Working knowledge : making the human sciences from Parsons to Kuhn / Joel Isaac.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Isaac, Joel, 1978-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Social sciences--Study and teaching--Massachusetts--Cambridge.

Social sciences.

Social sciences--Massachusetts--Cambridge--Reseach.

Universities and colleges.

History.

Social sciences--Study and teaching.

Massachusetts--Cambridge.

Harvard University--History.

Harvard University.

Universities and colleges--Massachusetts--Cambridge--History.

Physical Description:

314 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2012.

Summary:

A love letter to Harvard from Harvard University Press, this book looks at the development of the social sciences (anthropology, sociology, history and philosophy of science) in the mid-twentieth century, and a variety of famous names of that era, as all products of a unique environment at Harvard. Joel Isaac (history of modern political thought, U. of Cambridge, UK) documents the way these disciplines fell outside the institutional boundaries of American universities at the time, and found a home at Harvard through an informal network of clubs and other refuges of intellectual and teaching culture. There, thinkers from different backgrounds and disciplines were able to talk together, or work together on collaborative projects. Isaac joins a growing number of voices drawing attention to the way that unclaimed spaces and open-ended opportunities for interdisciplinary contact foster intellectual innovation. While other articles have focused on the kinds of physical spaces that foster such outpourings of new work, Isaac focuses intensive research on the social space that created this one. He notes that while innovators from Talcott Parsons to B. F. Skinner to Thomas Kuhn have been treated separately by historians and scholars, they all were crossing paths in the same social setting at the same time, interacting through non-professional teaching programs and faculty philosophical conversations outside of the usual departmental structures at Harvard. The book is well written in an academic intellectual style, supported with extensive endnotes. While the author focuses the book on the history of the mid-century Harvard example of informal networking in extreme detail, he offers the hope that it can serve as a model for greater tolerance of different outlooks, and more cross-fertilization between disciplines, in an era where fierce defense of increasingly tiny and uniform intellectual fiefdoms, and the death of informal teaching-community networks, is the rule. If enough academic administrators read this book, his hope may come true. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Contents:

Prologue: crafting knowledge in the human sciences

The interstitial academy : Harvard and the rise of the American university

Making a case : the Harvard Pareto circle

What do the science-makers do? : migrations of operationism

Radical translation : W. V. Quine and the reception of logical empiricism

The levellers : Harvard's social scientists from World War to Cold War

Lessons of the revolution : history, sociology, and philosophy of science

Epilogue: the great disembedding

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674065741

0674065743

OCLC:

758383614