Awards

• Commended for PROSE (Biography/Autobiography) 2011

Overview

In Michael Polanyi and His Generation, Mary Jo Nye investigates the role that Michael Polanyi and several of his contemporaries played in the emergence of the social turn in the philosophy of science. This turn involved seeing science as a socially based enterprise that does not rely on empiricism and reason alone but on social communities, behavioral norms, and personal commitments. Nye argues that the roots of the social turn are to be found in the scientific culture and political events of Europe in the 1930s, when scientific intellectuals struggled to defend the universal status of scientific knowledge and to justify public support for science in an era of economic catastrophe, Stalinism and Fascism, and increased demands for applications of science to industry and social welfare. At the center of this struggle was Polanyi, who Nye contends was one of the first advocates of this new conception of science. Nye reconstructs Polanyi’s scientific and political milieus in Budapest, Berlin, and Manchester from the 1910s to the 1950s and explains how he and other natural scientists and social scientists of his generation—including J. D. Bernal, Ludwik Fleck, Karl Mannheim, and Robert K. Merton—and the next, such as Thomas Kuhn, forged a politically charged philosophy of science, one that newly emphasized the social construction of science.

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9780226610634

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This is a sure-handed polymathic study of a distinguished polymath. Michael Polanyi and His Generation is an impressive intellectual achievement, a book that will be read with pleasure and profit by multiple audiences. --Alan J. Rocke, Case Western Reserve University<br><br>--Alan J. Rocke

This is a sure-handed, polymathic study of a distinguished polymath. Michael Polanyi and His Generation is an impressive intellectual achievement, a book that will be read with pleasure and profit by multiple audiences. (Alan J. Rocke, Case Western Reserve University)

Author Information

Mary Jo Nye is the Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Professor of the Humanities Emerita and professor of history emerita at Oregon State University. She is the author of several books, including, most recently, Blackett: Physics, War, and Politics in the Twentieth Century.

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