Knowledge Missemination: L. Susan Stebbing, C.E.M. Joad, and Philipp Frank on the Philosophy of the Physicists

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Adam Tamas Tuboly

Science popularization might take different forms. In the early twentieth century, Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington presented the most successful endeavors. Philosophers were highly unimpressed and disturbed by these popular works and various authors declared their disagreement with the physicists’ philosophical books against their own philosophical background. I will discuss three different philosophers, L. Susan Stebbing, C. E. M. Joad, and Philipp Frank, whose three lines of criticism represent three different forms of philosophy, social engagement, and scientific outlook. What is interesting is that there was a point when the most diverse philosophers (of science) agreed in contrast of their common enemy, namely, those popularizing scientists that have their reputation and use it to propagate false, or at least misleading views about science, culture, and values. What we shall see is how far this agreement went among these figures and how the divergent strategies culminated in very similar results regarding knowledge dissemination.

BJHS Themes ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 73-103
Author(s):  
ISABEL ZILHÃO

AbstractThis article addresses and discusses one of the first literary attempts to extend the communication of science to young people – agriculture being the case in point – through moralizing and educational novels in early twentieth-century Portugal. In this study, I show that a set of popular books on agriculture addressing horticulture, poultry farming, beekeeping, dairy farming, silkworm breeding, orchard culture and fish farming written for young people by the agricultural engineer João Coelho da Motta Prego – coupled with popularizing articles about agricultural policy and agronomy written by him in the daily press – clearly served the purpose of re-educating the Portuguese rural inhabitant and reviving the country's agriculture-based economy. The article showcases how locality drives the way science and technology are addressed, what is communicated, who writes for whom, and the purpose of the writing itself. It highlights how science popularization/popular science, in its various formats (i.e. science, technology and medicine), can be more than a way to teach science to a lay audience.


Tempo ◽  
1948 ◽  
pp. 25-28
Author(s):  
Andrzej Panufnik

It is ten years since KAROL SZYMANOWSKI died at fifty-four. He was the most prominent representative of the “radical progressive” group of early twentieth century composers, which we call “Young Poland.” In their manysided and pioneering efforts they prepared the fertile soil on which Poland's present day's music thrives.


2004 ◽  
Vol 171 (4S) ◽  
pp. 320-320
Author(s):  
Peter J. Stahl ◽  
E. Darracott Vaughan ◽  
Edward S. Belt ◽  
David A. Bloom ◽  
Ann Arbor

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-170
Author(s):  
P. G. Moore

Three letters from the Sheina Marshall archive at the former University Marine Biological Station Millport (UMBSM) reveal the pivotal significance of Sheina Marshall's father, Dr John Nairn Marshall, behind the scheme planned by Glasgow University's Regius Professor of Zoology, John Graham Kerr. He proposed to build an alternative marine station facility on Cumbrae's adjacent island of Bute in the Firth of Clyde in the early years of the twentieth century to cater predominantly for marine researchers.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.


Author(s):  
Vike Martina Plock

By looking at Jean Rhys’s ‘Left Bank’ fiction (Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight, ‘Illusion’, ‘Mannequin’), this chapter investigates how new operational procedures such as Fordism and Taylorism, which were introduced into the French couture industry at the beginning of the twentieth century, affected constructions of modern femininity. Increasingly standardized images of feminine types were produced by Paris couturiers while the new look of the Flapper seemingly advertised women’s expanding social, political and professional mobility. Rhys, this chapter argues, noted fashion’s ability to provide resources for creative image construction but she simultaneously expressed criticism of its tendency to standardize female costumes and behaviour. Ultimately, Rhys demonstrates in her fiction that the radically modern couture of the early twentieth century was by no means the maker of social change and women’s political modernity. To offset the increased standardization of female images that she witnessed around her, Rhys created heroines and texts that relied on an overt display on difference.  


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