本书以耶稣会士和天文学为主题，系统查阅研读了国内外所藏清代历算著作、官方文献和清人文集，并与欧洲所藏第一手西文档案资料互证，在全球史和跨文化的视野下系统阐述天主教传教士与欧洲天文学传入中国的诸面相。
作者试图将天文学传播置于政治史、社会史和宗教史的语境中加以讨论，完整勾勒清代近两百年间欧洲天文学在华传播的历程。通过案例，生动展现知识和权力交织的复杂背景，进而揭示了康熙皇帝如何通过西学来达到控制汉人和洋人之目的；深入分析了皇子、传教士、钦天监官员和士大夫群体在知识传播中所扮演的不同角色。

Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences—and show how the concept differs from its alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images.
From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences—from anatomy to crystallography—are those featured in scientific atlases, the compendia that teach practitioners what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology.
As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity—or truth-to-nature or trained judgment—is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to anyone interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity—and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically.

近年来，随着中国学术界的发展，特别对西方学术资源的系统引入、借鉴和互证，在科技史与科技哲学的学术界内，传统的那种刻板的、脱离文化环境的、不食人间烟火的科学形象早已被颠覆，科学史与技术史已经越来越多地被置入多元的文化环境之内被考察，科学、技术与文化环境之互动关系早已成为学界的常识。
本书把学术界的前沿成就体现到通俗读物之中，立足于科技史与科技哲学界的前沿成果和优秀理念，摒弃虚构的编造和刻板的叙事，把科学、技术置于文化环境内考察，形成一本兼具学术性与通俗性的作品。