How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science

How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science PDF Author: George A. Reisch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521837972
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
This in-depth study of the development of philosophy of science studies in the United States during the Cold War documents the political vitality of logical empiricism and Otto Neurath's Unity of Science Movement when the movement emigrated to the U.S. in the 1930s. It follows its de-politicization by a convergence of intellectual, cultural and political forces in the 1950s. The volume will be of interest to philosophers and historians of science, as well as scholars of Cold War studies.

How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science

How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science PDF Author: George A. Reisch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521837972
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Get Book

Book Description
This in-depth study of the development of philosophy of science studies in the United States during the Cold War documents the political vitality of logical empiricism and Otto Neurath's Unity of Science Movement when the movement emigrated to the U.S. in the 1930s. It follows its de-politicization by a convergence of intellectual, cultural and political forces in the 1950s. The volume will be of interest to philosophers and historians of science, as well as scholars of Cold War studies.

How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science

How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science PDF Author: George A. Reisch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521837979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
This intriguing and ground-breaking book is the first in-depth study of the development of philosophy of science in the United States during the Cold War. It documents the political vitality of logical empiricism and Otto Neurath's Unity of Science Movement when these projects emigrated to the US in the 1930s and follows their de-politicization by a convergence of intellectual, cultural and political forces in the 1950s. Students of logical empiricism and the Vienna Circle treat these as strictly intellectual non-political projects. In fact, the refugee philosophers of science were highly active politically and debated questions about values inside and outside science, as a result of which their philosophy of science was scrutinized politically both from within and without the profession, by such institutions as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. It will prove absorbing reading to philosophers and historians of science, intellectual historians, and scholars of Cold War studies.

Pursuing the Unity of Science

Pursuing the Unity of Science PDF Author: Harmke Kamminga
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317073061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
From 1918 to the late 1940s, a host of influential scientists and intellectuals in Europe and North America were engaged in a number of far-reaching unity of science projects. In this period of deep social and political divisions, scientists collaborated to unify sciences across disciplinary boundaries and to set up the international scientific community as a model for global political co-operation. They strove to align scientific and social objectives through rational planning and to promote unified science as the driving force of human civilization and progress. This volume explores the unity of science movement, providing a synthetic view of its pursuits and placing it in its historical context as a scientific and political force. Through a coherent set of original case studies looking at the significance of various projects and strategies of unification, the book highlights the great variety of manifestations of this endeavour. These range from unifying nuclear physics to the evolutionary synthesis, and from the democratization of scientific planning to the utopianism of H.G. Wells's world state. At the same time, the collection brings out the substantive links between these different pursuits, especially in the form of interconnected networks of unification and the alignment of objectives among them. Notably, it shows that opposition to fascism, using the instrument of unified science, became the most urgent common goal in the 1930s and 1940s. In addressing these issues, the book makes visible important historical developments, showing how scientists participated in, and actively helped to create, an interwar ideology of unification, and bringing to light the cultural and political significance of this enterprise.

Science Studies during the Cold War and Beyond

Science Studies during the Cold War and Beyond PDF Author: Elena Aronova
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137559438
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This book examines the ways in which studies of science intertwined with Cold War politics, in both familiar and less familiar “battlefields” of the Cold War. Taken together, the essays highlight two primary roles for science studies as a new field of expertise institutionalized during the Cold War in different political regimes. Firstly, science studies played a political role in cultural Cold War in sustaining as well as destabilizing political ideologies in different political and national contexts. Secondly, it was an instrument of science policies in the early Cold War: the studies of science were promoted as the underpinning for the national policies framed with regard to both global geopolitics and local national priorities. As this book demonstrates, however, the wider we cast our net, extending our histories beyond the more researched developments in the Anglophone West, the more complex and ambivalent both the “science studies” and “the Cold War” become outside these more familiar spaces. The national stories collected in this book may appear incommensurable with what we know as science studies today, but these stories present a vantage point from which to pluralize some of the visions that were constitutive to the construction of “Cold War” as a juxtaposition of the liberal democracies in the “West” and the communist “East.”

The Philosophy of Susanne Langer

The Philosophy of Susanne Langer PDF Author: Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350030589
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
This book is a comprehensive study of one of the most insightful and fertile but also most neglected philosophers of the twentieth century, Susanne Langer. Failure to recognise Langer's seminal philosophical sources has led to frequent misinterpretations and misunderstandings of her unique philosophical thought. Beginning with an overview of Langer's life and education, this study provides a much-needed explanation of how Langer's thinking was shaped by four seminal sources: her mentors Henry Sheffer and Alfred North Whitehead and the European philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Langer's ability to unite seemingly disparate fields such logic, art, and embodied cognition around the notion of symbolic form, places aesthetics not at the margins of philosophy but at its very centre. By locating Langer's work in the broader context of major developments in twentieth-century European and American philosophy, Dengerink Chaplin shows how she was often ahead of her time. Shedding new light on Langer as an American philosopher whose innovative thought crosses the customary boundaries between analytic and continental philosophy, this book confirms why she continues to have relevance today.

