Boris Hessen: Physics and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, 1927–1931

Boris Hessen: Physics and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, 1927–1931 PDF Author: Chris Talbot
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030700453
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
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.

Boris Hessen: Physics and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, 1927–1931

Boris Hessen: Physics and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, 1927–1931 PDF Author: Chris Talbot
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030700453
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Boris Hessen: Physics and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, 1927-1931

Boris Hessen: Physics and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, 1927-1931 PDF Author: Chris Talbot
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783030700461
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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.

Boris Hessen and Philosophy

Boris Hessen and Philosophy PDF Author: Sean Winkler
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538147599
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
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.

Science in Russia and the Soviet Union

Science in Russia and the Soviet Union PDF Author: Loren R. Graham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521287890
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
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.

A History of the Work Concept

A History of the Work Concept PDF Author: Agamenon R. E. Oliveira
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400777051
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
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.

A Concise History of Russia

A Concise History of Russia PDF Author: Paul Bushkovitch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139504444
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 517

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Book Description
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.

The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's "Principia"

The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Author: B. Hessen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Book Description


Matvei Petrovich Bronstein and Soviet Theoretical Physics in the Thirties

Matvei Petrovich Bronstein and Soviet Theoretical Physics in the Thirties PDF Author: Gennady E. Gorelik
Publisher: Birkhäuser
ISBN: 3034884885
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
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].

From Newspeak to Cyberspeak

From Newspeak to Cyberspeak PDF Author: Slava Gerovitch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262572255
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
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."

The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution

The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution PDF Author: Gideon Freudenthal
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402096046
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
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.