World Views and Scientific Discipline Formation

The various efforts to develop a Marxist philosophy of science in the one­ time 'socialist' countries were casualties of the Cold War. Even those who were in no way Marxists, and those who were undogmatic in their Marxisms, now confront a new world. All the more harsh is it for those who worked within the framework imposed upon professional philosophy by the official ideology. Here in this book, we are concerned with some 31 colleagues from the late German Democratic Republic, representative in their scholarship of the achievements of a curiously creative while dismayingly repressive period. The literature published in the GDR was blossoming, certainly in the final decade, but it developed within a totalitarian regime where personal careers either advanced or faltered through the private protection or denunciation of mentors. We will never know how many good minds did not enter the field of philosophy in the first place due to their prudent judgments that there was a virtual requirement that the candidate join the Socialist Unity (i.e. Communist) Party. Among those who started careers and were sidetracked, the record is now beginning to be revealed; and for the rest, the price of 'doing philosophy' was mostly silence in the face of harassments the likes of which make academic politics in the West seem child's play.

Inhalt

I: Introduction.- World Views and Scientific Discipline Formation: How East German Science Studies Contributed to the Fall of the Cultural Wall.- On the Origin and Nature of Scientific Disciplines.- II: Ideas and Institutions.- Relating Evolutionary Theory to the Natural Sciences.- Dialectical Understanding of the Unity of Scientific Knowledge.- History of Science in the GDR: Institutions and Programmatic Positions.- III: Mathematics in a Socio-Political Context.- Historiography of Mathematics: Aims, Methods, Tasks.- The Berlin' society for Scientific Philosophy' as Organizational Form of Philosophizing in the Medium of Natural Science.- Mathematics and Ideology in Fascist Germany.- IV: Psychology Constructs its Subject Matter.- Imageless Thought or Stimulus Error? The Social Construction of Private Experience.- The Berlin Psychological Tradition: Between Experiment and Quasi-Experimental Design, 1850-1990.- Move over Darwin: The Ontogenetic Sources of William Preyer's Developmental Psychology.- On the Interdisciplinary Genesis of Experimental Methods in Nineteenth-Century German Psychology.- V: Physics in the Context of Philosophy and Theory Of Science.- From Boltzmann to Planck: On Continuity in Scientific Revolutions.- Walther Nernst and Quantum Theory.- Historical Explanations in Modern Physics: The Lesson of Modern Quantum Mechanics.- Fritz London and the Community of Quantum Physicists.- VI: Theory as Method.- The Middle Ages: Darkness in the Sciences.- to the Basic Concepts of Communication-Oriented Science Studies.- Philosophical Problems of Modern Psychology.- VII: Discipline Formation of Philosophy.- Neo-Kantianism and Epistemology: On the Formation of a Philosophical Discipline in Nineteenth-Century Germany.- The Transformation of German Philosophy in the Context of Scientific Research in the Nineteenth Century.- Reform Efforts of Logic at Mid-Nineteenth Century in Germany.- VIII: Biological Evolution in the Mirror of Theories of Evolution.- August Weismann: One of the First Synthetic Theorists of Evolutionary Biology.- Darwin and the German Theologians.- Two Faces of Biologism: Some Reflections on a Difficult Period in the History of Biology in Germany.- What Keeps a Species Together.- IX: Teachers and Students: Chemistry Laboratories and Dissertations.- The Training in Germany of English-Speaking Chemists in the Nineteenth Century and its Profound Influence in America and Britain.- Science and Practice in German Agriculture: Justus von Liebig, Hermann von Liebig, and the Agricultural Experiment Stations.- Things Are Seldom What They Seem: The Story of Non-Phosphorylating Glycolysis.- X: Natural Science and Naturphilosophie.- Goethe's Morphology of Stones: Between Natural History and Historical Geology.- The Philosophy of Living Things: Schilling's Naturphilosophie as a Transition to the Philosophy of Identity 339.- A New Correspondence of the Philosopher F. W. J. Schelling.- The Influence of Jakob Friedrich Fries on Matthias Schleiden.- XI: Science and Society.- The Geographical Vision and the Popular Order of Disciplines, 1848-1870.- Knowledge Transfer in the Nineteenth Century: Young, Navier, Roebling, and the Brooklyn Bridge.- Soviet-German Scientific Relations before World War II: Fruitful Cooperation in Different Social Orders.- XII: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge.- Bourgeois Berlin Salons: Meeting Places for Culture and the Sciences.- Max Delbrück: A Physicist in Biology.- 'Nobody Can Become a Real Engineer Who Has Not Already Become a Whole Person'.- Summer Institute Program 1988.- About the Authors.- Name Index.