Bukharin’s Philosophical Arabesques was written while he was imprisoned in the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, facing trial on charges of treason, and later awaiting execution after he was found guilty. After the death of Lenin, Bukharin cooperated with Stalin for a time. Once Stalin's supremacy was assured he began eliminating all potential rivals. For Bukharin, the process was to end with his confession before the Soviet court, facing the threat that his young family would be killed along with him if (...) he did not. While awaiting his death, Bukharin wrote prolifically. He considered Philosophical Arabesques as the most important of his prison writings. In its pages, he covers the full range of issues in Marxist philosophy—the sources of knowledge, the nature of truth, freedom and necessity, the relationship of Hegelian and Marxist dialectic. The project constitutes a defense of the genuine legacy of Lenin's Marxism against the use of his memory to legitimate totalitarian power. Consigned to the Kremlin archives for a half-century after Bukharin’s execution, this work is now being published for the first time in English. It will be an essential reference work for scholars of Marxism and the Russian revolution and a landmark in the history of prison writing. (shrink)

A masterful survey of the history of Marxist philosophy of science. Now with a new afterword. Skillfully deploying a large cast of characters, Sheehan retraces the development of Marxist philosophy of science through detailed and highly readable accounts of the debates that have characterized it. Approaching Marxism from the perspective of the philosophy of science, Sheehan shows how Marx's and Engel's ideas on the development and structure of natural science had a crucial impact on the work of early twentieth-century natural (...) philosophers, historians of science, and natural scientists. From the ideas of Marx and Engels, those of the Marxist theoreticians of the Second International to the debates within Russian Marxism up to World War II, Sheehan masterfully surveys the history of marxist philosophy of science, concluding with a close analysis of the development of the debate among non-Soviet Marxists, placing particular emphasis on the contributions of leading British Marxists in the 1930s. (shrink)

1. MARIO BIAGIOLI--Introduction 2. KAREN BARAD--Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in Understanding Scientific Practices 3. MARIO BIAGIOLI--Aporias of Scientific Authorship: Credit and Responsibility in Contemporary Biomedicine 4. PIERRE BOURDIEU--The Specificity of Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason 5. ROBERT M. BRAIN and M. NORTON WISE--Muscles and Engines: Indicator Diagrams and Helmholtz’s Graphical Methods 6. MICHEL CALLON--Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fisherman of St. Brieuc Bay 7. SANDE COHEN--Reading Science (...) Studies Writing 8. H. M. COLLINS--The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks 9. LORRAINE DASTON--Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective 10. ARNOLD I. DAVIDSON--Styles of Reasoning, Conceptual History, and the Emergence of Psychiatry 11. PETER GALISON--Trading Zone: Coordinating Action and Belief 12. IAN HACKING--Making Up People 13. DONNA J. HARAWAY--Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective 14. ROGER HART--On the Problem of Chinese Science 15. THOMAS P. HUGHES--The Evolution of Large Technological Systems 16. LILY E. KAY--In the Beginning Was the Word?: The Genetic Code and the Book of Life 17. EVELYN FOX KELLER--The Gender/Science System: or, Is Sex to Gender as Nature Is to Science? 18. ROBERT E. KOHLER--Moral Economy, Material Culture, and Community in Drosophila Genetics 19. BRUNO LATOUR--Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World 20. BRUNO LATOUR--One More Turn After the Social Turn... 21. TIMOTHY LENOIR--Was the Last Turn the Right Turn?: The Semiotic Turn and A. J. Greimas 22. GEOFFREY LLOYD--Science in Antiquity: The Greek and Chinese Cases and Their Relevance to the Problems of Culture and Cognition 23. MICHAEL LYNCH and JOHN LAW--Pictures, Texts, and Objects: The Literary Language Game of Bird-Watching 24. DONALD MACKENZIE--Nuclear Missile Testing and the Social Construction of Accuracy 25. EMILY MARTIN--Toward an Anthropology of Immunology: The Body as Nation State 26. ANDREW PICKERING--The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science 27. THEODORE M. PORTER--Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science 28. PAUL RABINOW--Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality 29. HANS-JORG RHEINBERGER--Experimental Systems: Historiality, Narration and Deconstruction 30. BRIAN ROTMAN--Thinking Dia-Grams: Mathematics, Writing, and Virtual Reality 31. JOSEPH ROUSE--Understanding Scientific Practices: Cultural Studies of Science as a Philosophical Program 32. SIMON SCHAFFER--Late Victorian Metrology and Its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms 33. STEVEN SHAPIN--The House of Experimentation in Seventeenth-Century England 34. SUSAN LEIGH STAR and JAMES R. GRIESEMER--Institutional Ecology, "Translation," and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39 35. SHARON TRAWEEK--Pilgrim’s Progress: Male Tales Told during a Life in Physics 36. SHERRY TURKLE--What Are We Thinking about When We Are Thinking about Computers? 37. ALISON WYLIE--The Engendering of Archaeology: Refiguring Feminist Science Studies. (shrink)

Describes the impact of Russian scientific research on science in the United States.

