ISBN:
9789401106733
Language:
English
Pages:
Online-Ressource (VI, 356 p)
,
online resource
Edition:
Springer eBook Collection. Humanities, Social Sciences and Law
Series Statement:
Sociology of the Sciences, A Yearbook - 1994 18
Series Statement:
Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook 18
Parallel Title:
Erscheint auch als
Parallel Title:
Erscheint auch als
Parallel Title:
Erscheint auch als
Keywords:
Humanities
;
Linguistics Philosophy
;
Science Philosophy
;
History
;
Language and languages—Philosophy.
;
Science—Philosophy.
Abstract:
The disciplines of biology and the social sciences share common roots in history and yet have drifted so far apart that the demarcation line between them has become a contested boundary. The boundary shift between the `natural' and the `social' is becoming permanent: moves in either direction are subject to ideological rhetoric. Yet there is continual exchange across the line: metaphors are moving freely between biology and the social sciences. As messengers of meaning they become agents of change, forever undermining any attempt at fixing similarities and differences. Biology as Society, Society as Biology: Metaphors offers a unique look at the function of metaphors in mediating between two disciplinary cultures which represent and mold our views about nature and society, and the boundary between them. For professionals and students of history, philosophy and sociology of science, biology, and literary science alike
Description / Table of Contents:
Introduction: Metaphors: Is There a Bridge over Troubled Waters?I: Metaphors Revalued -- Who is Afraid of Metaphors? -- How Nature Became the Other: Anthropomorphism and Anthropocentrism in Early Modern Natural Philosophy -- The Manifest and the Scientific -- The Nexus of Animal and Rational: Sociobiology, Language, and the Enlightenment Study of Apes -- II: “Struggle” -- Social Metaphors in Evolutionary Biology, 1870-1930: The Wider Dimension of Social Darwinism -- “Struggle for Existence”: Selection and Retention of a Metaphor -- III: “Evolution” and “Organism” -- The Importance of the Concepts of “Organism” and “Evolution” in Emile Durkheim’s Division of Social Labor and the Influence of Herbert Spencer -- Herbert Spencer: Biology, Sociology, and Cosmic Evolution -- The Superorganism Metaphor: Then and Now -- Defining the Organism in the Welfare State: The Politics of Individuality in American Culture, 1890-1950 -- IV: Economics -- A Plague Upon Your House: Commercial Crisis and Epidemic Disease in Victorian England -- Evolutionary Metaphors in Explanations of American Industrial Competition -- Biological and Physical Metaphors in Economics.
DOI:
10.1007/978-94-011-0673-3
URL:
Volltext
(lizenzpflichtig)
Permalink
