Scientific culture in Europe and the refugee generation -- Germany and Weimar Berlin as the City of Science -- Origins of a social perspective: doing physical chemistry in Weimar Berlin -- Chemical dynamics and social dynamics in Berlin and Manchester -- Liberalism and the economic foundations of the "Republic of Science" -- Scientific freedom and the social functions of science -- Political foundations of the philosophies of science of Popper, Kuhn, and Polanyi -- Personal knowledge: argument, audiences, and sociological engagement (...) -- Epilogue: SSK, scientific constructivism, and the paradoxical legacy of Polanyi and the 1930s generation. (shrink)

In _Michael Polanyi and His Generation_, Mary Jo Nye investigates the role that Michael Polanyi and several of his contemporaries played in the emergence of the social turn in the philosophy of science. This turn involved seeing science as a socially based enterprise that does not rely on empiricism and reason alone but on social communities, behavioral norms, and personal commitments. Nye argues that the roots of the social turn are to be found in the scientific culture and political (...) events of Europe in the 1930s, when scientific intellectuals struggled to defend the universal status of scientific knowledge and to justify public support for science in an era of economic catastrophe, Stalinism and Fascism, and increased demands for applications of science to industry and social welfare. At the center of this struggle was Polanyi, who Nye contends was one of the first advocates of this new conception of science. Nye reconstructs Polanyi’s scientific and political milieus in Budapest, Berlin, and Manchester from the 1910s to the 1950s and explains how he and other natural scientists and social scientists of his generation—including J. D. Bernal, Ludwik Fleck, Karl Mannheim, and Robert K. Merton—and the next, such as Thomas Kuhn, forged a politically charged philosophy of science, one that newly emphasized the social construction of science. (shrink)

This paper defines and analyzes the processes of “othering” as they manifest in the practice and praxis of nursing education. Othering is bound up in the establishment and reinforcement of norms, and shores up power inequities that negatively impact faculty, students, and patients. While previous analyses have addressed othering in nursing more broadly, this paper adds a consideration of the multiple processes of othering that operate within the context of nursing education spaces. Cases from recent nursing education literature are interpreted (...) through the frameworks of exclusionary, inclusionary, and structural othering, and provide specific illustrations of the concepts described. The paper concludes by arguing for an application of norm‐critical pedagogical practice to counteract, disrupt and dismantle othering processes within nursing education. (shrink)

Biography is one of the most popular categories of books—and indeed the most popular category among nonfiction books, according to one British poll. Thus, biography offers historians of science an opportunity to reach a potentially broad audience. This essay examines approaches typical of different genres of scientific biography, including historians’ motivations in their choices of biographical subject and their decisions about strategies for reconstruction of the biographical life. While historians of science often use biography as a vehicle to analyze scientific (...) processes and scientific culture, the most compelling scientific biographies are ones that portray the ambitions, passions, disappointments, and moral choices that characterize a scientist’s life. (shrink)

SummaryThe convening of the first three Solvay Chemistry Conferences in Brussels from 1922–1928 marked an important turning point for the discipline of chemistry. Whereas much of nineteenth-century chemical endeavour had focused on compositional and functional analysis of chemical compounds, many leaders in chemistry were turning to questions of molecular dynamics by the early twentieth century. Two competing schools of chemical dynamics, which were represented at the Solvay Conferences, were a predominantly English group (Lowry, Lapworth, Robinson, Ingold) who worked out electron (...) and ionic interpretations of organic reaction mechanisms, and a French group (Perrin, Job) who developed a generalized radiation hypothesis of reaction activation. While differences in conceptual and stylistic approach separated the two schools, they agreed on the need to apply contemporary physical theory to old chemical problems, and to develop a theoretical chemistry complementary to theoretical physics. (shrink)

The influential French chemist Marcelin Berthelot spoke against the use of Dalton's atomic theory and Avogadro's hypothesis in the second half of the nineteenth century. This paper argues that Berthelot conceded that atomism might be acceptable as a system of conventions, but he feared the power of such conventions in constructing a realistic picture of atoms which was not warranted empirically. Equally, Berthelot's anti-atomism was a last-ditch effort to assert the place of chemistry within the tradition of natural history and (...) to deny the possible reduction of chemical science to the laws of nineteenth-century physics. (shrink)

The decades of the 1920s to the 1960s were a period of transformation in chemical science. The era was marked by erosion of boundaries that had often been drawn between chemistry and other scientific disciplines. In particular, theories, instruments, and mathematical approaches associated with the new physics of X-rays, the electron particle, and the electron wave enabled chemists and other physical scientists to address unsolved chemical problems of structure and mechanism and to ask new questions that further expanded and transcended (...) disciplinary borders. In turn, the historiography of these developments reflects the pluralism of chemistry in historical narratives written by scientists, historians, philosophers, and sociologists. (shrink)

