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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

"Grounded in biology, philosophy of biology, and metaphysics, The Units of Life is a stellar package of research. The prose is precise, accessible, and graceful.... Get the book and be delighted." Subrena Smith's review: link.springer.com/article/10.1... @ellenclarke.bsky.social

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 35, Issue 2 of Metascience! Access the full issue here: link.springer.com/journal/1101... Find the table of contents here: hpsleeds.wordpress.com/2026/09/21/m...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

In Reading the World, Rose "uncover[s] a dynamic – and at times divisive – world in which masculinity and social status acted alongside national and imperial politics to define the shape and character of the scientific information." Easterby-Smith's review: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

"Read together," Qureshi's Vanished and Birkhead's The Great Auk, "show that the destruction of species cannot be separated from the cultures, values, and historical forces that produce ecological loss." Mark V. Barrow's double review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Science is now facing, "not the sort of healthy skepticism that leads to better answers, but rather an outright rejection of well-established scientific consensus. Organized Science Denial examines this broader trend of distrust in science." Gong & Potochnik's review: tinyurl.com/mr2kpche

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

In The Arrival of the Fittest Jim Endersby shows that "audiences and readers (as broadly defined as possible) have been as important as scientists in shaping visions of what biology should be, what it should be for, and for whom progress should be pursued." Review: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

In The Sciences in Islamicate Societies in Context, Sonja Brentjes "shows a continuity and adaptation of the sciences over the centuries, thereby bringing welcome nuance to the familiar decline narratives." Ahmed Aarab's review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

In Volumes 13 and 14 of The Correspondence of John Tyndall, "Tyndall himself comes across as both infuriating and charming [...] and absolutely determined to pursue what he regarded as 'the truth' in scientific debates." Read Sophie Forgan's review: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Sam Scheiner's omnibus review looks at three books which "[a]ll address, in one way or another, how the form and function of living organisms are determined and affected by factors that are both internal and external to individuals." Read the review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

"[I]t is philosophically valid, and of great interest, to ask: what does the phenomenology of psychedelic life tell us about reality?" On Drugs by Justin Smith-Ruiu probes this question. Access Roger Smith's review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

"Modern life is sweet. Sugar is everywhere." Steven Shapin reviews David Singerman's BSHS Pickstone Prize-winning Unrefined, alongside Susan Greehalgh's Soda Science, in a double review titled, "The Sweet Smell of Excess." Get the full review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Joris Merclis' omnibus review, "Chemistry and biography: the view from the middle," on recent works on Armstrong, Haller, and Edison concludes that these "influential yet lesser-known scientists deserve to be taken as seriously as their more famous contemporaries." tinyurl.com/yc55a364

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

"Modeling the Possible makes a significant contribution to the literature on modal modelling by convening what amounts to an impressively thoughtful and well-informed symposium on the philosophical puzzles around modelling and possibility." Marco Casali's review: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Juan Mayoral's Kuhn biography shows that his "philosophical views were not born fully formed but emerged from a lifetime of grappling with questions concerning belief, rationality and historical understanding that first arose in his youth." Zhang and Shen's review: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

James Powell's Faith in Fallacy focusses "not merely the existence of scepticism toward scientific expertise, but the ways in which such scepticism can become institutionalized through state power." Laida Arbizu Aguirre's review: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

"There was no such thing as the Enlightenment and this is a book about it." Adrian Wilson reviews J.C.D. Clark's The Enlightenment, concluding: historians should "drop “the Enlightenment” as an organizing category. We can, and we will, do very much better without it." tinyurl.com/4h55n2km

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

"There is wide agreement that general relativity is background independent, but at least seven (and counting) mathematical definitions [...] It is into these murky waters that James Read leads us in this dense yet rewarding short monograph." Thébault's review: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

"In Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism, Alma Steingart compellingly weaves together mathematical and high modernisms, unifying their contradictions and methodological disagreements into a single account." Aiden Sagerman's review: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Thomas Morel shows that it was "not primarily gentlemen naturalists, philosophers, administrators, bureaucrats or labourers [...] [but] a middle stratum of mobile mining surveyors whose practices taught others how to see the earth." Hillman's review: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

On the Riddle of Life challenges the "comfortable, and largely canonical, historical lesson" that "the progress of biology has largely consisted of the gradual rendering of all forms of vitalism as untenable." Esposito's review: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

Metascience is pleased to announce the publication of Volume 35, Issue 1 — our first issue of 2026! Find the full issue here: link.springer.com/journal/1101...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

Tulodziecki’s goal is to show "just how much underdetermination survives the concession that theoretical virtues are epistemic, and indeed that this is where the most significant, interesting, and pressing forms of underdetermination were always to be found." Stanford's review: tinyurl.com/2jxva2a3

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

Ken Aizawa's approach in Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretations is "groundbreaking in envisioning abductive inferences in science as instances of singular compositional confirmations that individually provide defeasible support for a hypothesis." Mace's review: tinyurl.com/588mp972

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

The backstage world of the Nobel Prize is the subject of two new pieces in Metascience, by the historian of science Richard Burkhardt, Jr (on the early 70s awards) and the Nobellist Martin Chalfie (on the reputational consequences of winning). Both pieces now available online: tinyurl.com/59vhu4n6

