Errata: STANDORT-Ausgabe 1/2001

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

HISTORY/PHILOSOPHY/SCIENCE: SOME LESSONS FOR PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Rheinberger's brief history brings into sharp profile the importance of history of science for a philosophical understanding of historical practice. Rheinberger presents thought about the nature of science by leading scientists and their interpreters over the course of the twentieth century as emphasizing increasingly the local and developmental character of their learning practices, thus making the conception of knowledge dependent upon historical experience, “historicizing epistemology.” Linking his account of thought about science to his own work on “experimental systems,” I draw extensive parallels with other work in the local history of science (the ideas of Latour, Pickering, Rouse, and others) and consider the epistemological implications both for the relation between history and philosophy of science and between history and theory more broadly. In doing so, I suggest that the long‐standing gap between the natural sciences and history as a “human science” has been significantly bridged by the insistence upon the local, mediated, indeed “historicized epistemology” of actual science.     

The political geographies of D/decolonization: Variegation and decolonial challenges of /in geography

Anglophone and North Atlantic geography is enmeshed institutionally, epistemically and racially in colonial modern privilege, highlighting the urgent task of addressing its modes of theorization, interpretation, and research. Decolonizing analysis builds from postcolonial, critical, feminist and racism critiques, and problematizes accounts of knowledge, subjectivity and power. In pursuit of decolonizing knowledge production and addressing global inequalities, this paper enjoins political geography to more systematically engage with decolonial analysis, conceptualization and theory. Political geography has much to contribute to interdisciplinary decolonial scholarship through contextualized, grounded, multiscalar and granular analysis of socio-spatial relations. The paper examines the common ground and potential tensions between Anglophone political geographies and decolonial theory (῾decoloniality’), then examines the case of Ecuador's politics of plurinationalism to illustrate a decolonizing political geographical analysis. The case highlights how the variegated political geographies of decolonization arising within and against coloniality require from political geography a decolonial turn, which would entail divesting core political geography concepts of western norms, including plural epistemologies of space and power in analysis, and recalibrating knowledge production processes.     

Aeroponic gardens and their magic: Plants/persons/ethics in suspension

Out of the fire bombed ruins and food deprivation of the Second World War came one innovator’s prototype for growing edible plants, suspended above earth and requiring a minimum of water. His aeroponic apparatus would later be referred to as The Genesis Machine, from the movie Star Trek II. This paper travels with roots in air into different spheres where the relations of persons, plants, and technology conspire to place future – growing into ethical suspension. The aim is to open questions for an anthropocenic future: Are plants ‘for’ persons or persons ‘for’ plants? Is it ethical to separate growing plants from earth/Earth and from earthlings? Where might ‘responsible innovation’ and ‘innovative eclecticism’ find a place in post-genomic discourse? And might a commitment to a dividual ethics guide lives in co-becoming to devise (as Latour recognizes in like terms) a scitech-diplomacy capable of resisting the programmatic pressures of new climatic regimes?