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 Mc Carthy-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 within urgent political worries—on campus and in the public sphere—about the invisible, unconscious powers of ideology, language, and history to shape the human mind and its experience of the world.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations
Preface
Bombs and Books: An Introduction
Timeline of Events and Documents
Cast of Additional Characters
Part I. War and Crisis
1. Progress and Revolution in the Suburbs of New York
2. War and General Education at Harvard
3. History of Science in a Divided World
Part II. “The Struggle for Men’s Minds”
4. The Cold War Conversions of Thomas S. Kuhn and James Bryant Conant
5. Sidney Hook and the Anticommunist Inquisition
6. Brainwashing, or the Structure of Philosophical Revolutions
7. The Necessary Dangers of Consensus and Unity
Part III. The Cold War Origins of
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
8. The Language, Psychology, and Psychoanalysis of Scientific “Reorientations”
9. “Attention Senator Mc Carthy”: The Perils of Methodology in Totalitarian Times
10. Ideology and Revolution in the
International Encyclopedia of Unified Science
11. Progress, Ideology, and “Writing History Backwards”
12. From “Ideology” and “Consensus” to Paradigmania
Part IV. The New World of Paradigms
13. “If Mr. Kuhn Is Right . . .”: Paradigms and Dogmas in Cold War Science Education
14. The Magic of Paradigms
15. Spies, Prisons, Mobs, Bandwagons, and Beasts
16. The Thomas Kuhn Experience
17. A Revolution and a New Ideology
Epilogue: Writing and Rewriting History
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Despre autor
George A. Reisch is managing editor of
The Monist and series editor for Open Court Publishing Company’s series Popular Culture and Philosophy.
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