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266Did Kuhn kill logical empiricism?Philosophy of Science 58 (2): 264-277. 1991.In the light of two unpublished letters from Carnap to Kuhn, this essay examines the relationship between Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Carnap's philosophical views. Contrary to the common wisdom that Kuhn's book refuted logical empiricism, it argues that Carnap's views of revolutionary scientific change are rather similar to those detailed by Kuhn. This serves both to explain Carnap's appreciation of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and to suggest that logical empiri…Read more
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239The Paranoid Style in American History of ScienceTheoria 27 (3): 323-342. 2012.Historian Richard Hofstadter’s observations about American cold-war politics are used to contextualize Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and argue that substantive claims about the nature of scientific knowledge and scientific change found in Structure were adopted from this cold-war political culture.
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204Pluralism, logical empiricism, and the problem of pseudosciencePhilosophy of Science 65 (2): 333-348. 1998.I criticize conceptual pluralism, as endorsed recently by John Dupre and Philip Kitcher, for failing to supply strategies for demarcating science from non-science. Using creation-science as a test case, I argue that pluralism blocks arguments that keep creation-science in check and that metaphysical pluralism offers it positive, metaphysical support. Logical empiricism, however, still provides useful resources to reconfigure and manage the problem of creation-science in those practical and polit…Read more
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91How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of LogicCambridge University Press. 2005.This intriguing and ground-breaking book is the first in-depth study of the development of philosophy of science in the United States during the Cold War. It documents the political vitality of logical empiricism and Otto Neurath's Unity of Science Movement when these projects emigrated to the US in the 1930s and follows their de-politicization by a convergence of intellectual, cultural and political forces in the 1950s. Students of logical empiricism and the Vienna Circle treat these as strictl…Read more
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89Anticommunism, the unity of science movement and Kuhn'sStructure of Scientific RevolutionsSocial Epistemology 17 (2-3): 271-275. 2003.No abstract
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82Chaos, History, and NarrativeHistory and Theory 30 (1): 1-20. 1991.Hempel's proposal of covering laws which explain historical events has a certain plausibility, but can never be actually realized due to the chaotic nature of history. The natural laws that would govern both individual lives and greater history would be nonlinear; consequently, in the terminology of chaos theory, the final states of both are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. Initial conditions would need to be exactly known in order to account correctly for historic phenomena, especiall…Read more
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75Pink Floyd and Philosophy: Careful with That Axiom, Eugene! (edited book)Open Court. 2007."Essays critically examine philosophical concepts and problems in the music and lyrics of the band Pink Floyd"--Provided by publisher.
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67John McCumber, Time In The Ditch: American Philosophy And The Mccarthy Era. Northwestern University Press , xxiii + 213 pp., $29.95 (review)Philosophy of Science 69 (2): 389-392. 2002.
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66Planning science: Otto Neurath and the International Encyclopedia of Unified ScienceBritish Journal for the History of Science 27 (2): 153-175. 1994.In the spring of 1937, the University of Chicago Press mailed hundreds of subscription forms for its latest enterprise – a projected series of twenty short monographs by various philosophers and scientists. Together the monographs were to form the first section of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Included in each mailing was an introductory prospectus which began:Recent years have witnessed a striking growth of interest in the scientific enterprise as a whole and especially in …Read more
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61Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael D. Gordin. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. vii+259, index. $35.00 (review)Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 4 (2): 358-361. 2014.
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55How postmodern was Neurath's idea of unity of science?Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 28 (3): 439-451. 1997.
