https://booksandideas.net// Books & Ideas is the English-language mirror website of La Vie des Idées, a free online journal which has gained a large readership and established itself in France as a major place for intellectual debate since 2007. en SPIP - www.spip.net https://booksandideas.net/local/cache-vignettes/L144xH68/siteon0-04014.png?1675949311 https://booksandideas.net// 68 144 https://booksandideas.net/Life-as-a-Puzzle https://booksandideas.net/Life-as-a-Puzzle 2024-09-19T07:30:00Z text/html en Bertrand Vaillant Philosophy living epistemology history of sciences biology Science Cairn.info <p>The complexity of contemporary biology is a source of wonder, fear, and misunderstanding. Thierry Hoquet reviews the major biological theories to help us think through the social implications of a science that is opening up fascinating, though not inevitable, horizons.</p> https://booksandideas.net/Secrets-of-the-Forest-and-a-Life https://booksandideas.net/Secrets-of-the-Forest-and-a-Life 2023-10-19T07:00:00Z text/html en Michel Gueldry environmentalism history of sciences Science <p>The current craze for trees and their capacity for mutual help owes much to Canadian forestry expert Suzanne Simard, whose book traces her professional and life journey.</p> https://booksandideas.net/Scholars-Between-Laughter-and-Tears https://booksandideas.net/Scholars-Between-Laughter-and-Tears 2019-11-11T08:00:00Z text/html en Volny Fages History research epistemology history of sciences Institut français emotion <p>Scholars are not just thinking machines. They laugh; they are anxious, angry, or afraid; they become friends with their colleagues. Researchers experience many emotions but these are mainly ignored, as though they had nothing to do with the process that produces knowledge.</p> https://booksandideas.net/Laborious-Nature https://booksandideas.net/Laborious-Nature 2015-03-23T06:00:00Z text/html en Stéphane Van Damme History history of sciences Institut français Portraits <p>How do scientific discoveries and progress come about? Against an idealist and triumphalist conception of the history of science, Simon Schaffer's oeuvre examines science in the making, in close proximity to its practices and actors. Far from diminishing its prestige, this approach restores science to the central place it occupied in Old Regime societies.</p> https://booksandideas.net/The-Substance-of-Modernity https://booksandideas.net/The-Substance-of-Modernity 2015-02-26T06:30:00Z text/html en France food history of sciences <p>Emma Spary's new book <i>Feeding France</i> explores the rise of the food expert as public figure from the eighteenth century onwards, considering in particular the life-story of Antoine Parmentier, who introduced the potato into the country. The history of food consumption trends, which remains largely unexplored, tells a tale of persuasion, food crises and controversy.</p> https://booksandideas.net/Urban-Archaeology-A-Science-of-the https://booksandideas.net/Urban-Archaeology-A-Science-of-the 2013-01-14T09:00:00Z text/html en Clarisse Coulomb France Great Britain History town planning history of sciences <p>By comparing the ways in which Paris and London have updated their urban pasts since the seventeenth century, Stéphane Van Damme studies the birth of a science of the city. How has urban archaeology become simultaneously an object of mass consumption and a requirement for public action?</p> https://booksandideas.net/A-Moral-History-of-Human-Guinea https://booksandideas.net/A-Moral-History-of-Human-Guinea 2011-04-06T07:00:00Z text/html en Ariel Suhamy organized crime Philosophy science Marxism ethics experimentation history of sciences <p>Is scientific progress necessarily moral? In his history of experiments on human guinea pigs, Grégoire Chamayou attempts to show that modern science, although apparently neutral, has a share in the domination and exploitation of individuals whose existence is deemed insignificant.</p>