This crucial intervention in political epistemology offers a comprehensive discussion of the multiple applicability of Gramscian concepts and categories to the historical, sociological, and cultural analysis of science. The authors argue that the perspective of hegemony and subalternity allows us to critically assess the political directedness of scientific practices as well as to reflect on the ideological status of disciplines that deal with science at a meta-level - historical, socio-historical, and epistemological. Contributors include: Massimiliano Badino, Javier Balsa, Lino Camprubi, Ana Carneiro, Luis Miguel Carolino, Riccardo Ciavolella, Roger Cooter, Alina-Sandra Cucu, Maria Paula Diogo, Isabel Jimenez Lucena, Annelies Lannoy, Jorge Molero Mesa, Agusti Nieto-Galan, Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Matteo Realdi, Jaume Sastre-Juan, Arne Schirrmacher, Ana Simoes, Carlos Tabernero Holgado, and Carlos Ziller Camenietzki.

This volume considers contingency as a historical category resulting from the combination of various intellectual elements - epistemological, philosophical, material, as well as theological and, broadly speaking, intellectual. With contributions ranging from fields as diverse as the histories of physics, astronomy, astrology, medicine, mechanics, physiology, and natural philosophy, it explores the transformation of the notion of contingency across the late-medieval, Renaissance, and the early modern period. Underpinned by a necessitated vision of nature, seventeenth century mechanism widely identified apparent natural irregularities with the epistemological limits of a certain explanatory framework. However, this picture was preceded by, and in fact emerged from, a widespread characterization of contingency as an ontological trait of nature, typical of late-Scholastic and Renaissance science. On these bases, this volume shows how epistemological categories, which are preconditions of knowledge as "historically-situated a priori" and, seemingly, self-evident, are ultimately rooted in time. Contingency is intrinsic to scientific practice. Whether observing the behaviour of a photon, diagnosing a patient, or calculating the orbit of a distant planet, scientists face the unavoidable challenge of dealing with data that differ from their models and expectations. However, epistemological categories are not fixed in time. Indeed, there is something fundamentally different in the way an Aristotelian natural philosopher defined a wonder or a "monstrous" birth as "contingent", a modern scientist defines the unexpected result of an experiment, and a quantum physicist the behavior of a photon. Although to each inquirer these instances appeared self-evidently contingent, each also employs the concept differently.

This book is an investigation of the ideological dimensions of the disciplinary discourses on science in line with the scholarly tradition of historical epistemology. It offers a programmatic treatment of the political-epistemological problematic along three entangled lines of inquiry: socio-historical, epistemological and historiographical. The book aims for a meta-level integration of the existing scholarship on the social and cultural history of science in order to consider the ways in which struggles for hegemony have constantly informed scientific discourses. This problematic is of primary relevance for scholars in Science Studies, philosophers, historians and sociologists of science, but would also be relevant for anybody interested in scientific culture and political theory.

This book is an investigation of the ideological dimensions of the disciplinary discourses on science in line with the scholarly tradition of historical epistemology. It offers a programmatic treatment of the political-epistemological problematic along three entangled lines of inquiry: socio-historical, epistemological and historiographical. The book aims for a meta-level integration of the existing scholarship on the social and cultural history of science in order to consider the ways in which struggles for hegemony have constantly informed scientific discourses. This problematic is of primary relevance for scholars in Science Studies, philosophers, historians and sociologists of science, but would also be relevant for anybody interested in scientific culture and political theory.