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.

《物理学理论的目的与结构》是迪昂科学哲学的代表作。该书比较完整地展现了迪昂的科学哲学思想，是科学哲学的经典篇，是科学思想的里程碑。它的论题即使在今天看来依然是新鲜的和激动人心的，当今科学哲学讨论的诸多问题和提出的许多新颖命题，都能在其中找到思想源泉和智力酵素。难怪德布罗意这样认为：“迪昂论述物理学理论的著作值得大加赞誉，因为这是一部建立在作者的重大个人经验和一个无比强大的心智的敏锐判断基础上的著作，它包含着往往是非常正确和深邃的观点，甚至在我们不能没有限制地采纳它们的情况下，它们无论如何依然是有趣的，并为思想提供了足够的素材。”难怪内格尔如此评论:“迪昂的书是关于现代科学的哲学的最重要的经典著作之一，尽管自第一版出版以来已过去了半个世纪，但它还与目前的问题和当前思想的活跃源泉密切相关。”在内格尔如是估价之后又过了将近半个世纪，恕我孤陋寡闻，似乎在同一论题的著作中，还没有一本能在内容的丰富和思想的新颖方面超越迪昂。

本书是萨顿科学史经典著作之一：这些文章虽然写作年代相去颇远但有共同的精神和意向一以贯之主题包括知识的统一，科学的国际性，艺术家、宗教家、科学家的亲近关系，艺术史、宗教史、科学史是如何作为人类历史的根本所在，等等：这些文章主题开阔方法多样能够使初学者甚至外行生动感受到科学史的各种形式以及我们可望从科学史获得哪些益处。

造纸术与印刷术、指南针、火药并称为中国古代科学技术的四大发明，在推动中国和全世界的发展中起了巨大作用。潘吉星研究员一直坚持在纸史领域耕耘，特别偏重对纸史中技术和应用部分的研究，解决造纸技术起源及其发展问题，探讨各种纸原料、制造技术、在社会上用途的推广和印刷中应用等，并对纸的西传及其影响作了深入的研究。本书中，作者采用新的研究方法，将文献考证、考古发掘、古代实物标本的分析化验、模拟实验、传统技术调查、中外技术比较和技术原理探讨等七个方面结合起来，作交叉的综合研究，同时还结合有关社会历史背景进行分析。全书还配以精美图片200多幅，大多是各个时代出土的纸以及印刷品。