Pushing PositivismThe Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics. Robert P. Crease , Charles C. MannInward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World. Abraham PaisStory of the W and Z. Peter Watkins

Isis ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 78 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-428
Author(s):  
Andy Pickering
Authorship ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Bonciarelli

The objective of this article is to analyze how or in what ways the most advanced visual experiments centred on “the book” as an object in the period between 1900 and 1930 in Italy, in particular in relation to the development of middlebrow literature. The article’s hypothesis is that the revolution brought about by Futurism soon touched on literature intended for a middlebrow reading public, attracted and interested by the paratextual presentation of the book and its physical aspects. This article focuses in particular on changes in page layout and on lettering games in paratextuality, to give a precise idea of how strong the thrust of Futurism was and how book design affected the visual culture of the beginning of the twentieth century in Italy.


Author(s):  
Wayne C. Myrvold

Probability concepts permeate physics. This is obvious in statistical mechanics, in which probabilities appear explicitly. But even in cases when predictions are made with near-certainty, there is are implicit probabilistic assumptions in play, as it is assumed that molecular fluctuations can be neglected. How are we to understand these probabilistic concepts? This book offers a fresh look at these familiar topics, urging readers to see them in a new light. It argues that the traditional choices between probabilities as objective chances or degrees of belief is too limiting, and introduces a new concept, called epistemic chances, that combines physical and epistemic considerations. Thinking of probabilities in this way solves some of the puzzles associated with the use of probability and statistical mechanics. The book includes some history of discussions of probability, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and introductions to conceptual issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. It should be of interest to philosophers interested in probability, and to physicists and philosophers of physics interested in understanding how probabilistic concepts apply to the physical world.


Author(s):  
Vernon Bogdanor

This chapter examines the history of the civil service in Great Britain. It suggests that the revolution in Whitehall during the last two decades of the twentieth century transformed the civil service, and that many of the public utilities nationalised by the post-war Attlee government were privatised. Other major changes include the reduction in the size of the civil service and the application of market disciplines to it.


Author(s):  
T.L.S. Sprigge

Idealism is now usually understood in philosophy as the view that mind is the most basic reality and that the physical world exists only as an appearance to or expression of mind, or as somehow mental in its inner essence. However, a philosophy which makes the physical world dependent upon mind is usually also called idealist even if it postulates some further hidden, more basic reality behind the mental and physical scenes (for example, Kant’s things-in-themselves). There is also a certain tendency to restrict the term ‘idealism’ to systems for which what is basic is mind of a somewhat lofty nature, so that ‘spiritual values’ are the ultimate shapers of reality. (An older and broader use counts as idealist any view for which the physical world is somehow unreal compared with some more ultimate, not necessarily mental, reality conceived as the source of value, for example Platonic forms.) The founding fathers of idealism in Western thought are Berkeley (theistic idealism), Kant (transcendental idealism) and Hegel (absolute idealism). Although the precise sense in which Hegel was an idealist is problematic, his influence on subsequent absolute or monistic idealism was enormous. In the US and the UK idealism, especially of the absolute kind, was the dominating philosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, receiving its most forceful expression with F.H. Bradley. It declined, without dying, under the influence of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and later of the logical positivists. Not a few philosophers believe, however, that it has a future.


Author(s):  
Frederick H. White

One of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets, Aleksander Aleksandrovich Blok (1880–1921) was a representative of the ‘second wave’ of Russian Symbolists. Two books of poetry, Verses on a Beautiful Lady (1904) and Inadvertent Joy (1907), and his lyric drama, The Showbooth, staged in 1906, made him famous. Paradoxically, Blok began to openly mock his former Symbolist ideals after 1905, even as he was considered by many to be the leader of Russian Symbolism. In particular, Blok was concerned with the widening gulf between the common people and the intelligentsia. As his disillusionment deepened, his poetry was haunted by a sense of imminent catastrophe. Therefore, his initial response to the revolution of 1917 was positive, seeing in it an apocalyptic moment that would bring renewal and regeneration after a period of chaos and destruction. This idea was realized in his poem The Twelve (1918) which celebrates the October Revolution and placed Christ at the head of a gang of Red Army soldiers. Blok, however, soon realized that the Bolsheviks would not embody the revolutionary ideals that he wished to support, causing him to become disenchanted and deeply depressed. Blok only lived for another three and a half years, dying in August 1921.


Slavic Review ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 512-517
Author(s):  
Leopold h. Haimson

Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg have greatly contributed by their respective commentaries to broadening the scope of the issues addressed in my discussion of “The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia” (see Slavic Review [Spring 1988]: 1-20). They have also helped bring out the complexity of the processes involved, after the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917, in the shaping and reshaping of the representations that individuals and groups entertained of themselves, of one another, and of the body politic as a whole.


2017 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-363
Author(s):  
Nicole Mottier

The battles that peasants waged during the Mexican Revolution translated into a series of agrarian and agricultural institutions, and one of these was the Banco Nacional de Crédito Ejidal, created in 1926. Histories deeply engrained in both the popular imagination of Mexico and scholarly historiography have offered a generic classic narrative of ejidal credit, beginning with Lázaro Cárdenas. He and his cabinet sought to transform theejidointo the engine of agricultural growth for the nation and carried out a sweeping and (in qualified ways) successful land reform, thereby bringing the revolution to the fullest fruition many Mexicans would ever know. It is assumed that ejidal credit peaked during Cárdenas's administration in two major ways: first, it was in this period that ejidal credit societies received the most loans from the Banco Nacional del Crédito Ejidal, and second, it was during the same period that the bank clearly and unanimously embraced social reform goals over orthodox banking goals.


Slavic Review ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toivo U. Raun

Historical studies of the Russian empire in upheaval in the first two decades of the twentieth century have tended to be animated by a narrow centralist bias or an equally narrow regional one. Although it is clear that the primary impulse for revolutionary situations in 1905 and 1917 resulted from events in St. Petersburg/Petrograd, a Russocentric approach to a society that was less than 50 percent Russian is surely inadequate. At the same time, studies of individual minority nationalities, however thorough, tend to view these groups in isolation. A comparative perspective, which could identify broader uniformities as well as local peculiarities, is usually lacking. In this article I shall present a synthesizing and comparative overview of the Revolution of 1905 in the Baltic Provinces and Finland. Although these areas constituted only 2 percent of the land area of the Russian empire and had less than 4 percent of its population in 1905,2 they were among the most modernized in the country, and their ethnic diversity and differing histories provide abundant material for a comparative case study.


1972 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 620-653 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard M. Pfeffer

Western social scientists have tended to evade a central issue of the Chinese Revolution. As a consequence, our scholarship has generally misconceived and denigrated the Chinese Communist concepts and practices of mass participation. The issue evaded is twentieth-century China's need for a continuing vanguard to direct the revolutionary change that China's conditions demand. One result of that evasion has been the near-unanimous decrying of China's restrictions on democratic control, restrictions that, of course, are implicit in the very concept of a vanguard.


2000 ◽  
Vol 68 (6) ◽  
pp. 582-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Johnson ◽  
Sheldon Lee Glashow

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document