How does a cultural-political understanding of science integrate socio-economic treatments? How can a historiography that takes subjectivity into account avoid the pitfall of post-modern relativism? The history of mechanics is a paradigmatic field to use in answering these questions and, in fact, it has always been at the center of much political-epistemological skirmish. This chapter first recounts the main motives and features of early twentieth-century social accounts of science. Further, it deals with the issue of how the need for a non-reductionist treatment of intellectual history (neither economicist nor monocausal) calls for an integration of the economic context and the political element for a more appropriate understanding of scientific development.
CITATION STYLE
Omodeo, P. D. (2018). Socio-Political Coordinates of Early-Modern Mechanics: A Preliminary Discussion. In Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science (Vol. 270, pp. 55–78). Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90345-3_3
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