The third volume of the book series, The Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology, and the Doctrine of the Mode of Thinking, deals with the crisis of bourgeois natural science. Natural scientists generally are held in high esteem in bourgeois society because they are seemingly apolitical, unimpeachable, and committed solely to social progress. With the advance of positivism and pragmatism, however, the natural sciences lost much of their scientificity and have gotten into a crisis. This polemic is intended to revive materialistically based free thinking in the working class. Unless it frees itself from the shackles of idealism and metaphysics, humanity will not be able to utilize the achievements of the modern natural sciences for social progress. Thus, this book is also a must for every scientist with a critical mind. It serves the purpose of helping scientific socialism and its dialectical-materialist method gain new esteem.

A masterful survey of the history of Marxist philosophy of science Sheehan retraces the development of a Marxist philosophy of science through detailed and highly readable accounts of the debates that shaped it. Skilfully deploying a large cast of characters, Sheehan shows how Marx and Engel’s ideas on the development and structure of natural science had a crucial impact on the work of early twentieth-century natural philosophers, historians of science, and natural scientists. With a new afterword by the author.

The papers given by the Soviet Delegation to the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in London in 1931, headed by N. I. Bukharin, exerted a profound influence on Western historiography of science. Perhaps the most influential contribution was that of Hessen, who made a long and classical statement of Marxist historiography, taking Isaac Newton as his example. The collection, which appeared in Britain at the height of the Depression, fostered an acute social awareness and a heated debate among many working scientists. Accredited by some as "the starting point of a new evaluation of the history of science", the book reflects the huge social and economic divide between Socialism and Capitalism present at the time of publication, and its influence on intellectual culture and scientific advancement.

The true history of physics can only be read in the life stories of those who made its progress possible. Matvei Bronstein was one of those for whom the vast territory of theoretical physics was as familiar as his own home: he worked in cosmology, nuclear physics, gravitation, semiconductors, atmospheric physics, quantum electrodynamics, astro physics and the relativistic quantum theory. Everyone who knew him was struck by his wide knowledge, far beyond the limits of his trade. This partly explains why his life was closely intertwined with the social, historical and scientific context of his time. One might doubt that during his short life Bronstein could have made truly weighty contributions to science and have become, in a sense, a symbol ofhis time. Unlike mathematicians and poets, physicists reach the peak oftheir careers after the age of thirty. His thirty years of life, however, proved enough to secure him a place in theGreaterSovietEncyclopedia. In 1967, in describing the first generation of physicists educated after the 1917 revolution, Igor Tamm referred to Bronstein as "an exceptionally brilliant and promising" theoretician [268].

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the German intellectual world was challenged by a growing distrust in the rational ideals of the enlightenment, and consequently by a belief in the existence of a radical ‘cultural crisis’. One response to this crisis was the emergence of ‘Life Philosophy’, which celebrated the irrational, expressive, instinctive and spontaneous, while rejecting the rational, conscious, and logical. Around the same time and place, Zionist thought crystallized. It discussed issues like the ‘Jewish essence’, the creation of a new Jewish person and a new Jewish community, return to the Jewish homeland, and the negation of the diasporic way of life. This book explores the connections between Zionism and Life Philosophy, and argues that Life Philosophy represents a modern secularized version of gnostic dualism between God and world, and that this was a particular secular impulse that lay at the core of the Zionist political mission. Consisting of two main sections, the book first shows the manner in which Life Philosophy should be understood as a modern, secularized, gnostic theology, before concluding by discussing its political Zionist interpretation. Drawing on published works of a wide range of thinkers and intellectuals, alongside a variety of unpublished materials, this book will be welcomed by students and scholars of Jewish studies, the philosophy of Judaism, and religion and philosophy more generally.

Throughout his career, the influential new media theorist Vilém Flusser kept the idea of gesture in mind: that people express their being in the world through a sweeping range of movements. He reconsiders familiar actions—from speaking and painting to smoking and telephoning—in terms of particular movement, opening a surprising new perspective on the ways we share and preserve meaning. A gesture may or may not be linked to specialized apparatus, though its form crucially affects the person who makes it. These essays, published here as a collection in English for the first time, were written over roughly a half century and reflect both an eclectic array of interests and a durable commitment to phenomenological thought. Defining gesture as “a movement of the body or of a tool attached to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation,” Flusser moves around the topic from diverse points of view, angles, and distances: at times he zooms in on a modest, ordinary movement such as taking a photograph, shaving, or listening to music; at others, he pulls back to look at something as vast and varied as human “making,” embracing everything from the fashioning of simple tools to mass manufacturing. But whatever the gesture, Flusser analyzes it as the expression of a particular form of consciousness, that is, as a particular relationship between the world and the one who gestures.

Originally published in 1961. Russian Marxist philosophy of science originated among men and women who gave their whole lives to rebellion against established authority. The original tension within Marxist philosophy between positivism and metaphysics was repressed but not resolved in this first phase of Soviet Marxism. In this volume the author correlates the development of ideas with trends in the Cultural Revolution and against this background it is possible to understand why debates over general philosophy gave way to conflicts over specific sciences in the aftermath of the first Five Year Plan and why there was a genuine crisis in Soviet biology.