Peter Galison Quotes

Peter Louis Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in history of science and physics at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in both physics and in the history of science in 1983. His publications include Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics and Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time. His most recent book , co-authored with Lorraine Daston, is titled Objectivity.

Before moving to Harvard, Galison taught for several years at Stanford University, where he was professor of history, philosophy, and physics. He is considered part of the Stanford School of philosophy of science along with Ian Hacking, John Dupré, and Nancy Cartwright.

Galison developed a film for the History Channel on the development of the hydrogen bomb, and has done work on the intersection of science with other disciplines, in particular art and architecture. He is on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry and was a MacArthur Fellow in 1996.

✵ 1955

“To Donham, the case study stood squarely in the legal and cultural tradition of Anglo-American thought. Unlike French or Spanish law. Donham emphasized, English law was grounded on the doctrine of stare decisis, in which the written case decisions of the past shape, and instantiate, the law. Just as the recording of cases allowed English common law to break the arbitrariness of local law. Donham argued in 1925, business needed to universalize its procedures by itself adopting the case system. The chaos of local law that ruled in England before the common law. Donham contended, "is exactly the same situation that we have [in the world of business] where practically every large corporation is tightly hound by traditions which are precedents in its particular narrow field and narrow held only The recording of decisions from industry to industry [enables] us to start from facts and draw inferences from those facts; [it] will introduce principle… in the field of business to such an extent that it will control executive action in the field where executive action is haphazard or unprincipled or bound by narrow, instead of broad precedent and decision"”

Peter Galison

W. Donham, transcript of talk to the Association of Coll. School of Business Committee Reports and Other Literature, 5-7 May 1925. Harvard Business School, box 17, folder 10. 62
Source: Image and Logic, 1997, p. 57, footnote 66