Abstract Summary
Experience has long been a key area in the history of science, from accounts of the early modern rise of experimental philosophy to more recent histories of the senses. Yet specific everyday experiences superficially unrelated to scientific knowledge production, such as taking a walk or having a conversation, have remained mostly unconsidered by the discipline. Following the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, these experiences form the very stuff of the lifeworld that is the "grounding soil" of the sciences; no matter the effort to create a separate objective-scientific world, the sciences remain tethered to this experiential fundament. Might a historical phenomenology join historical epistemology as a significant approach within the history of science? How might critical and textured accounts of everyday experiences qua experiences affect our understanding of the production, circulation, and consumption of scientific knowledge? Is there a distinction between instances in which such experiences were the object of investigation and when they were more broadly part of the lifeworld underpinning scientific activity? Would the diffuse nature of *experience* as a concept help or hinder such a project? Such an approach would build on histories of the everyday as well as material and spatial histories; it would in addition further connections with the history of medicine and the history of technology, where medically pertinent and technologically constructed experiences have always played an important role. This roundtable brings together scholars working across time and the sciences who have prominently incorporated such experiences into their work.