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55Against a third dogma of logical empiricism: Otto Neurath and "unpredictability in principle"International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 15 (2). 2001.(2001). Against a third dogma of logical empiricism: Otto Neurath and 'unpredictability in principle' International Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 199-209. doi: 10.1080/02698590120059068
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47The Politics of ParadigmsSUNY. 2019.The Politics of Paradigms shows that America’s most famous and influential book about science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions of 1962, was inspired and shaped by Thomas Kuhn’s political interests, his relationship with the influential cold warrior James Bryant Conant, and America’s McCarthy-era struggle to resist and defeat totalitarian ideology. Through detailed archival research, Reisch shows how Kuhn’s well-known theories of paradigms, crises, and scientific revolutions emerged from …Read more
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47The Nature of Science: A Perspective from the Philosophy of ScienceJournal of Research in Science Teaching 36 107-116. 1999.In a recent article in this journal, Brian Alters argued that, given the many ways in which the nature of science is described and poor student responses to NOS instruments such as Nature of Scientific Knowledge Scale, Nature of Science Scale, Test on Understanding Science, and others, it is time for science educators to reconsider the standard lists of tenets for the NOS. Alters suggested that philosophers of science are authorities on the NOS and that consequently, it would be wise to investig…Read more
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39Andrew Jewett. Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xii+374. $100.00 (review)Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 4 (1): 150-153. 2014.
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31Economist, Epistemologist … and Censor? On Otto Neurath’s Index Verborum ProhibitorumPerspectives on Science 5 (3): 452-480. 1997.This article is about Otto Neurath’s infamous proposal to combat metaphysics by creating and publishing an index of prohibited words. The logic of this proposal is explicated in the frameworks of Neurath’s philosophy of science and his International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. I reconstruct two arguments within Neurath’s project to defend the proposal against criticisms from Neurath’s colleagues and against the charge that philosophers ought not be censors.
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27Abraham Flexner: The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, with an introduction by Robbert Dijkgraaf: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. ISBN 9780691174761. $9.95Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (5): 1083-1085. 2017.
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26Scientism without Tears: A Reply to Roth and RyckmanHistory and Theory 34 (1): 45-58. 1995.In response to Roth and Ryckman, I explain in more detail why narratives fashioned with ideal, quantitative covering laws cannot be combined into large-scale covering-law explanations and specify further reasons for supposing that history can be conceived as dynamically nonlinear. I also appeal to an episode in the history of science to examine the idea that dynamical complexity is local in historical space and time and to suggest that such complexity does not pose a unique problem for historica…Read more
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26What a Difference a Decade Makes: The Planning Debates and the Fate of the Unity of Science MovementIn Adam Tuboly & Jordi Cat (eds.), Neurath Reconsidered: New Sources and Perspectives, Springer Verlag. pp. 385-411. 2019.This paper examines selected writings of the American science writer Waldemar Kaempffert, Science Editor for the New York Times, in public support of Otto Neurath, his Isotype projects, and his Unity of Science Movement. Attention is focused first on Kaempffert’s writings in the 1930s, when some intellectuals, the American public, and their elected leaders were relatively sympathetic with Neurath’s quest to unify the sciences in ways that would advance and direct scientific research toward pract…Read more
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25Three Kinds of Political Engagement for Philosophy of ScienceScience & Education 18 (2): 191-197. 2009.
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24Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics by Nancy Cartwright; Jordi Cat; Lola Fleck; Thomas E. Uebel (review)Isis 88 560-562. 1997.
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22Pragmatic engagements: Philipp Frank and James Bryant Conant on science, education, and democracyStudies in East European Thought 69 (3): 227-244. 2017.This essay examines the relationship between Philipp Frank and James Bryant Conant in light of two issues that engaged leading American intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century: the place of metaphysics in higher education and the responsibilities of intellectuals as educators to defend democracy against the rise of totalitarianism. It suggests that Frank’s relationship to pragmatism was nourished by his professional and intellectual relationships to Conant and that each of their contributions…Read more
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13The Rolling Stones and Philosophy: It's Just a Thought Away (edited book)Open Court Publishing. 2011.From their commanding role in the so-called British Invasion of the early 1960s to their status as the elder statesmen (and British Knight) of rock and roll, the Stones have become more than an evanescent phenomenon in pop culture. They have become a touchstone not only for the history of our times--their performance at the Altamont Raceway marked the "end of the sixties," while their 1990 concert in Prague helped Czechoslovakia and other eastern bloc nations celebrate their newfound freedom (an…Read more
George Reisch
Northwestern University
The Monist (journal)
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The Monist (journal)Administrator
Evanston, Illinois, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
20th Century Philosophy |
History of Western Philosophy |
General Philosophy of Science |