D. Graham Burnett

A questionnaire on materialisms

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today.

Introduction : Cross-examination?

From Galileo to the Bhopal tort litigation, Scopes to OncoMouse®, Lysenko to the lie detector, the agonistic and alethic forum of the courtroom has offered unique opportunities to witness science and scientists being made and unmade. Evolving legal systems have consistently been forced to draw on (or defensibly away from) scientific knowledge, scientific methods, and scientific experts in the pursuit of truth and justice. At the same time, courts-in many ways the original site for the production of social facts-have to a significant extent shaped both the theories and the practices of knowledge production central to the emergence of modern science. This Focus section draws together a set of scholars at work on these borrowings and aims to stimulate more research in an important and fast-expanding area of scholarship.

Michael S. Mahoney, 1939–2008

Perhaps the clearest testimony to the scholarly range and depth of Princetons now‐lamented Michael S. Mahoney lies in the dismay of his colleagues in the last few years, as they contemplated his imminent retirement. How to maintain coverage of his fields? Fretting over this question, the program in history of science that he did so much to build recently found itself sketching a five-year plan that involved replacing him with no fewer than four new appointments: a historian of mathematics with the ability to handle the course on Greek antiquity, a historian of the core problems of the Scientific Revolution, a historian of technology who could cover the nineteenth‐century United States and Britain, and, finally, a historian of the computer-and-media revolution. In his passing we have lost a small department.

The History of Cartography and the History of Science

The orbis totius has long served as an icon for the sphere of the knowable; the map, in turn, became early, and has in important ways remained, a dominant archetype of human knowledge. A field for the collation of diverse measurements, a framework for ordering nature, a means of nesting multiple scales of representation, an intersection of mathematics, astronomy, chronometry, precision instrumentation, and a host of craft practices, maps in the European tradition constitute a distinctive system for apprehending the lineaments of the natural world: like science itself, they are stable but flexible, structured but expandable. The study of cartography-as practice, theory, metaphor-has been the subject of a fair bit of recent work in the history of science (one thinks here of Lesley Cormack, Jane Camerini, and James Moore, among others). There is reason to look forward to more such studies in the future.