Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s An Epistemology of the Concrete defines scientific knowledge as a historically situated experimental practice, produced through the reciprocal action of instruments, organisms, concepts, inscriptions and research communities. The foreword by Tim Lenoir situates Rheinberger within historical epistemology, a Franco-German tradition concerned with the concrete conditions through which scientific objects become thinkable, manipulable and conceptually productive . The central proposition is that science advances through experimental systems: material arrangements capable of generating unforeseen epistemic things at the frontier between knowledge and ignorance. This argument gains force through the prologue’s account of twentieth-century life sciences, where genetics and molecular biology emerge from dense assemblages of model organisms, apparatuses, laboratory protocols and interdisciplinary techniques. The decisive case study is the model organism. Rheinberger shows that organisms such as Drosophila, Ephestia, bacteria, viruses and tobacco mosaic virus become technical supports for general biological questions, selected for manipulability, accumulated knowledge and access to specific phenomena. Molecular biology further illustrates the thesis through ultracentrifugation, electron microscopy, chromatography, electrophoresis and liquid scintillation counting, whose instrumental configurations helped reshape the concepts of gene, information and biological specificity. Rheinberger’s epistemology therefore treats scientific objects as material-discursive hybrids, formed through recursion, trace, preparation and inscription. In conclusion, the concrete history of life science appears as an art of productive uncertainty, where experimental systems sustain controlled openness and allow concepts to acquire form through practice.
