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The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (IEUS) was a series of publications devoted to unified science. The IEUS was conceived at the Mundaneum Institute in The Hague in the 1930s, and published in the USA beginning in 1938. It was an ambitious project that was never completed.
Contents
The IEUS was an output of the Vienna Circle to address the "growing concern throughout the world for the logic, the history, and the sociology of science..." Only the first section Foundations of the Unity of Science (FUS) was published; it contains two volumes for a total of nineteen monographs published from 1938 to 1969.
Volume I
Encyclopedia and Unified Science (FUS I-1)
Otto Neurath, Niels Bohr, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, and Charles Morris
Foundations of the Theory of Signs (FUS I-2)
Charles Morris
Foundations of Logic and Mathematics (FUS I-3)
Rudolf Carnap
Linguistic Aspects of Science (FUS I-4)
Leonard Bloomfield
Procedures of Empirical Science (FUS I-5)
Victor F. Lenzen
Principles of the Theory of Probability (FUS I-6)
Ernest Nagel
Foundations of Physics (FUS I-7)
Philipp Frank
Cosmology (FUS I-8)
E. Finlay-Freundlich
Foundations of Biology (FUS I-9)
Felix Mainx
The Conceptual Framework of Psychology (FUS I-10)
Egon Brunswik
Volume II
Foundations of the Social Sciences (FUS II-1)
Otto Neurath
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (FUS II-2)
Thomas S. Kuhn
Science and the Structure of Ethics (FUS II-3)
Abraham Edel
Theory of Valuation (FUS II-4)
John Dewey
The Technique of Theory Construction (FUS II-5)
Joseph H. Woodger
Methodology of Mathematical Economics and Econometrics (FUS II-6)
Gerhard Tintner
Concept Formation in Empirical Science (FUS II-7)
Carl G. Hempel
The Development of Rationalism and Empiricism (FUS II-8)
George De Santillana, Edgar Zilsel
The Development of Logical Empiricism (FUS II-9)
Joergen Joergensen
Bibliography and Index (FUS II-10)
Herbert Feigl, Charles Morris
Influence
Historian David Hollinger argued that the IEUS was a less comprehensive account of the sciences of the time than it could have been, and was especially weak in the social sciences. Hollinger noted that the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, published around the same time, provided a much more comprehensive account of the social sciences: "The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (12 vols., New York, 1933–1937) was a prodigious endeavor brought to successful completion by Alvin Johnson. This encyclopedia is a much more important episode in the history of thought than The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science yet has attracted much less attention from historians than the abortive enterprise led by Neurath." Hollinger also said that the scholarly journal Philosophy of Science, founded in 1934, provided a much more inclusive perspective on the sciences in those years than did the IEUS.
American political theorist James Burnham refers to the Encyclopedia in Science and Style: A Reply to Comrade Trotsky (1940), his penultimate tract discussing his differences with Trotsky and marking Burnham's renouncement of dialectical materialism. In this text he responds to Trotsky's request to draw his attention to "those works which should supplant the system of dialectic materialism for the proletariat" by referring to Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead and "the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science". Burnham resigned from the Workers Party three and a half months later declaring "that dialectical materialism, though scientifically meaningless, is psychologically and historically an integral part of Marxism" and that he had "for several years had no real place in a Marxist party."