Kollaboration und Konkurrenz gibt es in der Wissenschaft zwischen Individuen oder verschiedenen Gruppen, größeren Organisationen, Schauplätzen und Nationalstaaten. Die Spannung zwischen individuellem Ansehen und Gruppenmeriten oder individuellem Ehrgeiz und Gruppenleistung ist der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit inhärent und trägt zu ihrem Erfolg bei. Die Autorin vergleicht zwei soziale Modelle der Wissenschaft, die entwickelt wurden, als Wissenschaftler im 20. Jahrhundert zunehmend begannen kollaborativ zu forschen: Michael Polanyis individualistische Freie-Markt-Republik der Wissenschaft und Ludwik Flecks Denkkollektiv. Diese beiden Modelle sollten Praktiken beschreiben und Ideale für (...) die Wissenschaft im allgemeinen auf der Grundlage der Erfahrungen spezialisierter Forschungsgruppen vorschreiben. Die Arbeitsgruppen von Linus Pauling und Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin dienen hier der Erläuterung der beiden Modelle. Die Autorin untersucht verschiedene Auswirkungen von Paulings und Hodgkins Praktiken auf das persönliche Ansehen des Direktors und der Mitarbeiter, und schließt mit der Frage, ob eine kollektive Wissenschaft möglich ist. (shrink)

Scholars in the field of social studies of science marked the year 2012 as the 50th anniversary of the publication of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s book is routinely cited as the beginning of a new intellectual movement that jettisoned logical and empiricist accounts of scientific progress in favor of sociological and psychological explanations of scientific practice. In contrast, this essay argues that the roots of the social construction of science lie earlier, in the 1930s, in (...) the political milieu, scientific careers, and intellectual debates of a generation in which Michael Polanyi was a central figure. Crucial elements in the development of Polanyi’s philosophy of science are examined, with comparisons to J. D Bernal, Karl Mannheim and others of their generation, as well as to the younger Thomas Kuhn and to Karl Popper. (shrink)

In the late spring of 1947, the experimental physicist P. M. S. Blackett succumbed to the temptations of theory. At this time, Blackett was fifty years old. He was a veteran of the Cavendish tradition in particle physics and he was on his way to an unshared award of the 1948 Nobel Prize for his experimental researches in nuclear physics and cosmic-ray physics. His photographs of cloud-chamber tracks of alpha particles, protons, electrons and positrons were well known to practitioners of (...) particle physics, even as they now grace the pages of physics textbooks.Blackett's turn toward theory in 1947 involved some risk for a well-established experimental physicist. The 3 May 1947 issue of Nature carried an announcement of his forthcoming lecture at the Royal Society:Professor P. M. S. Blackett, Langworthy Professor of Physics in the University of Manchester, will deliver a lecture on ‘The Magnetic Field of Massive Rotating Bodies’ at a meeting of the Royal Society on May 15, at 4:30 p.m.Blackett circulated a preliminary draft of his paper among colleagues in several different fields, including the geophysicist Sydney Chapman and the astrophysicist Harry Plaskett. (shrink)

Kollaboration und Konkurrenz gibt es in der Wissenschaft zwischen Individuen oder verschiedenen Gruppen, größeren Organisationen, Schauplätzen und Nationalstaaten. Die Spannung zwischen individuellem Ansehen und Gruppenmeriten oder individuellem Ehrgeiz und Gruppenleistung ist der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit inhärent und trägt zu ihrem Erfolg bei. Die Autorin vergleicht zwei soziale Modelle der Wissenschaft, die entwickelt wurden, als Wissenschaftler im 20. Jahrhundert zunehmend begannen kollaborativ zu forschen: Michael Polanyis individualistische Freie-Markt-Republik der Wissenschaft und Ludwik Flecks Denkkollektiv. Diese beiden Modelle sollten Praktiken beschreiben und Ideale für (...) die Wissenschaft im allgemeinen auf der Grundlage der Erfahrungen spezialisierter Forschungsgruppen vorschreiben. Die Arbeitsgruppen von Linus Pauling und Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin dienen hier der Erläuterung der beiden Modelle. Die Autorin untersucht verschiedene Auswirkungen von Paulings und Hodgkins Praktiken auf das persönliche Ansehen des Direktors und der Mitarbeiter, und schließt mit der Frage, ob eine kollektive Wissenschaft möglich ist. (shrink)

Philosophy's traditional "man of reason"—independent, neutral, unemotional—is an illusion. That's because the "man of reason" ignores one very important thing—the woman. Representing Reason: Feminist Theory and Formal Logic collects new and old essays that shed light on the underexplored intersection of logic and feminism.

This is a unique, groundbreaking study in the history of philosophy, combining leading men and women philosophers across 2600 years of Western philosophy, covering key foundational topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Introductory essays, primary source readings, and commentaries comprise each chapter to offer a rich and accessible introduction to and evaluation of these vital philosophical contributions. A helpful appendix canvasses an extraordinary number of women philosophers throughout history for further discovery and study.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Dans ce livre ambitieux, Anne-Marie Sohn prolonge son intérêt avéré pour les affaires intimes touchant à la sexualité et au genre en l’étendant à la sphère publique de la masculinité afin de suivre l’évolution du comportement et de l’identité des jeunes hommes au XIXe siècle. Elle s’appuie pour cela sur les mémoires, la presse et une partie des travaux historiques qui en ont traité, mais sa contribution la plus importante est d’avoir exploité ici 1 500 cas individuels, puisés dans les (...) archive... (shrink)