Steven Shapin

What we eat, who we are, and the relationship between the two. Eating and Being is a history of Western thinking about food, eating, knowledge, and ourselves. In modern thought, eating is about what is good for you, not about what is good. Eating is about health, not about virtue. Yet this has not always been the case. For a...

“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin begins his bold, vibrant exploration of the origins of the modern scientific worldview, now updated with a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship. An excellent book. — Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review...

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...