As Reisch describes it, the Unity of Science
> movement was
> committed to demonstrating the fundamental unity of
> the sciences
> including the natural sciences, the behavioral
> sciences and the social
> sciences, and the Unity of Science movement was
> interested in using
> social science to explore how economic, political
> and cultural factors
> have shaped the development of science. As Reisch
> points out, the Unity
> of Science movement drew upon Marxist ideas while
> eschewing the dogmatism
> of dialectical materialism, which it dismissed as
> metaphysics. Its
> leading figures like Neurath and Frank were
> democratic socialists who
> were committed to using the methods of science to
> help create a fairer,
> more just society. But in the end, it seems that
> instead of transforming
> American society, the Unity of Science movement
> withered and died, and
> logical empiricism, itself, became shriveled in its
> concerns, abandoning
> its former political commitments in the name of
> scientific neutrality.
Just for what it's worth, my dissertation, in a nod to
this old tradition, was entitled Materialism and The
Unity Of Science. Btw, I don't think the old LPs ever
changed their stripes -- it's just that their first
generation students (1930s-50s) were not Marxists and
social democrats raised in Red Vienna, but in places
like Akron, Ohio (Quine). ANd not of the LPs were
reds. Schlick was not. It was the third or fourth
generations of their students, post-positivists, like
Hilary Putnam (briefly in PL), Peter Railton (a diss
adviser of mine), Michael Devitt, Richard Miller,
Richard Boyd, Andrew Levine, Elliot Sober, etc. who
turned back to Marxism at least fora whiler. Of this
lot, Railton still on the left, Boyd's still a
Amrxists last I heard, Andy Levine is still holding up
the torch. But there are few and they produced a
shrinking and less distinguished generation of
successors. Like me -- I studied with both Hempel;
(one of the original LPs) and Railton.
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