested in climate action, interdisciplinary research and methodological innovation. The empirical analyses amount to a methodological experiment, across history of science, theology, art theory and history, architecture, future studies, climatology, computer modelling, and agricultural policy. This book is a major contribution to understanding how we are precluding effective climate action, and designing futures that resemble our worst nightmares.




Post-Modernism, Economics and Knowledge


Book Description

This ground-breaking volume brings together the essays of top theorists including Arjo Klamer, Deirdre McCloskey, Julie Nelson, Shaun Hargreaves-Heap and Philip Miroswki on a diverse range of topics.




Material Events


Book Description







Genetic Science and New Digital Technologies


Book Description

From health tracking to diet apps to biohacking, technology is changing how we relate to our material, embodied selves. Drawing from a range of disciplines and case studies, this volume looks at what makes these health and genetic technologies unique and explores the representation, communication and internalization of health knowledge. Showcasing how power and inequality are reflected and reproduced by these technologies, discourses and practices, this book will be a go-to resource for scholars in science and technology studies as well as those who study the intersection of race, gender, socio-economic status, sexuality and health.




The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is a major contribution to the dynamic field of Victorian studies. This collection of 37 original chapters by leading international Victorian scholars offers new approaches to familiar themes including science, religion, and gender, and gives space to newer and emerging topics including old age, fair play, and economics. Structured around three broad sections (Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology, Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief, and Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures), the volume is sub-divided into nine sub-sections each with its own 'lead' essay: on subjectivity, politics, gender and sexuality, place and race, religion, science, material and mass culture, aesthetics and visual culture, and theatrical culture. The collection, like today's Victorian studies, is thoroughly interdisciplinary and yet its substantial Introduction explores a concern which is evident both implicitly and explicitly in the volume's essays: that is, the nature and status of 'literary' culture and the literary from the Victorian period to the present. The diverse and wide-ranging essays present original scholarship framed accessibly for a mixed readership of advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars.