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2 books match the query 'Jewish scientists'

cover of Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science

Michael Polanyi and His Generation

Origins of the Social Construction of Science

Mary Jo Nye

University of Chicago Press, 2011

In Michael Polanyi and His Generation, Mary Jo Nye investigates the role that Michael Polanyi and several of his contemporaries played in the emergence of the social turn in the philosophy of science. This turn involved seeing science as a socially based enterprise that does not rely on empiricism and reason alone but on social communities, behavioral norms, and personal commitments. Nye argues that the roots of the social turn are to be found in the scientific culture and political events of Europe in the 1930s, when scientific intellectuals struggled to defend the universal status of scientific knowledge and to justify public support for science in an era of economic catastrophe, Stalinism and Fascism, and increased demands for applications of science to industry and social welfare.
 
At the center of this struggle was Polanyi, who Nye contends was one of the first advocates of this new conception of science. Nye reconstructs Polanyi’s scientific and political milieus in Budapest, Berlin, and Manchester from the 1910s to the 1950s and explains how he and other natural scientists and social scientists of his generation—including J. D. Bernal, Ludwik Fleck, Karl Mannheim, and Robert K. Merton—and the next, such as Thomas Kuhn, forged a politically charged philosophy of science, one that newly emphasized the social construction of science.
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cover of To Life: Jews Exploring Nature

To Life

Jews Exploring Nature

Joel Greenberg

Rutgers University Press, 2026

To Life explores the Jewish relationship with nature by illuminating significant Jewish thinkers who increased in important ways our understanding of various aspects of natural history. In eight compelling chapter-long biographies, naturalist Joel Greenberg demonstrates the diversity of both Jewish identity and the natural sciences.

Greenberg’s rich biographical sketches spotlight great Jewish scientists who not only made major contributions to the study of the natural world but also led rich and colorful lives: botanist and spy Aaron Aaronsohn, zoologist Libbie Henrietta Hyman, infamous ornithologist Nathan Leopold, mammalogist Philip Hershkovitz, arachnologist Herbert Levi, herpetologist Hymen Marx, public health entomologist Andrew Spielman, and ecologist Joan Ehrenfeld. These individuals manifested different aspects of Jewish identity—some observant, some secular—but all were affected in one way or another by their being Jewish. 

By exploring the relationship between Jews and nature through the lives of these figures, Greenberg shares new and underrecognized aspects of Jewish and environmental history and opens new portals into the fields they studied.

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