The Woods Lecture Series presents George Reisch on January 22 at 7:30 p.m. in the Atherton Union Reilly Room, speaking about Paradigms and the Cold War “Struggle for Men’s Minds.”
Admission is free and open to the public without tickets.
This lecture will explore Thomas Kuhn’s famous theory of scientific paradigms and how it was inspired and shaped by the anticommunism of cold war America. Sketching his new theory of scientific revolutions at Harvard in the 1950s, Kuhn thought about science in an age of dramatic political conversions, McCarthyism, brainwashing, and the specter of totalitarian mind control.
These anxieties shaped his new theory of science as well as his life and career. They also helped prepare the United States for a revolution of its own, as the 1950s gave way to the psychedelic 60s—and Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions became the most important and widely read book about science in America.
Reisch is the author of How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2005). He is currently working on a book on the Cold War context of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He is the series editor for the Open Court Press Popular Culture and Philosophy series, a co-editor (with Brandon Forbes) of Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter, Happier, More Deductive (Open Court, 2009), and a co-editor (with Gary Hardcastle) of Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge Nudge, Think Think! (Open Court, 2006). He is also managing editor the philosophy journal The Monist.
He has a B.A. from Bowdoin College and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He has taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, and received a National Science Foundation fellowship for his research on cold-war philosophy of science.
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