In this conclusion, Stephen T. Casper reviews themes and findings from the entirety of the collection. He situates the book as a whole as a provocation to reconsider the traditional historiographic approach in the history of the human sciences.

Chapter 6 examines the devastating toll that the development of the hydropower nation took on people’s lives. In Henan, Shanxi, and Shaanxi, over 430,000 people were forced to leave their homes and communities due to the construction of the Sanmenxia Dam. This chapter focuses on the resettlement of over 7,000 residents from Henan to Gansu, revealing how the state’s pursuit of hydroelectricity not only altered the Yellow River’s physical landscape but also caused irreparable harm to the affected communities.

Experimental philosophy was institutionalized as a discipline in Central Europe with the first seminars and professorships. Major requested but did not receive a professorship in this discipline, yet he taught one of its first seminars. At the beginning of each meeting, Major lectured on experimental norms, but then spent most time experimenting upon objects in his collection in a purposefully nonmethodical way. The seminar integrated current research by Major and his students. Whirling from one experiment to the next, Major dramatized shifting, probabilistic knowledge and tried to lure students away from a priori systems. He often deployed phenomena from global craft or even street performances, but he distinguished experimental philosophy as a liberal discipline from its application to use. Major’s son-in-law, Wilhelm Ulrich Waldschmidt, became the first chair of experimental philosophy in Kiel in 1693. He taught many of the same experiments as Major, but, like others of his generation, he rearranged them to lend experimental philosophy a much more methodical air. A pedagogical presentation of experimental method developed distinct from the practice of experimental research.

By arguing for an earlier development of the research university, this book questions previous accounts that have seen the state or the corporation as the main drivers of the making of research. Whereas other accounts see a turn toward useful knowledge as a corrective to the overly bookish or pedantic knowledge of professors, academics themselves reformed scholarly approaches both in opposition to their academic forebears and to the entanglement of knowledge with use. Both theory and practice could be a bias. This book highlights the research university as a place to cultivate and protect critical thinking from political and economic pressure. Even proponents of useful knowledge adopted academic techniques because by improving the quality of knowledge they made it more useful. The early modern development of dynamic epistemic superstructures suggests approaches to interdisciplinarity and continuing knowledge change today. The book encourages academics to participate in knowledge reforms from a position of epistemic humility and a self-critical search for biases. It proposes how curation of knowledge still represents a viable approach, but one that could be reformulated to address the biases of the past.