Desposyni: Book Review | Thomas Kuhn and the Science Wars by ...

Thomas Kuhn and the Science Wars by Ziauddin Sardar

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sardar's slim little volume is an excellent primer which is part of a new series of pocket guides that has hit the shelves ("Postmodern Encounters") and includes titles like Heidegger and the Nazis, Wittgenstein and Psychoanalysis, and this handy guide to the recent and continuing fuss about the status of science, the coherence of some postmodernist theorizing, and the interconnections between the two domains.

Sardar recounts the history of debates about the philosophy and politics of science and technology, by means of a discussion of Thomas Kuhn's famous 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which itself revolutionized sociological approaches to science. The familiar phrase, "paradigm shift", is Kuhn's, and refers to what happens when the day-to-day work of "normal science" is re-conceived as a result of major theoretical developments, as when Einstein's ideas supplanted Newton's.

Sardar's treatment is primarily useful for what it can point you to read further and should not be kept around as the only book you have on the science wars and the developments in the History and Philosophy of Science in the last century. The back section has a generous bibliography for further reading and will adequately serve that task. If you are familiar with Kuhn's reputation and his seminal work but need to be oriented a bit in order to appreciate it, Sardar's book will help.

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Source: http://desposyni.blogspot.com/2011/06/book-review-thomas-kuhn-and-science.html

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