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Article ID: CBB000930039

Hostile Environmental Intellectuals? Critiques and Counter-Critiques of Science and Technology in West Germany after 1945 (2008)

Beyler, Richard H. (Author)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Volume: 31
Pages: 393--406

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

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Science and culture Science and literature Humanism Science and politics Science and technology, relationships Environmentalism 20th century, late West Germany Forman, Paul

Hostile Environmental Intellectuals? Critiques and Counter-Critiques of Science and Technology in West Germany after 1945. Paul Forman, in his work on physics in Weimar Germany, advanced the thesis that an irrationalist current within German intellectual history was then suddenly exacerbated in a context of defeat and political crisis. After World War II, Germany's situation was if any thing even more catastrophic; nevertheless, a comparable climate of irrationalism arose only in a limited way. The collapse of National Socialism was, in effect, sufficiently explicable on rational grounds to resort to a philosophical fatalism. F. G. Jünger, as a possible exception, put forward a theory of autonomous, demonic technology as an explanation; many cultural critics of the time, however, found these views unrealistic and favored an integration of technical and humanistic approaches. Moreover, even a new wave of (sometimes apocalyptic) literature of environmental crisis focused on specific scientifically analyses rather than a diffuse cultural pessimism.

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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

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