Pursuing the Unity of Science: Ideology and Scientific Practice from the Great War to the Cold War

ISBN-13: 9780815366805 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017

Harmke Kamminga; Geert Somsen

Opis

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 that look at the significance of various projects and strategies for unification, the essays demonstrate the great variety of manifestations of this ambitious pursuit. In so doing 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.

Spis treści

Contents: Preface; Introduction, Harmke Kamminga and Geert Somsen; Meanings of scientific unity: the law, the orchestra, the pyramid, quilt and ring, Peter Galison; The unifying vision: Julian Huxley, evolutionary humanism and the evolutionary synthesis, Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis; Unity through experiment? Reductionism, rhetoric and the politics of nuclear science, 1918-40, Jeff Hughes; Scientists of the world unite: socialist internationalism and the unity of science, Geert Somsen; Government as scientific process in H.G. Wells’s world state, Rein de Wilde and Geert Somsen; Unifying science against Fascism: neuropsychiatry and medical education in the Spanish Civil War, Fernando Salmón and Rafael Huertas; ’To formulate a plan for better living’: visual communication and scientific planning in Paul Rotha’s documentary films, 1935-1945, Timothy Boon; Unifying science and human culture: the promotion of the history of science by George Sarton and Frans Verdoorn, Bert Theunissen; The unity of knowledge and the diversity of knowers: science as an agent of cultural integration in the United States between the two world wars, David A. Hollinger; McCarthyism in philosophy and the end of the unity of science ideology, George Reisch; Index.