Boris Hessen

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Boris M. Hessen.

Boris Mikhailovich Hessen (

Principia which became foundational in historiography of science
.

Biography

Boris Hessen was born to a Jewish family in

machist" and "right deviationist".[2]

After working in the institute for two more years, he became a physics professor and the chair of the physics department at the Moscow State University in 1931. In 1933 he was elected a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

International Congress of the History of Science

In 1931, as part of a

sociology of science.[3]

Hessen asserted that

Principia was the solution of technical problems of the bourgeoisie
.

At that time in the Soviet Union, the work of

philosophers; being supposedly motivated by bourgeois values, it was "bourgeois science",[4] and should henceforth be banned. (In many ways this attack was similar to the Deutsche Physik
movement in Germany which occurred only a few years later.) Hessen's paper was a lobbying tactic: Party philosophers would not challenge the accuracy of Newton's theories, and to show them as being motivated by bourgeois concerns would, in Hessen's eyes, show that scientific validity could exist whatever the motivations were for undertaking it. However, there is little evidence that his paper had any effect in the internal Soviet philosophical battles over Einstein's work.

Despite its lack of impact in his home country, Hessen's thesis had a wide effect in Western history of science. Hessen's work has been dismissed as "vulgar Marxism".[5] However, its focus on the relationship between society and science was, in its time, seen as novel and inspiring. It was a challenge to the notion that the history of science was the history of individual genius in action, the dominant view at least since William Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences in 1837.

Few contemporary Western readers of Hessen took his paper at face value. His rigid connection between economy and

chemical weapons, and as the war machines were again gearing up in preparation for another world war, the role between science, technology
, and warfare was becoming more interesting to scholars and scientists. Previous views of science as separate from the mundane or vulgar aspects of practical life — the disembodiment of the scientific mind from its context — were becoming less attractive than a view that science and scientists were increasingly embedded in the world in which they worked.

Last years, death and rehabilitation

From 1934 to 1936 Hessen was a deputy director of the

S.I. Vavilov. On 22 August 1936 Hessen was arrested by the NKVD on charges of participation in a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization and preparation of terrorist acts. He was secretly tried for terrorism by a military tribunal together with his gymnasium school
teacher Arkadij O. Apirin, who had been arrested two months earlier.

They were found guilty on 20 December 1936 and were

executed by shooting the same day. Gessen was buried in Moscow at the Donskoye Cemetery in a common grave. Gessn was posthumously expelled from the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union
by the General Assembly on April 29, 1938.

On 21 April 1956 both Apirin and Hessen were rehabilitated (posthumously exonerated) by decision of the All-Russian Military Commission. Gessen was posthumously reinstated by the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences on March 5, 1957

See also

Writings

  • Boris Hessen, The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia in: Freudenthal, G., McLaughlin, P. (eds) The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution, pp. 41–101. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 278. Springer, Dordrecht. (Russian original: [2]).
  • New English translation in: Gideon Freudenthal and Peter McLaughlin, The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution, Springer, 2009, pp. 41–101.
  • Boris Hessen, "Preface to Articles by A. Einstein and J.J. Thomson," trans. Sean Winkler, Society and Politics 13.1 (2019): 87 - 102. http://socpol.uvvg.ro/docs/2019-1/5.Hessen.pdf.
  • Classical Physics in Context (unpublished text- and sourcebook, in preparation with Edizioni Ca'Foscari Venice).
  • Boris Hessen: Physics and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, 1927–1931, Neglected Debates on Emergence and Reduction, edited and translated by Chris Talbot and Olga Pattison, Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2021. ISBN 978-3-030-70044-7.

References

  • Gideon Freudenthal, "The Hessen-Grossman Thesis: An Attempt at Rehabilitation" in: Perspectives on Science, Summer 2005, Vol. 13, No. 2, Pages 166-193
  • Loren R. Graham, "The Socio-Political Roots of Boris Hessen: Soviet Marxism and the History of Science" in: Social Studies of Science, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Nov., 1985), pp. 705–722
  • Gideon Freudenthal and Peter McLaughlin, "Boris Hessen: In Lieu of a Biography" in: The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution, Springer, 2009, 253-256.
  • Pablo Huerga Melcón, La ciencia en la encrucijada. Análisis crítico de la célebre ponencia de Boris Mihailovich Hessen, "Las raíces socioeconómicas de la mecánica de Newton", desde las coordenadas del materialismo filosófico", Biblioteca Filosofía en español, Fundación Gustavo Bueno,Pentalfa ediciones, Oviedo 1999. (Con prólogo de Serguei Kara-Murza)
  • Boris Hessen, Le radici sociali ed economiche della meccanica di Newton (a cura di Gerardo Ienna; Saggio Introduttivo Gerardo Ienna e Giulia Rispoli; Postfazione Pietro Daniel Omodeo) Castelvecchi, 2017.
  • Boris Hessen, "Las raíces socioeconómicas de la mecánica de Newton", (edición, introducción y notas de Pablo Huerga Melcón) en El Catoblepas. Revista crítica del presente, 2010, nº 100. Enlace

External links

Remarks

  1. ^ The date of death is given incorrectly in most sources, including the Russian Academy of Sciences web site [1]. The exact date was determined recently by the Russian society Memorial.
  2. S2CID 143937146
    .
  3. ^ Ienna, Gerardo; Rispoli, Giulia (April 2019). "Boris Hessen at the Crossroads of Science and Ideology". Society and Politics. 13 (1(25)): 37–63. Retrieved 20 May 2019.
  4. ^ (Graham 1985:711)
  5. ^ (Schaffer 1984:26)

Works cited

  • Schaffer, Simon (1984), "Newton at the crossroads", Radical Philosophy, 37: 23–38.
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