The objective image

Abstract

In his work, Galison approaches the historical development of objectivity as an important factor that affects the way we experience and imagine ourselves in communities of knowledge and in democratic societies. Prof. Peter Galison has demonstrated that scientific objectivity has a history and he traces this history from the early eighteenth century to the twentieth century through the use of atlas images and other visualization techniques. This interdisciplinary work focuses on how certain (scientific) truths emerged and came to be in competition with other discourses – such as religious truths – and how they affected collective knowledge and socio-political community formations.