World Views and Scientific Discipline Formation : Science Studies in the German Democratic Republic Papers From a German-American Summer Institute, 1988

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. Front Matter....Pages i-xvi World Views and Scientific Discipline Formation: How East German Science Studies Contributed to the Fall of the Cultural Wall....Pages 1-15 On the Origin and Nature of Scientific Disciplines....Pages 17-28 Relating Evolutionary Theory to the Natural Sciences....Pages 29-37 Dialectical Understanding of the Unity of Scientific Knowledge....Pages 39-48 History of Science in the GDR: Institutions and Programmatic Positions....Pages 49-62 Historiography of Mathematics: Aims, Methods, Tasks....Pages 63-73 The Berlin ‘Society for Scientific Philosophy’ as Organizational form of Philosophizing in the Medium of Natural Science....Pages 75-87 Mathematics and Ideology in Fascist Germany....Pages 89-95 Imageless Thought or Stimulus Error? The Social Construction of Private Experience....Pages 97-106 The Berlin Psychological Tradition: Between Experiment and Quasi-Experimental Design, 1850–1990....Pages 107-116 Move Over Darwin: The Ontogenetic Sources of William Preyer’s Developmental Psychology....Pages 117-128 On the Interdisciplinary Genesis of Experimental Methods in Nineteenth-Century German Psychology....Pages 129-140 From Boltzmann to Planck: On Continuity in Scientific Revolutions....Pages 141-150 Walther Nernst and Quantum Theory....Pages 151-162 Historical Explanations in Modern Physics? The Lesson of Quantum Mechanics....Pages 163-175 Fritz London and the Community of Quantum Physicists....Pages 177-190 The Middle Ages: Darkness in the Sciences?....Pages 191-198 Introduction to the Basic Concepts of Communication-Oriented Science Studies....Pages 199-208 Philosophical Problems of Modern Psychology....Pages 209-222 Neo-Kantianism and Epistemology: On the Formation of a Philosophical Discipline in Nineteenth-Century Germany....Pages 223-234 The Transformation of German Philosophy in the Context of Scientific Research in the Nineteenth Century....Pages 235-246 Reform Efforts of Logic at Mid-Nineteenth Century in Germany....Pages 247-258 August Weismann: One of the First Synthetic Theorists of Evolutionary Biology....Pages 259-267 Darwin and the German Theologians....Pages 269-278 Two Faces of Biologism: Some Reflections on a Difficult Period in the History of Biology in Germany....Pages 279-291 What Keeps a Species Together?....Pages 293-298 The Training in Germany of English-Speaking Chemists in the Nineteenth Century and its Profound Influence in America and Britain....Pages 299-308 Science and Practice in German Agriculture: Justus Von Liebig, Hermann Von Liebig, and the Agricultural Experiment Stations....Pages 309-320 Things are Seldom What they Seem: The Story of Non-Phosphorylating Glycolysis....Pages 321-327 Goethe’s Morphology of Stones: Between Natural History and Historical Geology....Pages 329-338 The Philosophy of Living Things: Schelling’s Naturphilosophie as a Transition to the Philosophy of Identity....Pages 339-350 A New Correspondence of the Philosopher F. W. J. Schelling....Pages 351-356 The Influence of Jakob Friedrich Fries on Matthias Schleiden....Pages 357-365 The Geographical Vision and the Popular Order of Disciplines, 1848–1870....Pages 367-376 Knowledge Transfer in the Nineteenth Century: Young, Navier, Roebling, and the Brooklyn Bridge....Pages 377-386 Soviet-German Scientific Relations before World War II: Fruitful Cooperation in Different Social Orders....Pages 387-399 Bourgeois Berlin Salons: Meeting Places for Culture and the Sciences....Pages 401-414 Max Delbrück: A Physicist in Biology....Pages 415-422 ‘Nobody can Become a Real Engineer Who Has Not Already Become a Whole Person’....Pages 423-429 Back Matter....Pages 431-471