Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s An Epistemology of the Concrete presents scientific knowledge as a material-discursive practice generated through experimental systems, model organisms, instruments and historically situated concepts. The foreword by Tim Lenoir emphasises Rheinberger’s decisive contribution to historical epistemology: science advances through recursive configurations in which objects emerge from technical arrangements, instead of appearing as ready-made entities awaiting discovery . The prologue develops this proposition through the life sciences, especially genetics and molecular biology, where organisms, apparatuses and laboratory inscriptions become active participants in knowledge production. The visual cover’s moth imagery and the contents’ emphasis on Pisum, Eudorina, Ephestia and tobacco mosaic virus already stage the book’s central case study: the model organism as a living technical object, selected, cultivated and transformed so that general biological questions may become experimentally tractable. Rheinberger’s account of molecular biology is especially instructive: its emergence depended upon assemblages of ultracentrifugation, electron microscopy, chromatography, electrophoresis, liquid scintillation counting, viruses, bacteria and interdisciplinary cooperation, which together produced new concepts of gene, information and biological specificity. His notion of phenomenotechnique, inherited from Bachelard, gives the argument its philosophical force: phenomena are technically constituted through instruments that embody prior knowledge while opening unforeseen futures. In conclusion, Rheinberger offers an epistemology grounded in concrete practices, where science becomes a historical art of configuring uncertainty, sustaining productive vagueness and allowing epistemic things to acquire form through experimental life.
