Download or read book Boris Hessen Physics and Philosophy in the Soviet Union 1927 1931 written by Chris Talbot and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-17 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents key works of Boris Hessen, outstanding Soviet philosopher of science, available here in English for the first time. Quality translations are accompanied by an editors' introduction and annotations. Boris Hessen is known in history of science circles for his “Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” presented in London (1931), which inspired new approaches in the West. As a philosopher and a physicist, he was tasked with developing a Marxist approach to science in the 1920s. He studied the history of physics to clarify issues such as reductionism and causality as they applied to new developments. With the philosophers called the “Dialecticians”, his debates with the opposing “Mechanists” on the issue of emergence are still worth studying and largely ignored in the many recent works on this subject. Taken as a whole, the book is a goldmine of insights into both the foundations of physics and Soviet history.
Download or read book Boris Hessen Physics and Philosophy in the Soviet Union 1927 1931 written by Chris Talbot and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents key works of Boris Hessen, outstanding Soviet philosopher of science, available here in English for the first time. Quality translations are accompanied by an editors' introduction and annotations. Boris Hessen is known in history of science circles for his "Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia" presented in London (1931), which inspired new approaches in the West. As a philosopher and a physicist, he was tasked with developing a Marxist approach to science in the 1920s. He studied the history of physics to clarify issues such as reductionism and causality as they applied to new developments. With the philosophers called the "Dialecticians", his debates with the opposing "Mechanists" on the issue of emergence are still worth studying and largely ignored in the many recent works on this subject. Taken as a whole, the book is a goldmine of insights into both the foundations of physics and Soviet history.
Download or read book Boris Hessen and Philosophy written by Sean Winkler and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-11-21 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1931, Soviet philosopher, Boris Hessen presented a paper at the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in London, England. It was a watershed moment, marking the founding of the ‘externalist’ approach to the history and philosophy of science. Five years after this talk, however, Hessen was executed in what became Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge of the 1930s. Nearly a century after his death, we still know all too little about this pioneering figure and his expansive oeuvre. In this book, Sean Winkler provides a reading of Hessen’s philosophy and its unique approach to understanding the relationship between socioeconomic development, technological progress and natural scientific theory. To further encourage the study of Hessen, the book also includes first-time translations of his contributions to the Soviet Encyclopedia. Through a systematic analysis, Winkler reflects upon Hessen’s contribution to the history and philosophy of science of the past and his possible significance in the world today.
Download or read book Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union written by Loren R. Graham and published by Vintage Books USA. This book was released on 1974 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Science in Russia and the Soviet Union written by Loren R. Graham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the 1980s the Soviet scientific establishment had become the largest in the world, but very little of its history was known in the West. What has been needed for many years in order to fill that gap in our knowledge is a history of Russian and Soviet science written for the educated person who would like to read one book on the subject. This book has been written for that reader. The history of Russian and Soviet science is a story of remarkable achievements and frustrating failures. That history is presented here in a comprehensive form, and explained in terms of its social and political context. Major sections include the tsarist period, the impact of the Russian Revolution, the relationship between science and Soviet society, and the strengths and weaknesses of individual scientific disciplines. The book also discusses the changes brought to science in Russia and other republics by the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Download or read book Einstein and Soviet Ideology written by Alexander Vucinich and published by Stanford Nuclear Age. This book was released on 2001 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the historical trajectory of one of the most momentous confrontations in the intellectual life of the Soviet Union—the conflict between Einstein's theory of relativity and official Soviet ideology embodied in dialectical materialism. Soviet attitudes toward Einstein's scientific and philosophical thought passed through several stages. During the pre-Stalin era, Marxist philosophers clashed over the problem of defining dialectical materialism in relation to the ongoing revolution in science. This controversy produced a full spectrum of Marxist attitudes toward the theory of relativity, ranging from complete acceptance to total rejection. Disunity also prevented Marxist writers from interfering with the work of those Soviet physicists who produced a rich literature extolling the theory of relativity. During the Stalin era (1929-1953), conflicting forces in Marxist thinking were eliminated, and complete unity was established and firmly guarded by the state. Marxist theorists declared war on "idealistic" principles built into Einstein's scientific work. State harassment of leading physicists accused of idealistic digressions persisted throughout the Stalinist era. Several leading proponents of Einstein's ideas perished in political prisons. Despite all these pressures, some leading physicists used every opportunity to reaffirm their fundamental agreement with the theory of relativity as one of the fundamental contributions to twentieth-century scientific thought. The post-Stalinist period (1953-1985) gradually evolved into a profound transformation of every domain of social and cultural life, and Einstein's scientific and philosophical legacy was no exception. Whereas Stalinist writers tried to reformulate Einstein's principles to accommodate dialectical materialism, post-Stalinist thinkers, much more familiar with modern physics than their predecessors, attempted to make Marxist philosophy sufficiently flexible to absorb the guiding principles of the theory of relativity. A wide range of Einstein's ideas, previously regarded as symptoms of bourgeois decadence, was now hailed as a cornerstone of the Marxist philosophy of science. The post-Stalinist era also produced an extensive and appreciative literature on the humanistic aspect of Einstein's thought. The short-lived period of perestroika (1985-1991) accelerated the de-Stalinization process, post-Stalinist gains were solidified, and the theory of relativity was increasingly shorn of ideological burdens, thus removing one of the last remnants of the Stalinist war on science.