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

"A primary merit of the work is the heuristic clarity it brings to a field often clouded by conceptual slippage." For more from Daniele Pizzocaro's review of a new philosophical study of absolute magnitudes, see link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

"Science doesn't self-correct because it follows a magical method guaranteeing truth. Rather, it self-corrects because scientific communities cultivate dispositions toward criticism and revision." Byron Hyde's double review of Bárdos & Tuboly and Fernandez-Beanato: tinyurl.com/5e8v5eh7

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Operationism in Psychology's "distinctive contribution is to elevate descriptive and taxonomic work in psychology to first-class epistemic status and to dispel caricatures of operationism as a failed positivist relic." Thomas Spiteri's review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

"Revisiting the Eclipse of Darwinism offers a stimulating re-appraisal of a historiographic category that, for all its limitations, continues to influence how we see the history of evolutionary theory today." Elizabeth Schulz's review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

Science Interrupted calls "for a science that embraces fragility as a productive force by the establishing of environments open to uncertainty and adaptability, while recognising the agency and capacity of groups too often marginalised or overlooked." Yixuan Li's review: tinyurl.com/mpptnp2k

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

Energy in the Early Modern Home "challenges linear and simplistic images of an easy transition to a 'material modernity', and instead reveals the effectiveness of cultural anchors, social differences and conventions." Margareth Lanzinger's review: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

In Rebecca Lemov's Instability of Truth, truth "is not there to be stable or unstable, but is continuously created, affirmed and promoted. In this new study, it is people who emerge as unstable." Read Roger Smith's review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

In Disputed Inheritance, "the inheritance being disputed is, as expected, Mendel’s 1866 paper [....] But there is a second inheritance that is also being disputed in Radick’s book—cultural inheritance—and that is a riveting and important battle." Scott Gilbert's review here: tinyurl.com/2uftxzrb

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Evolution Evolving "has this rare quality of leaving the reader not only better informed, but also better equipped to see evolutionary problems from an entirely new vantage point." Read Simon Oklholm's review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

"Historians of science interested in the 1980s [...] can profitably learn from one another by comparing how scientists of different stripes moved through the greedy waters they swam in." Joseph Martin's review of Greedy Science: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

In Rivals, Lorraine Daston "shows again and again how well she understands both the roles of social and disciplinary elites and the power politics of science." Mitchell Ash's review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

Peter Bowler's Evolution for the People "does justice to all of the hard work that has been put into excavating the lives and works of popularizers of evolution." Read Bernard Lightman's review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

"There are times when one could hear Morgan Freeman’s voice dubbed in saying something like, “Little did Einstein realize that the problem was not with this approach..."" Read Steven Gimbel's review of recent Einsteiniana: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

"The American Phage Group (APG) is arguably one of the most famous, almost mythic, biological research groups of the twentieth century." Neeraja Sankaran reviews a biography of founding APG member, Salvador Luria, and a history of the group itself: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

The stories told in Women in the History of Quantum Physics "add new knowledge to how quantum physics was cultivated by marginal figures sometimes under difficult circumstances." Read Helge Kragh's review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

We are excited to announce the publication of Volume 34, Issue 3 of Metascience! Access the full issue here: link.springer.com/journal/1101... Access the Table of Contents here: hpsleeds.wordpress.com/2025/11/28/m...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

"Here is an exciting new way to think about the century that produced Darwinism." Janet Browne's review of Martin Hewitt's Darwinism's Generations: link.springer.com/article/10.1... @vicmanch.bsky.social

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

"Reading the book, one can simply enjoy being taken on a tour through the bewildering diversity of projects and ideas that preoccupied Linnaeus throughout his life [...] The biography, however, also challenges some widely held assumptions about Linnaeus."

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

"Lab Dog is a landmark study. Brad Bolman’s history of what might seem a niche subject is, in fact, an original and illuminating exploration of key aspects of the biological and biomedical sciences in the twentieth century." Read Michael Worboys' review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

"Neil Barton's main thesis in Iterative Conceptions of Set is that there is a tension at the heart of the iterative conception, whose resolution requires us to decide between at least two independently plausible but mutually exclusive principles of set-construction."

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

In Matthew Wiseman's Frontier Science, "the Arctic – or the more nebulous geographical term “the North” (33–35) – takes centre stage as the crux in the relationship between science and the Canadian military […] both as a natural laboratory and as a borderland that required protection."

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

Myles W. Jackson's "Broadcasting Fidelity" is "a beautiful academic study on the genesis and life of a complex technical object, well located in the interweaving of its scientific, technical, social, cultural and political contexts and attentive to the play of its various actors."

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

"Finding longitude at sea vexed navigators and captains for centuries [...] Now five distinguished historians have sought to understand how the difficult quest to discover a workable technology developed from there."

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

"Roby hypothetically imagines three historical contexts—Ptolemaic, Early Roman, and later Imperial Alexandria—and explores which aspects of Hero’s corpus would align with each of these settings."

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

"These findings put one more nail in the by-now well-sealed coffin of the myth of the disembodied, disengaged scientist who gains knowledge through contemplation alone." Rose Trappes on an attempt to centre bodies in our conception of the scientific enterprise: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Metascience @metasciencejournal.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

From the print edition of the current issue of Metascience, here's a version of the Table of Contents that lists the books under review in each essay as well as the essay titles:

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