School · 29 thinkers
Science & Human Sciences
29 thinkers of Science & Human Sciences on the Agora star map, from Nicolaus Copernicus to Isabelle Stengers, in chronological order.
- 1473–1543Nicolaus Copernicus
The Earth is not the centre of the universe; it moves around the Sun like the other planets.
- 1564–1642Galileo Galilei
Nature follows mathematical laws, and we discover them by measuring and experimenting rather than by trusting ancient authorities.
- 1643–1727Isaac Newton
The same simple laws of motion and gravity govern a falling apple and the planets – and science should state laws, not invent hidden causes.
- 1809–1882Charles Darwin
For Darwin, all species, including humans, developed over vast time through natural selection, without any plan or designer.
- 1815–1887Johann Jakob Bachofen
For Bachofen, myths and tomb symbols were memories of forgotten stages of culture: behind the father-centred law of Greece and Rome lay an older “mother right”, with descent through the mother and cults of earth and night. Modern anthropology rejects a universal matriarchal stage.
- 1818–1897Jacob Burckhardt
For Burckhardt, history has no plan we could know; it can be studied as the interplay of three powers – state, religion, culture – and of the crises that shift them; in Renaissance Italy the state became a work of art and the individual discovered itself.
- 1832–1920Wilhelm Wundt
Wundt held that consciousness can be studied experimentally with the methods of physiology, while the higher products of communal life – language, myth and custom – need a historical method of their own.
- 1838–1916Ernst Mach
Science describes how our sensations hang together as simply as possible, and concepts that no experience can touch, like absolute space, should go.
- 1849–1901Paul Rée
Rée held that moral feelings, altruism among them, are not given by nature or reason but arose from habit and utility in the course of evolution – an account that Nietzsche took as his starting point and then rejected.
- 1856–1939Sigmund Freud
Much of what drives us is unconscious – hidden wishes and conflicts shape our behaviour, dreams and slips without our knowing.
- 1864–1944Jakob von Uexküll
For Uexküll, there is no single world shared by all living beings: each animal lives in its own Umwelt, made of the few signs it can perceive and act upon – the tick’s world consists of three.
- 1866–1929Aby Warburg
Warburg held that images store the energy of past cultures: gestures of passion from antiquity, the Pathosformeln, return in Renaissance art charged anew; culture, in his view, oscillates between magical fear and rational distance, and images open or close the ‘thinking space’ between them.
- 1870–1952Maria Montessori
For Montessori, the child is not an empty vessel but builds itself: given a prepared environment, freedom of choice and materials suited to its stage of development, it learns by its own activity, and the adult’s first task is to observe.
- 1872–1945Johan Huizinga
Culture arises in and as play: law, war, poetry and philosophy grew out of contests and rituals with their own rules, time and space; history should grasp how people of an age lived and felt – the late Middle Ages were an autumn, not a dawn.
- 1874–1945Ernst Cassirer
Humans are symbol-making animals: we never meet reality raw but always through myth, language, art and science.
- 1875–1961C. G. Jung
For Jung, beneath the personal unconscious lies a collective unconscious shared by all humans, whose archetypes – shadow, anima and animus, the self – shape dreams, myths and religions; psychic wholeness comes through individuation, a lifelong dialogue in which consciousness integrates these images.
- 1879–1955Albert Einstein
Space and time are not fixed and absolute but depend on the observer’s motion – and physics must match experience, not intuition.
- 1884–1962Gaston Bachelard
Scientific knowledge is not given by experience but built against it: every science has to overcome the obstacles of common sense and of its own earlier certainties.
- 1891–1976Michael Polanyi
We can know more than we can tell: all knowledge, science included, rests on tacit skills and personal commitment, and objectivity is reached through responsible knowers and their communities, not by eliminating them.
- 1896–1980Jean Piaget
Knowledge is neither innate nor copied from the world but built by the knower, through actions coordinated into ever more general structures; children pass through stages of thought, and obedience to adults’ rules gives way to a morality of cooperation and mutual respect.
- 1896–1934Lev Vygotsky
Every higher mental function appears twice: first between people, then within the child; language and other signs are the tools through which a social world becomes an individual mind, and good teaching runs ahead of development.
- 1904–1995Georges Canguilhem
Being healthy does not mean being average; it means being able to cope with change and to set new norms – disease is a narrower way of living, not just a deviation in degree.
- 1912–1954Alan Turing
Whatever can be computed by following rules step by step can be computed by one simple kind of machine – and instead of asking whether machines think, we should ask whether they can converse indistinguishably from a human.
- 1923–2006Reinhart Koselleck
For Koselleck, concepts do not only register history but help to shape it; in the modern age, which he dated to a “saddle period” around 1750–1850, expectations broke away from experience, so that history appeared as an open, accelerating process that could be made.
- 1928–2018Hayden White
For White, historians do not find stories in the past but make them: the same events can be emplotted as romance, tragedy, comedy or satire, and the choice between such accounts rests finally on aesthetic or moral grounds, not on the evidence alone.
- 1935–2025Sandra Harding
All knowledge starts from a social position, and research that begins from the lives of the marginalised is more objective, not less.
- b. 1944Donna Haraway
The lines between human, animal and machine are blurring, all knowledge is tied to where it comes from, and we must live with other species.
- 1947–2022Bruno Latour
Scientific facts are produced in laboratories by networks of people and things – and the split between nature and society was never real.
- b. 1949Isabelle Stengers
The sciences are not a neutral court but inventive practices: an experiment succeeds when it gets a phenomenon to answer the question put to it; no single practice should speak for “nature”, and cosmopolitics slows decisions down so that all those affected can be heard.