In seinen Erinnerungen schildert der 1933 in Stuttgart geborene Wissenschaftsphilosoph und -historiker Herbert Hörz seinen persönlichen Werdegang, der ihn aus dem nationalsozialistisch geprägten Kapitalismus über die antifaschistisch-demokratische Ordnung und Staatsdiktatur des Frühsozialismus in der DDR zur Kapitaldiktatur in der BRD führte. Er beschreibt Ideale und Illusionen eigenen Handelns, Handlungsmotive und Rahmenbedingungen seines Werdens und Wirkens, Philosophie und Politik in der DDR und die Entwicklung in den von ihm geprägten Einrichtungen.Auf manchen inhaltlichen Streit, wie den um Robert Havemann, hat er seine (...) eigene Sicht, durch Erlebnisse fundiert. Er verwahrt sich gegen die Diffamierung der DDR als Unrechtsstaat und begründet, warum er, trotz mancher Angebote, in der DDR blieb, die er reformieren wollte. Herbert Hörz begreift Philosophie als Welterklärung, Gedankenprovokation und Lebenshilfe. Sie kann sich, so seine Erfahrungen und Forderung, nur in der inter-, multi- und transdisziplinären Arbeit bewähren. Inhalte des eigenen philosophischen Denkens werden in konkreten Situationen und in der Auseinandersetzung gezeigt, Erfahrungen als Wissenschaftler in Funktionen, als Dekan, Sektionsdirektor und Akademie-Vizepräsident, in der FDJ und in der Gewerkschaft vermittelt. Als dialektischer Denker ist Hörz immer um die Erfassung der Widersprüchlichkeit von Ereignissen bemüht, ohne das persönliche Erleben mit Familie und Freunden auszusparen. Seine Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen vor, in und nach der "Wende" zeigen, dass kritische Sichten immer vorhanden waren, nicht ernst genommen wurden und die Implosion des Systems förderten. Hörz fordert eine solide Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit, der Stärken und Schwächen der Wissenschaftsentwicklung in der DDR und danach. Das Buch zeigt, wie er die "Wende" theoretisch und praktisch verarbeitete und sich als Wissenschaftler unter widrigen Umständen weiter betätigte. Teil dieses Engagements war das Ringen um den Erhalt der Gelehrtensozietät der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, die ihren öffentlich-rechtlichen Status durch Rechtsbruch am Einigungsvertrag verlor. Ihre Mitglieder ließen sich den Mund aber nicht verbieten. In ihrer Tradition entstand die Gelehrtengesellschaft der Leibniz-Sozietät, als deren Präsident er seit 1998 wirkt.Jeder, der sich ernsthaft mit Wissenschaft in der DDR, mit dem Verhalten von DDR-Bürgern, ihren Wurzeln und ihrer weiteren Entwicklung auseinandersetzt, sollte auf die Lektüre dieses Buches nicht verzichten. (shrink)

Originally published in 1974. Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory centres on the problem of explaining the manifest variety and contrast in the beliefs about nature held in different groups and societies. It maintains that the sociologist should treat all beliefs symmetrically and must investigate and account for allegedly "correct" or "scientific" beliefs just as he would "incorrect" or "unscientific" ones. From this basic position a study of scientific beliefs is constructed. The sociological interest of such beliefs is illustrated and a (...) sociological perspective upon scientific change is developed. (shrink)

The first edition of this book profoundly challenged and divided students of philosophy, sociology, and the history of science when it was published in 1976. In this second edition, Bloor responds in a substantial new Afterword to the heated debates engendered by his book.

THE PROBLEM OP KNOWLEDGE l CONCEPTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE An immediate difficulty which faces any discussion of the present kind is that there are so many ...

This paper is an examination of the philosophical and political legacy of John Desmond Bernal. It addresses the evidence of an emerging consensus on Bernal based on the recent biography of Bernal by Andrew Brown and the reviews it has received. It takes issue with this view of Bernal, which tends to be admiring of his scientific contribution, bemused by his sexuality, condescending to his philosophy and hostile to his politics. This article is a critical defence of his philosophical and (...) political position. (shrink)