“The philosophy of science is slowly discovering its radical political past with the help of two new intellectual biographies,” says Steve Fuller, professor of sociology at the University of Warwick.
Fuller is getting stuck into Malachi Hacohen’s Karl Popper– The Formative Years, 1902-1945: Politics and philosophy in interwar Vienna (Cambridge, 2000) and John Kadvany’s Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason (Duke, 2001).
He is also working his way through two recent books by maverick US economist Philip Mirowski on the political economy of science. Science Bought and Sold, co-edited with E. M. Sent (Chicago), brings together all the classic essays in the area, he says. He reports that the second, Mirowski’s Machine Dreams: Economics becomes a cyborg science (Cambridge), is a long-awaited account of the cold war’s impact on the scientific agenda of economics.
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