Download or read book The Social and Economic Roots of Newton s Principia written by B. Hessen and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Concise History of Russia written by Paul Bushkovitch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-05 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accessible to students, tourists and general readers alike, this book provides a broad overview of Russian history since the ninth century. Paul Bushkovitch emphasizes the enormous changes in the understanding of Russian history resulting from the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, new material has come to light on the history of the Soviet era, providing new conceptions of Russia's pre-revolutionary past. The book traces not only the political history of Russia, but also developments in its literature, art and science. Bushkovitch describes well-known cultural figures, such as Chekhov, Tolstoy and Mendeleev, in their institutional and historical contexts. Though the 1917 revolution, the resulting Soviet system and the Cold War were a crucial part of Russian and world history, Bushkovitch presents earlier developments as more than just a prelude to Bolshevik power.
Download or read book Science and Technology in the Global Cold War written by Naomi Oreskes and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-10-31 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution written by Gideon Freudenthal and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-05-20 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The texts of Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann assembled in this volume are important contributions to the historiography of the Scienti?c Revolution and to the methodology of the historiography of science. They are of course also historical documents, not only testifying to Marxist discourse of the time but also illustrating typical European fates in the ?rst half of the twentieth century. Hessen was born a Jewish subject of the Russian Czar in the Ukraine, participated in the October Revolution and was executed in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the purges. Grossmann was born a Jewish subject of the Austro-Hungarian Kaiser in Poland and served as an Austrian of?cer in the First World War; afterwards he was forced to return to Poland and then because of his revolutionary political activities to emigrate to Germany; with the rise to power of the Nazis he had to ?ee to France and then Americawhilehisfamily,whichremainedinEurope,perishedinNaziconcentration camps. Our own acquaintance with the work of these two authors is also indebted to historical context (under incomparably more fortunate circumstances): the revival of Marxist scholarship in Europe in the wake of the student movement and the p- fessionalization of history of science on the Continent. We hope that under the again very different conditions of the early twenty-?rst century these texts will contribute to the further development of a philosophically informed socio-historical approach to the study of science.
Download or read book From Newspeak to Cyberspeak written by Slava Gerovitch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-09-17 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Slava Gerovitch argues that Soviet cybernetics was not just an intellectual trend but a social movement for radical reform in science and society as a whole. Followers of cybernetics viewed computer simulation as a universal method of problem solving and the language of cybernetics as a language of objectivity and truth. With this new objectivity, they challenged the existing order of things in economics and politics as well as in science. The history of Soviet cybernetics followed a curious arc. In the 1950s it was labeled a reactionary pseudoscience and a weapon of imperialist ideology. With the arrival of Khrushchev's political "thaw," however, it was seen as an innocent victim of political oppression, and it evolved into a movement for radical reform of the Stalinist system of science. In the early 1960s it was hailed as "science in the service of communism," but by the end of the decade it had turned into a shallow fashionable trend. Using extensive new archival materials, Gerovitch argues that these fluctuating attitudes reflected profound changes in scientific language and research methodology across disciplines, in power relations within the scientific community, and in the political role of scientists and engineers in Soviet society. His detailed analysis of scientific discourse shows how the Newspeak of the late Stalinist period and the Cyberspeak that challenged it eventually blended into "CyberNewspeak."
