Article ID: CBB000930035

The Fin de Siècle Thesis (2008)

unapi

Staley, Richard A. (Author)


Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Volume: 31
Pages: 311--330


Publication Date: 2008
Edition Details: Part of a symposium on “Revisiting the Forman Thesis”
Language: English

The Fin de Siècle Thesis. This paper examines the relations between John Heilbron's argument that fin de siècle physicists adjusted the image and substance of their discipline to cultural concerns, and Paul Forman's approach to acausality in the Weimar period. In addition to their focus on representation rather than truth, adherents of the descriptionist epistemologies that Heilbron identified also promoted an emphasis on method, statistical rather than causal explanations, historical understandings of epistemology, and stressed the relations between physics and other disciplines. Their views provide an intellectual context - within the physics discipline - for at least some part of what Forman had described as a capitulation to the hostile social environment expressed in Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes.

...More

Description Compares John Heilbron's causal argument relating fin-de-siècle physicists to their cultural concerns and Paul Forman's approach to acausality in the Weimar period.


Included in

Article Trischler, Helmuth; Carson, Cathryn; Kojevnikov, Alexei (2008) Beyond Weimar Culture -- Die Bedeutung der Forman-These für eine Wissenschaftsgeschichte in kulturhistorischer Perspektive. Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte (p. 305). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB000930035/

Similar Citations

Article Schirrmacher, Arne; (2008)
Kosmos, Koralle und Kultur-Milieu. Zur Bedeutung der populären Wissenschaftsvermittlung im späten Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik

Book Forman, Paul; Carson, Cathryn; Kozhevnikov, A. B.; Trischler, Helmuth; (2011)
Weimar Culture and Quantum Mechanics: Selected Papers by Paul Forman and Contemporary Perspectives on the Forman Thesis

Article Wolff, Stefan L.; (2008)
Die Konstituierung eines Netzwerkes reaktionärer Physiker in der Weimarer Republik

Article Trischler, Helmuth; Carson, Cathryn; Kojevnikov, Alexei; (2008)
Beyond Weimar Culture -- Die Bedeutung der Forman-These für eine Wissenschaftsgeschichte in kulturhistorischer Perspektive

Essay Review Seth, Suman; (2013)
Forman at Forty: New Perspectives on “Weimar Culture and Quantum Mechanics”

Article Seth, Suman; (2008)
Mystik and Technik: Arnold Sommerfeld and Early-Weimar Quantum Theory

Article Scheideler, Britta; (2005)
Albert Einstein in der Weimarer Republik

Article Frans H. van Lunteren; (2024)
Physics and the quest for transcendence: A Durkheimian approach

Chapter Kenji Ito; (2017)
Cultural Difference and Sameness: Historiographic Reflections on Histories of Physics in Modern Japan

Chapter von Schwerin, Alexander; (2010)
The Origins of German Biophysics in Medical Physics. Material Configurations between Clinic, Physics and Biology (1900--1930)

Article Brandau, Daniel; (2012)
Cultivating the Cosmos: Spaceflight Thought in Imperial Germany

Book Fuechtner, Veronika; (2011)
Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond

Article Szöllösi-Janze, Margit; (2005)
Science and Social Space: Transformations in the Institutions of Wissenschaft from the Wilhelmine Empire to the Weimar Republic

Article Adam Tamas Tuboly; (2020)
Knowledge Missemination: L. Susan Stebbing, C.E.M. Joad, and Philipp Frank on the Philosophy of the Physicists

Article Dyson, Freeman J.; (2012)
Is Science Mostly Driven by Ideas or by Tools?

Book Somaditya Banerjee; (2020)
The Making of Modern Physics in Colonial India

Article Crossland, Rachel; (2013)
“Multitudinous and Minute”: Early Twentieth-Century Scientific, Literary and Psychological Representations of the Mass

Article Lunteren, Fran H. van; Hollestelle, Marijn J.; (2013)
Paul Ehrenfest and the Dilemmas of Modernity

Article Karl Grandin; (2020)
Marie Skłodowska Curie: Between Physics and Chemistry and Two Nobel Prizes

Article Emily Hayes; (2019)
Fashioned in the Light of Physics: The Scope and Methods of Halford Mackinder's Geography

Authors & Contributors
Carson, Cathryn L.
Seth, Suman
Trischler, Helmuth
Banerjee, Somaditya
Brandau, Daniel
Crossland, Rachel
Journals
Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte
British Journal for the History of Science
Endeavour: Review of the Progress of Science
Historia Scientiarum: International Journal of the History of Science Society of Japan
History and Technology
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Publishers
Imperial College Press
Routledge
University of California Press
Concepts
Physics
Science and culture
Quantum mechanics
Popularization
History of science, as a discipline
Societies; institutions; academies
People
Forman, Paul
Einstein, Albert
Bergson, Henri Louis
Bose, Satyendranath
Curie, Marie Sklodowska
Curie, Pierre
Time Periods
20th century, early
Modern
19th century
20th century
Places
Weimar Republic (1919-1933)
Germany
India
Japan
Institutions
Berliner Psychologisches Institut
Royal Institution of Great Britain
Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (DPG)
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment