ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Laboratory 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 a longue durée study of the history and philosophy of science. She radically rereads Descartes’s key epistemological text Meditations 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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jenny Boulboullé is Lecturer in the Art and Culture Department at the University of Amsterdam.

REVIEWS

"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 experimentalist and vivisectionist, Descartes was prouder of his experiments than his philosophy, and, with his correspondents, helped devise the ‘literary technology’ that led to the scientific method of the Royal Society. Boulboullé argues that Laboratory Epistemologies begin in touch and the sensory followed by cogito-mathematical consolidations that often erase their empirical origins, and for Descartes required a theological overlay."

-- Michael M. J. Fischer, author of Probing Arts and Emergent Forms of Life

“Jenny Boulboullé calls her study a ‘multisited historioethnographical investigation,’ thus condensing its spirit in one combined expression. The book brings together an impressively wide reading in contemporary historical and ethnographical science studies, a longue dureée philosophical perspective, and hands-on participatory experiences both in molecular biology and in the aesthetic practices of contemporary bio-artists. A highly original study of scientific practice that makes for fascinating reading.”
-- Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, author of Split and Splice: A Phenomenology of Experimentation

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Experience

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