Political Epistemology : The Problem of Ideology in Science Studies

This book is an investigation of the ideological dimensions of the disciplinary discourses on science in line with the scholarly tradition of historical epistemology. It offers a programmatic treatment of the political-epistemological problematic along three entangled lines of inquiry: socio-historical, epistemological and historiographical. The book aims for a meta-level integration of the existing scholarship on the social and cultural history of science in order to consider the ways in which struggles for hegemony have constantly informed scientific discourses. This problematic is of primary relevance for scholars in Science Studies, philosophers, historians and sociologists of science, but would also be relevant for anybody interested in scientific culture and political theory.

Pietro Daniel Omodeo is a cultural historian of science and a professor of historical epistemology at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy). He is the principal investigator of the ERC Consolidator research endeavor “Institutions and Metaphysics of Cosmology in the Epistemic Networks of Seventeenth-Century Europe” (Horizon 2020, GA 725883). Together with Jürgen Renn he authored the book Science in Court Society: Giovanni Battista Benedetti’s Diversarum speculationum mathematicarum et physicarum liber (Turin, 1585) (2019). His forthcoming books include the co-edited volume Cultural Hegemony in a Scientific World: Gramscian Concepts for the History of Science (with Massimiliano Badino) and Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science (with Rodolfo Garau).