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Individuals and collectives in the philosophy of Boris Hessen: An introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2022

Sean Winkler
Sean Winkler*
Affiliation:
Loyola Marymount University and University of Redlands
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Argument

This paper provides an introduction to three translations of articles by Soviet philosopher Boris Hessen: “Mechanical Materialism and Modern Physics,” “On Comrade Timiryazev’s Attitude towards Contemporary Science” and “Marian Smoluchowski (On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death)”. It begins by presenting a central tension in Hessen’s work; namely, how even though he is better known for the externalism of his 1931 Newton paper, much of his work has been considered exemplary of an internalist approach. I then show that for Hessen, the history of modern science was defined by the discovery of the dialectical unity in opposition between dynamic and statistical regularity. This not only sheds important light on Hessen’s understanding of causation, but also reconciles the aforementioned tension by showing his approach to the relationship between individuals and collectives in the study of physical phenomena, along with the relationship between individual scientists and socioeconomic conditions.

Keywords

Boris HessenSoviet scienceindividualscollectivesdynamic regularitystatistical regularity
Type
Historical Document
Information
Science in Context , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 121 - 136
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

1

The translations of Hessen’s texts following this introduction were carried out by Sean Winkler with the aid of translation software, and were later revised by Alexei Kojevnikov. Translations of these same texts have also appeared in Olga Pattison and Chris Talbot’s recent volume, Boris Hessen: Physics and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, 1927 – 1931. These translations are unrelated and were carried out independently of one another.

References

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