TY - BOOK AU - Ephraim,Laura TI - Who Speaks for Nature?: On the Politics of Science SN - 9780812294682 AV - Q175.5 .E64 2018eb U1 - 303.48/3 23 PY - 2017///] CY - Philadelphia : PB - University of Pennsylvania Press, KW - Natural history KW - Philosophy KW - Nature KW - Political aspects KW - Political science KW - Science KW - POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory KW - bisacsh KW - History of Science KW - Natural History KW - Political Science KW - Public Policy N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Introduction. The Science Question in Political Theory --; Chapter 1. Earth to Arendt --; Chapter 2. Vico’s World of Nature --; Chapter 3. Descartes and Democracy --; Chapter 4. Hobbes’s Worldly Geometry of Politics --; Epilogue. Science and Politics at the End of the World --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index --; Acknowledgments; restricted access N2 - When natural scientists speak up in public about the material phenomena they have observed, measured, and analyzed in the lab or the field, they embody a distinctive version of political authority. Where does science derive its remarkably resilient, though often contested, capacity to give voice to nature? What efforts on the part of scientists and nonscientists alike determine who is regarded as a legitimate witness to material reality and whose speech is discounted as idle chatter, mere opinion, or noise?In Who Speaks for Nature?, Laura Ephraim reveals the roots of scientific authority in what she calls "world-building politics": the collection of practices through which scientists and citizens collaborate with and struggle against each other to engage natural things and events and to construct a shared yet heterogeneous world. Through innovative readings of some of the most important thinkers of science and politics of the near and distant past, including René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Giambattista Vico, and Hannah Arendt, Ephraim argues that the natural sciences are political because they are crucial sites in which the worldly relationships that bind together the human and nonhuman are inherited, augmented, and reconstructed.Who Speaks for Nature? opens a novel conversation between political theory, science, and technology studies and augments existing efforts by feminists, environmentalists, and democratic theorists to challenge the traditional binary separating nature and politics. In an age of climate change and climate-change denial, Ephraim brings theoretical understandings of politics to bear on real-world events and decisions and uncovers fresh insights into the place of scientists in public life UR - https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812294682 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780812294682 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/cover/covers/9780812294682.jpg ER -