Abstract
Academic reviewing, one of the communal academic practices, is a vital genre, in which epistemic virtues have been cultivated. In our article, we discuss reviews as a form of institutionalized critique, which historians could use to trace the changing epistemic virtues within humanities. We propose to use them 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, as well as on its most recent applications in the field of history and philosophy of science, we propose a general conceptual framework for analyzing reviews in their historical dimension. Besides, we 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 risks presupposing the existence of an autonomous, disconnected community of scholars.
Highlights
Book review is an academic genre of a long history, and of various functions
We focus on the connection between virtues and reviews
We introduce our idea of connecting book reviews to the discussion on epistemic virtues in humanities, especially by analogy with the discussion in history of natural sciences symbolized by the research on objectivity.[7]
Summary
Book review is an academic genre of a long history, and of various functions. They have been functioning since the 17th century[1], when the genre of printed reviews appeared, up to the online versions nowadays. This paper, and the section of Studia Historiae Scientiarum it prefaces, intends to spark interest in reviews as a communal academic practice, becoming a source for understanding the moral economy of modern sciences and humanities in particular. We introduce our idea of connecting book reviews to the discussion on epistemic virtues in humanities, especially by analogy with the discussion in history of natural sciences symbolized by the research on objectivity.[7] we discuss some examples of book reviews and how their media coverage and social context relate to the virtues they express
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