Laboratory Epistemologies: A Hands-On Perspective [Hardcover]

InLaboratory Epistemologies: A Hands-On Perspective, Jenny Boulboullé examines the significance of hands-on experiences in contemporary life sciences laboratories. Addressing the relationship between contemplation and manipulation in epistemology, Boulboullé combines participant observations in molecular genetics labs and microbiological cleanrooms with alongue duréestudy of the history and philosophy of science. She radically rereads Descartes’s key epistemological textMeditations on First Philosophy, reframing the philosopher as a hands-on knowledge maker. With this reading, Boulboullé subverts the pervasive modern conception of the disembodied knower and puts the hands-on experimenter at the heart of life sciences research. In so doing, she contributes a theoretical model for understanding how life processes on cellular and molecular levels are manually produced in today’s techno-scientific spaces. By reassessing the Cartesian legacy and arguing that epistemology should be grounded in the standpoint of a hands-on practitioner, Boulboullé offers the philosophical and historical foundation to understand and study contemporary life sciences research as multisensory embodied practices.USExplores the vital role of hands-on experiences in shaping scientific knowledge in contemporary life science laboratories with an in-depth analysis of the interaction between “manual” practices in experimental research and “hands-off” theories of (scientific) knowledge formation.Jenny Boulboullé is Lecturer in the Art and Culture Department at the University of Amsterdam."Jenny Boulboullé brilliantly revises superficial clichés about Descartes: as foundational to French rationality, as opposed to British practicality, and to the dualism of subject versus object; as conceiving of cogito as purely in the mind; and as invested in skepticism as his primary method. An experl+