Historians have studied extensively how sciences begin. But how do they end? Previous attention to the founding, disciplinisation, and professionalisation of individual sciences has provided robust frameworks in which to think about the birth and growth of scientific knowledge communities. Less attention has been directed at how those same communities decay, dissolve, or evolve beyond the contemporary boundaries of science. SciEnds is a research network cultivating case studies of the ends of sciences in order to motivate a new approach to thinking about the developmental trajectories of scientific disciplines, communities, institutions, and the ordering of knowledge. This working group explores specific cases of the ends of sciences as well as reflects on general methodological questions raised by scrutinizing the unmaking of scientific practices.

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Upcoming Meetings

Wednesday, May 7, 2025, 10:00 - 11:30 am EDT

Reading:

  • Ronald R. Kline, "Cybernetics in Crisis," in The Cybernetics Moment : Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age, ch. 7 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).
  • Ranulph Glanville, "A (Cybernetic) Musing: Invisibility and Silence," Cybernetics And Human Knowing 13, no. 1 (2006): 71–80.

Both are available in the attached zip file.
 

Past Meetings

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Our readings for April 2 are:

  • Shigehisa Kuriyama, "Translation and the History of Japanese Irritability," in Traduire, transposer, naturaliser. La Formation d'une langue scientifique moderne hors des frontières de l'Europe au XIXe siècle, ed. Pascal Crozet and Annick Horiuchi (Paris: Éditions L'Harmattan, 2004), 27-41.
  • Federico Marcon, “Honzogaku after Seibutsugaku: Traditional Pharmacology as Antiquarianism after the Institutionalization of Modern Biology in Early Meiji Japan,” in Antiquarianism, Language and Medical Philology, ed. Benjamin A. Elman (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 148–62.

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We will discuss two readings on the end of natural history:

  • Bernard Lightman, “The ‘History’ of Victorian Scientific Naturalism: Huxley, Spencer and the ‘End’ of Natural History,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 58 (2016): 17–23.
  • Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, “The End of Natural History?,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 7, no. 1, (1996): 95–98.

Both are available in the attached zip file.
 

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Reading:

Simon Schaffer, "Scientific Discoveries and the End of Natural Philosophy," Social Studies of Science 16, no. 3 (1986): 387–420.