Scholars from disciplines as diverse as political science and art history have offered widely differing interpretations of Kuhn's ideas, appropriating his notions of paradigm shifts and revolutions to fit their own theories, however imperfectly. Destined to become the authoritative philosophical study of Kuhn's work. Bibliography.
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions can be seen, without exaggeration, as a landmark text in intellectual history. In his analysis of shifts in scientific thinking, Kuhn questioned the prevailing view that science was an unbroken progression towards the truth. Progress was actually made, he argued, via "paradigm shifts", meaning that evidence that existing scientific models are flawed slowly accumulates – in the face, at first, of opposition and doubt – until it finally results in a crisis that forces the development of a new model. This development, in turn, produces a period of rapid change – "extraordinary science," Kuhn terms it – before an eventual return to "normal science" begins the process whereby the whole cycle eventually repeats itself. This portrayal of science as the product of successive revolutions was the product of rigorous but imaginative critical thinking. It was at odds with science’s self-image as a set of disciplines that constantly evolve and progress via the process of building on existing knowledge. Kuhn’s highly creative re-imagining of that image has proved enduringly influential – and is the direct product of the author’s ability to produce a novel explanation for existing evidence and to redefine issues so as to see them in new ways.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is among the most enigmatic and influential figures of the twentieth century. While his life and work are crucial to any understanding of modern history and the socialist movement, generations of writers on the left and the right have seen fit to embalm him endlessly with superficial analysis or dreary dogma. Now, after the fall of the Soviet Union and “actually-existing” socialism, it is possible to consider Lenin afresh, with sober senses trained on his historical context and how it shaped his theoretical and political contributions. Reconstructing Lenin, four decades in the making and now available in English for the first time, is an attempt to do just that. Tamás Krausz, an esteemed Hungarian scholar writing in the tradition of György Lukács, Ferenc Tokei, and István Mészáros, makes a major contribution to a growing field of contemporary Lenin studies. This rich and penetrating account reveals Lenin busy at the work of revolution, his thought shaped by immediate political events but never straying far from a coherent theoretical perspective. Krausz balances detailed descriptions of Lenin’s time and place with lucid explications of his intellectual development, covering a range of topics like war and revolution, dictatorship and democracy, socialism and utopianism.Reconstructing Lenin will change the way you look at a man and a movement; it will also introduce the English-speaking world to a profound radical scholar.
Divided into three parts, this work is a record of the direction Kuhn was taking during the last two decades of his life. It consists of essays in which he refines the basic concepts set forth in "Structure"--Paradigm shifts, incommensurability, and the nature of scientific progress.
An argument for a non-Cartesian philosophical foundation for cognitive science that combines elements of Heideggerian phenomenology, a dynamical systems approach to cognition, and insights from artificial intelligence-related robotics.
In 1650, Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh joined the long-running theological debate on the age of the earth by famously announcing that creation had occurred on October 23, 4004 B.C. Although widely challenged during the Enlightenment, this belief in a six-thousand-year-old planet was only laid to rest during a revolution of discovery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this relatively brief period, geologists reconstructed the immensely long history of the earth-and the relatively recent arrival of human life. Highlighting a discovery that radically altered existing perceptions of a human's place in the universe as much as the theories of Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud did, Bursting the Limits of Time is a herculean effort by one of the world's foremost experts on the history of geology and paleontology to sketch this historicization of the natural world in the age of revolution. Addressing this intellectual revolution for the first time, Rudwick examines the ideas and practices of earth scientists throughout the Western world to show how the story of what we now call "deep time" was pieced together. He explores who was responsible for the discovery of the earth's history, refutes the concept of a rift between science and religion in dating the earth, and details how the study of the history of the earth helped define a new branch of science called geology. Rooting his analysis in a detailed study of primary sources, Rudwick emphasizes the lasting importance of field- and museum-based research of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bursting the Limits of Time, the culmination of more than three decades of research, is the first detailed account of this monumental phase in the history of science.
