Biographies of scientific objects / edited by Lorraine Daston.

Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, [2000], ©2000.

ix, 307 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

tThe coming into being of scientific objects / Lorraine Daston.-- Preternatural philosophy / Lorraine Daston.-- Mathematical entities in scientific discourse: Paulus Guldin and his Dissertatio de motu terrae / Rivka Feldhay.-- Dreams and self-consciousness: mapping the mind in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries / Doris Kaufmann.-- Mutations of the self in old regime and postrevolutionary France: from ame to moi to le moi / Jan Goldstein.-- The coming into being and passing away of value theories in economics (1776-1976) / Gérard Jorland.-- "An entirely new object of consciousness, of volition, of thought": the coming into being and (almost) passing away of "society" as a scientific object / Peter Wagner.-- "Sentimental pessimism" and ethnographic experience: or, why culture is not a disappearing "object" / Marshall Sahlins.-- How the ether spawned the microworld / Jed Z. Buchwald.-- Life insurance, medical testing, and the management of mortality / Theodore M. Porter.-- On the partial existence of existing and nonexisting objects / Bruno Latour.-- Cytoplasmic particles: the trajectory of a scientific object / Hans-Jörg Rheinberger.

Includes bibliographical references and index.