Philosophy of Science, Political Engagement, and the Cold War: An Introduction

Abstract

There have been hints in the literature for over a decade that something funny happened to logical empiricism on the way to becoming the dominant North American philosophy of science. But we had not had a sustained treatment of the topic until the publication of George Reisch’s recent book, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic. There is nothing like a substantial single-author book to focus the attention of an academic discipline, and Reisch’s book has certainly done this. There is now something for the discipline to use as a starting point in analyzing its history, to diverge from, or even to react against. If for nothing else, philosophy of science owes Reisch gratitude for this. However, as the contributions to this special issue indicate, Reisch’s book is more than just the first monograph published on this topic. It is also very carefully researched and thought-provoking. All of the authors here (including Reisch himself) have used it to go beyond the book. Thus, what is collected here are not only summaries of the book and its several claims, but reflections upon those claims and the philosophical lessons we might draw from them. Readers will also find challenges for future work that is historical, philosophical and—perhaps most challenging of all—responsive to the ways in which history and philosophy shape each other. In the first essay, Thomas Uebel provides a careful examination of Reisch’s main contentions while commenting on their scope and implications. He argues that Reisch’s main thesis is properly centered on logical empiricism, not philosophy of science writ large, and that, even among logical empiricists, there were important differences of opinion, differences which Reisch noted in his book and on which Uebel elaborates. Dividing logical empiricism into at least two camps, Uebel and Reisch both see the ‘‘left wing’’ of the logical empiricists (Neurath, Frank, Hahn, and Carnap) holding a similar