Download or read book Matvei Petrovich Bronstein and Soviet Theoretical Physics in the Thirties written by Gennady E. Gorelik and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true history of physics can only be read in the life stories of those who made its progress possible. Matvei Bronstein was one of those for whom the vast territory of theoretical physics was as familiar as his own home: he worked in cosmology, nuclear physics, gravitation, semiconductors, atmospheric physics, quantum electrodynamics, astro physics and the relativistic quantum theory. Everyone who knew him was struck by his wide knowledge, far beyond the limits of his trade. This partly explains why his life was closely intertwined with the social, historical and scientific context of his time. One might doubt that during his short life Bronstein could have made truly weighty contributions to science and have become, in a sense, a symbol ofhis time. Unlike mathematicians and poets, physicists reach the peak oftheir careers after the age of thirty. His thirty years of life, however, proved enough to secure him a place in theGreaterSovietEncyclopedia. In 1967, in describing the first generation of physicists educated after the 1917 revolution, Igor Tamm referred to Bronstein as "an exceptionally brilliant and promising" theoretician [268].
Download or read book Naming Infinity written by Loren Graham and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1913, Russian imperial marines stormed an Orthodox monastery at Mt. Athos, Greece, to haul off monks engaged in a dangerously heretical practice known as Name Worshipping. Exiled to remote Russian outposts, the monks and their mystical movement went underground. Ultimately, they came across Russian intellectuals who embraced Name Worshipping—and who would achieve one of the biggest mathematical breakthroughs of the twentieth century, going beyond recent French achievements. Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor take us on an exciting mathematical mystery tour as they unravel a bizarre tale of political struggles, psychological crises, sexual complexities, and ethical dilemmas. At the core of this book is the contest between French and Russian mathematicians who sought new answers to one of the oldest puzzles in math: the nature of infinity. The French school chased rationalist solutions. The Russian mathematicians, notably Dmitri Egorov and Nikolai Luzin—who founded the famous Moscow School of Mathematics—were inspired by mystical insights attained during Name Worshipping. Their religious practice appears to have opened to them visions into the infinite—and led to the founding of descriptive set theory. The men and women of the leading French and Russian mathematical schools are central characters in this absorbing tale that could not be told until now. Naming Infinity is a poignant human interest story that raises provocative questions about science and religion, intuition and creativity.
Download or read book A History of the Work Concept written by Agamenon R. E. Oliveira and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the history of the concept of work from its earliest stages and shows that its further formalization leads to equilibrium principle and to the principle of virtual works, and so pointing the way ahead for future research and applications. The idea that something remains constant in a machine operation is very old and has been expressed by many mathematicians and philosophers such as, for instance, Aristotle. Thus, a concept of energy developed. Another important idea in machine operation is Archimedes' lever principle. In modern times the concept of work is analyzed in the context of applied mechanics mainly in Lazare Carnot mechanics and the mechanics of the new generation of polytechnical engineers like Navier, Coriolis and Poncelet. In this context the word "work" is finally adopted. These engineers are also responsible for the incorporation of the concept of work into the discipline of economics when they endeavoured to combine the study of the work of machines and men together.
Download or read book The Social Production of Scientific Knowledge written by E. Mendelsohn and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book European Elites and Ideas of Empire 1917 1957 written by Dina Gusejnova and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who thought of Europe as a community before its economic integration in 1957? Dina Gusejnova illustrates how a supranational European mentality was forged from depleted imperial identities. In the revolutions of 1917 to 1920, the power of the Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Romanoff dynasties over their subjects expired. Even though Germany lost its credit as a world power twice in that century, in the global cultural memory, the old Germanic families remained associated with the idea of Europe in areas reaching from Mexico to the Baltic region and India. Gusejnova's book sheds light on a group of German-speaking intellectuals of aristocratic origin who became pioneers of Europe's future regeneration. In the minds of transnational elites, the continent's future horizons retained the contours of phantom empires. This title is available as Open Access.
Download or read book A Guide to the Culture of Science Technology and Medicine written by Paul T. Durbin and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 804 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
