The late Kanamori Osamu pushed against historical and philosophical boundaries in his extensive scientific writings. His recent series of edited volumes brings together a cross-section of historians and philosophers of science, technology, and medicine. Over the course of thirteen essays and close to a thousand pages, the volumes’ contributors pursue the twentieth-century transformation of scientific disciplines in Japan alongside shifts in Japanese-language studies on the history and philosophy of science.
Three books are under review: a pair of Japanese-language edited volumes and a partial English-language translation of the first volume. Their titles offer trilingual glosses of themes in a chronological sweep: (1) kagaku shisōshi 科学思想史 in the early and late Shōwa period (Shōwa zenki/kōki no kagaku shisōshi 昭和前期・後期の科学思想史), (2) l’histoire de la pensée scientifique au Japon moderne, and (3) the history of scientific thought in modern Japan.
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