John H. Zammito
American historian of philosophy and science and intellectual historian, known for work on Kant, the German Enlightenment, and the emergence of anthropology and biology; professor at Rice University and author of works such as The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, and A Nice Derangement of Epistemes.
Books
This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.
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1. The Genesis Of Kant's Critique Of Judgment
A historical reconstruction of the intellectual context in which Kant forged his third Critique, showing how late eighteenth-century debates in aesthetics, natural history, and the emerging life sciences shaped his concepts of purposiveness and teleology. Drawing on correspondence, lecture materials, and scientific controversies, it traces how problems of organism and exchanges with contemporaries such as Blumenbach and Herder spurred the conception of judgment as a mediating faculty between nature and freedom. The study reframes the work as a historically contingent response to specific debates rather than a purely system-driven conclusion.
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2. A Nice Derangement Of Epistemes
Post-positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour
A critical intellectual history of post-positivist thought about science, this work traces the shift from the collapse of logical empiricism through paradigm debates and constructivist science studies to actor-network theory, showing how foundational certainty gave way to accounts centered on practice, culture, and power. Weighing the major controversies of the period, including the “science wars,” it challenges strong relativism and argues for a historically grounded realism that integrates social insights with attention to material constraints and the normative ambitions of scientific inquiry.
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