A comprehensive study of German materialism in the second half of the nineteenth century is long overdue. Among contemporary historians the mere passing references to Karl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, and Ludwig Buchner as materialists and popularizers of science are hardly sufficient, for few individuals influenced public opinion in nineteenth-century Germany more than these men. Buchner, for example, revealed his awareness of the historical significance of his Kraft und Stoff in comments made in 1872, just seventeen years after its original appearance. A philosophical book which has undergone...

by MICHEL FOUCAULT Everyone knows that in France there are few logicians but many historians of science; and that in the 'philosophical establishment' - whether teaching or research oriented - they have occupied a considerable position. But do we know precisely the importance that, in the course of these past fifteen or twenty years, up to the very frontiers of the establishment, a 'work' like that of Georges Canguilhem can have had for those very people who were separ ated from, or challenged, the establishment? Yes, I know, there have been noisier theatres: psychoanalysis, Marxism,...

The impressive record of Italian philosophical research since the end of Fascism thirty-two years ago is shown in many fields: esthetics, social and" personal ethics, history and sociology of philosophy, and magnificently, perhaps above all, in logic, foundations of mathematics and the philosophY, methodology, and intellectual history ofthe empirical sciences. To our pleasure, Maria Luisa Dalla Chiara of the University of Florence gladly agreed to assemble a 'sampler' of recent Italian logical and analytical work on the philosophical foundations of mathematics and physics, along with a number...

Many books have been written on the history of quantum mechanics. So far as I am aware, however, this is the first to incorporate the results of the large amount of detailed scholarly research completed by professional historians of physics over the past fifteen years. It is also, I believe, the first since Max Jammer's pioneering study of fifteen years ago to attempt a genuine 'history' as opposed to a mere technical report or popular or semi-popular account. My aims in making this attempt have been to satisfy the needs of historians of science and, more especially, to promote a serious...

Teleological thinking has been steadfastly resisted by modern biology. And yet, in nearly every area of research biologists are hard pressed to find language that does not impute purposiveness to living forms. The life of the individual organism, if not life itself, seems to make use of a variety of strate gems in achieving its purposes. But in an age when physical models dominate our imagination and when physics itself has become accustomed to uncertainty relations and complementarity, biologists have learned to live with a kind of schizophrenic language, employing terms like 'selfish genes'...

Radio techniques were the nrst to lead astronomy away from the quiescent and limited Universe revealed by traditional observations at optical wave lengths. In the earliest days of radio astronomy, a handful of radio physicists and engineers made one startling discovery after another as they opened up the radio sky. With this collection of classic papers and the extensive intro ductory material, the reader can experience these exciting discoveries, as well as understand the developing techniques and follow the motivations which prompted the various lines of inquiry. For instance he or she will...

Charles Bonnet began his career as a naturalist, from an early age establishing a reputation as a careful observer. It is for those youthful observations, as well as for some suggestive speculations proposed relative to this field, that he is best remembered in English-speaking countries: regarding the taxonomic de mands of natural history he refurbished the idea of a chain of beings; regarding the question of generation he marshaled evidence in support of preforma tion theory; and regarding the analysis of the physiology of the nervous system he advanced a theory that individual nerve fibers...

A number of years ago I began a project to derme and evaluate the impact of Buffon's Histoire naturelle on the science of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My attention, however, was soon diverted by the striking difference between the highly literary natural history of Buffon and the duller, but more rigor ous, zoology of his successors, and I began to try to understand this transformation of natural history into a set of separate scientific disciplines (geology, botany, ornithology, entomology, ichthyology, etc. ). Historical literature on the emergence of the biological...

The nature of that transition to maturity a transition involving "The acquisition of the sort of paradigm that identifies challenging puzzles, supplies clues to their solution, and guarantees that the truly clever practitioner will succeed") deserves fuller discussion than it has received in this book, particularly from those concerned with the development of the contemporary social sciences. (Thomas S. Kuhn, 1969, Postscript to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. ) The fIrst two or three decades of the twentieth-century represents a shadowy period in the history of science. For most...