The ‘context museum’: integrating science and culture

Abstract

One of the most important tasks facing science and technology museums today is to shed the view of science as divorced from culture. Ivo Janousek explains how the history of Western thought resulted in this dichotomy and points a way forward to bring about a more integrated understanding of the world around us. The author is director of the National Technical Museum in Prague and a specialist in cybernetics, philosophy of science and culture, and contemporary art criticism. He is a member of the board of the European Collaborative for Science, Industry and Technology (ECSITE) and the Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTECH), and is a vice‐president of the Middle‐European Union of Technical Museums (MUT). He is the author of numerous monographs, patents, scientific articles and art catalogues, and radio and television programmes, as well as a lecturer in logic and epistemology at Charles University in Prague.