Hans-Jörg Rheinberger: Historische Epistemologie zur Einführung .Historische Epistemologie zur Einführung by Hans‐Jörg RheinbergerReview by: By Rafael   ZieglerIsis, Vol. 100, No. 3 (September 2009), p. 692Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/649199 .

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Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. Historische Episte-mologie zur Einfuhrung. 155 pp., bibl., index.Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2007. €12.90 (paper).

Historicizing epistemology is the major, if poly-morphic, development of twentieth-century epis-temology—or so Hans-Jörg Rheinberger suggestsin Historische Epistemologie zur Einfuhrung (p.11). Guided by what he calls the French use of theterm “epistemology” (as the reflection on the his-torical conditions according to, and by means ofwhich, things are turned into objects of knowl-edge that launch and sustain the process of sci-entific cognition; see p. 11), Rheinberger arguesthat historicizing epistemology yielded a com-ing together of the contexts of justification andof discovery, the idea of science as processrather than as a system and of the sciences asnonreducible to one master science.

The reader is invited to follow the historiciz-ing of epistemology in chronological order, be-ginning with the last quarter of the nineteenthcentury and the physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond’s famous 1872 Ignoramibus speech.Du Bois-Reymond’s argument that the mechan-ical paradigm of science ultimately cannot jus-tify its own basic concepts serves Rheinbergeras the exemplar of the nineteenth-century dis-cussion of the fictitious (but useful), conven-tional, and historical character of science (pp. 16ff.). To this end, Chapter 1 introduces the phi-losophies of Ernst Mach and Henri Poincare.Chapter 2 moves to the 1920s, focusing on Lud-wik Fleck and Gaston Bachelard as offering thefirst programmatic attempts at historicizing epis-temology in the twentieth century. In a tour deforce, Chapter 3 adds to these interwar perspec-tives the positions of Ernst Cassirer, Martin Hei-degger, Edmund Husserl, and Karl Popper. InChapter 4, post World War II, the historicizingof epistemology has largely moved to NorthAmerica. Rheinberger turns to Alexandre Koyre(in the United States since 1941), Thomas Kuhn,Paul Feyerabend (from 1958 a professor inBerkeley), and Stephen Toulmin (permanentlyworking in the United States since 1965). Yet,not only the historicizing spirit had movedacross the Atlantic—so too had thinkers such asRudolf Carnap, a teacher of Willard Van OrmanQuine. While these philosophers more or lessdefined the “received” views on epistemology inpost–World War II Anglo-Saxon academic phi-losophy, their (“dissenting”) voices are practi-cally absent from this introduction. Chapter 5returns to Europe and the French philosophicaltradition, notably Georges Canguilhem’s andMichel Foucault’s work on the epistemologicaldimension of the history of the life and social

sciences, as well as a brief account of LouisAlthusser’s theory of knowledge as a productionprocess and Jacques Derrida’s concept of histo-ricity. Chapter 6 turns to work in progress, thepositions of Ian Hacking and Bruno Latour. Abrief conclusion reexamines the main theses re-garding the historicity and plurality of the sci-ences.

This introduction offers an erudite account ofimportant developments in French, German, andAmerican philosophy; it insightfully juxtaposesauthors that are rarely discussed together; and inspite of all the inherent complexity the book isbrief and reads well. But there is no doubt thatRheinberger’s self-avowed “idiosyncracies” (p.10) raise a number of questions. Rheinberger doesnot explicitly argue for his philosophical positionbut, rather, assumes a specific understanding ofepistemology from the outset; his main thesis is inthis sense conceptually implied and there is nodiscussion of alternative views. Historiographi-cally, there is a noteworthy absence of the philos-opher who coined the (“French”) term “historicalepistemology” (Dominique Lecourt, in a thesis onBachelard supervised by Canguilhem) and of oth-ers who have explicitly contributed to the discus-sion of historical epistemology (with the exceptionof Hacking). Perhaps as a result, this insightfulrereading of twentieth-century science and philos-ophy is at its most abstract where historical epis-temology itself is concerned. The concept, for ex-ample, appears to refer to both Bachelard’sconcept of a contingent recurrence (p. 45) andHusserl’s phenomenology, which includes a uni-versal teleology of reason (p. 67). While this ac-count of historical epistemology thus seems al-most overly inclusive, it does not address theSocratic concern with epistemology as justifiedtrue belief, as a question concerning “you and me.”Epistemology so understood appears to have beenswept away by the imperial power of twentieth-century disciplinary sciences. Yet, in an age ofclimate change science and “science for policy,” itcould at the very least be asked whether historicalepistemology has any implications for our under-standing of the relations between the sciences andcitizens.

RAFAEL ZIEGLER

Brian Rotman. Becoming Beside Ourselves:The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed HumanBeing. Foreword by Timothy Lenoir. xxxiv �177 pp., index. Durham, N.C./London: DukeUniversity Press, 2008. $21.95 (paper).

Becoming Beside Ourselves has all the brilliancewe have come to expect from Brian Rotman,

692 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 100 : 3 (2009)

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