32 Further Reading
The most influential author who has written about the ways in which knowledge is shaped by social conditions is undoubtedly Michel Foucault. But it is difficult to find accounts of Foucault’s thinking that are easily approached by beginners. One might begin with the entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and follow up with Gary Gutting’s Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, was published in two volumes in 1945. Discussions and summaries of it can be found at several sites on the internet. It includes criticisms of Popper’s main ideas.
The views of the Victorians and the ways in which their own society shaped their science, and how the science shaped their society, can be found in George W. Stocking’s Victorian Anthropology (Free Press, 1987).
A fascinating account of the ways in which social prejudices affected the career of an amateur botanist and suffragette can be found in Tina Gianquitto’s “Botanical Smuts and Hermaphrodites: Lydia Becker, Darwin’s Botany, and Education Reform,” Isis 104 (2): 250-277 (2013).