Working Knowledge

Working Knowledge PDF Author: Joel Isaac
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674065220
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The human sciences in the English-speaking world have been in a state of crisis since the Second World War. The battle between champions of hard-core scientific standards and supporters of a more humanistic, interpretive approach has been fought to a stalemate. Joel Isaac seeks to throw these contemporary disputes into much-needed historical relief. In Working Knowledge he explores how influential thinkers in the twentieth century's middle decades understood the relations among science, knowledge, and the empirical study of human affairs. For a number of these thinkers, questions about what kinds of knowledge the human sciences could produce did not rest on grand ideological gestures toward "science" and "objectivity" but were linked to the ways in which knowledge was created and taught in laboratories and seminar rooms. Isaac places special emphasis on the practical, local manifestations of their complex theoretical ideas. In the case of Percy Williams Bridgman, Talcott Parsons, B. F. Skinner, W. V. O. Quine, and Thomas Kuhn, the institutional milieu in which they constructed their models of scientific practice was Harvard University. Isaac delineates the role the "Harvard complex" played in fostering connections between epistemological discourse and the practice of science. Operating alongside but apart from traditional departments were special seminars, interfaculty discussion groups, and non-professionalized societies and teaching programs that shaped thinking in sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, science studies, and management science. In tracing this culture of inquiry in the human sciences, Isaac offers intellectual history at its most expansive.

Science and Technology in the Global Cold War

Science and Technology in the Global Cold War PDF Author: Naomi Oreskes
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262326116
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
Investigations of how the global Cold War shaped national scientific and technological practices in fields from biomedicine to rocket science. The Cold War period saw a dramatic expansion of state-funded science and technology research. Government and military patronage shaped Cold War technoscientific practices, imposing methods that were project oriented, team based, and subject to national-security restrictions. These changes affected not just the arms race and the space race but also research in agriculture, biomedicine, computer science, ecology, meteorology, and other fields. This volume examines science and technology in the context of the Cold War, considering whether the new institutions and institutional arrangements that emerged globally constrained technoscientific inquiry or offered greater opportunities for it. The contributors find that whatever the particular science, and whatever the political system in which that science was operating, the knowledge that was produced bore some relation to the goals of the nation-state. These goals varied from nation to nation; weapons research was emphasized in the United States and the Soviet Union, for example, but in France and China scientific independence and self-reliance dominated. The contributors also consider to what extent the changes to science and technology practices in this era were produced by the specific politics, anxieties, and aspirations of the Cold War. Contributors Elena Aronova, Erik M. Conway, Angela N. H. Creager, David Kaiser, John Krige, Naomi Oreskes, George Reisch, Sigrid Schmalzer, Sonja D. Schmid, Matthew Shindell, Asif A. Siddiqi, Zuoyue Wang, Benjamin Wilson

Rebel Genius

Rebel Genius PDF Author: Tara Abraham
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262335395
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The life and work of a scientist who spent his career crossing disciplinary boundaries—from experimental neurology to psychiatry to cybernetics to engineering. Warren S. McCulloch (1898–1969) adopted many identities in his scientific life—among them philosopher, poet, neurologist, neurophysiologist, neuropsychiatrist, collaborator, theorist, cybernetician, mentor, engineer. He was, writes Tara Abraham in this account of McCulloch's life and work, “an intellectual showman,” and performed this part throughout his career. While McCulloch claimed a common thread in his work was the problem of mind and its relationship to the brain, there was much more to him than that. In Rebel Genius, Abraham uses McCulloch's life as a window on a past scientific age, showing the complex transformations that took place in American brain and mind science in the twentieth century—particularly those surrounding the cybernetics movement. Abraham describes McCulloch's early work in neuropsychiatry, and his emerging identity as a neurophysiologist. She explores his transformative years at the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute and his work with Walter Pitts—often seen as the first iteration of “artificial intelligence” but here described as stemming from the new tradition of mathematical treatments of biological problems. Abraham argues that McCulloch's dual identities as neuropsychiatrist and cybernetician are inseparable. He used the authority he gained in traditional disciplinary roles as a basis for posing big questions about the brain and mind as a cybernetician. When McCulloch moved to the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, new practices for studying the brain, grounded in mathematics, philosophy, and theoretical modeling, expanded the relevance and ramifications of his work. McCulloch's transdisciplinary legacies anticipated today's multidisciplinary field of cognitive science.

The Politics of Paradigms

The Politics of Paradigms PDF Author: George A. Reisch
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438473672
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
Uncovers long-ignored political themes—ideology, propaganda, mind control, and Orwellian history—at work within the pages of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The Politics of Paradigms shows that America’s most famous and influential book about science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions of 1962, was inspired and shaped by Thomas Kuhn’s political interests, his relationship with the influential cold warrior James Bryant Conant, and America’s McCarthy-era struggle to resist and defeat totalitarian ideology. Through detailed archival research, Reisch shows how Kuhn’s well-known theories of paradigms, crises, and scientific revolutions emerged from within urgent political worries—on campus and in the public sphere—about the invisible, unconscious powers of ideology, language, and history to shape the human mind and its experience of the world. “This book raises and explores important questions about the ideological background of some of the most important work in the philosophy of science in the twentieth century. It challenges conventional wisdom about the ideological neutrality of that work.” — Peter S. Fosl, editor of The Big Lebowski and Philosophy: Keeping Your Mind Limber with Abiding Wisdom

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine PDF Author: Miriam Solomon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 131751985X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine is a comprehensive guide to topics in the fields of epistemology and metaphysics of medicine. It examines traditional topics such as the concept of disease, causality in medicine, the epistemology of the randomized controlled trial, the biopsychosocial model, explanation, clinical judgment and phenomenology of medicine and emerging topics, such as philosophy of epidemiology, measuring harms, the concept of disability, nursing perspectives, race and gender, the metaphysics of Chinese medicine, and narrative medicine. Each of the 48 chapters is written especially for this volume and with a student audience in mind. For pedagogy and clarity, each chapter contains an extended example illustrating the ideas discussed. This text is intended for use as a reference for students in courses in philosophy of medicine and philosophy of science, and pairs well with The Routledge Companion to Bioethics for use in medical humanities and social science courses.