A special section edited by Aleksei Pleshkov and Jan Surman is published in Studia Historiae Scientiarum
In the opening article, Aleksei Pleshkov (Poletayev Institute, HSE) and Jan Surman (Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences) propose considering academic reviewing as one of the communal academic practices and a vital genre of academic writing in which epistemic virtues have been cultivated. The authors discuss reviews as a form of institutionalized critique, which historians could use to trace the changing epistemic virtues within humanities, analogously to Lorraine Daston’s and Peter Galison’s treatment of atlases in their seminal work Objectivity as a marker of changing epistemic virtues in natural sciences and medicine. Based on Aristotle’s virtue theory and its neo-Aristotelian interpretation in the second half of the 20th century and its most recent applications in the field of history and philosophy of science, the authors propose a general conceptual framework for analyzing reviews in their historical dimension. Besides, Aleksei Pleshkov and Jan Surman contend that the analysis of reviews should be carried out taking into account their historical context of social, political, cultural, and media-environment. Otherwise, one may risk presupposing the existence of an autonomous, disconnected community of scholars.
HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE
· Aleksei Pleshkov, Jan Surman. Book reviews in the history of knowledge
· Christiaan Engberts. Scholarship, community formation and book reviews: The Literarisches Centralblatt as arena and meeting place
· Alexander Stoeger. Constructing the persona of the Naturwissenschaftler – German book reviews on galvanism
· Aleksei Lokhmatov. The academic virtues in public discussion: Adam Schaff and the campaign against the Lvov-Warsaw School in post-war Poland
· Richard L. Kremer, Ad Maas. A tale of reviews in two history of science journals
You can read articles on the Studia Historiae Scientiarum journal website
Aleksei A. Pleshkov