The Humanistic Background of Science

While by this point in my life as an avid reader and independent scholar I have amassed a reasonable familiarity with a wide range of subjects, every so often I am faced with one that I must admit to knowing less about that I would like to; at least less than I would like to in order to write something meaningful about it. Case in point: the philosophy of science. I’m well versed in both the history of science, and of philosophy as a study in itself, but as a specific field of study, the philosophy of science incorporates both yet pursues its goals somewhat differently from each by itself. Additionally, it doesn’t take long reading into any significant book within its bailiwick before one is well surrounded by the very tall grass of such things as the Vienna Circle, logical positivism, and the like.

Which is why before taking up a reading of the newly published edition of Philipp Frank’s The Humanistic Background of Science I’ll be doing a bit of prior background reading. Left unfinished at the time of Frank’s death in 1966, this new edition was edited by George A. Reisch and Adam Tamas Tuboly for SUNY University Press in order to bring to the reading public Frank’s “accessible, engaging introduction to the philosophy of science and its cultural significance.”

While Frank’s earlier published, widely read, and well-acclaimed work The Philosophy of Science was published in 1957 by Prentice Hall, over the following years, he clearly had more to say, and intended to do so in this now finally published book. As Frank’s concern was the divide between science and the humanities, it is difficult not to wonder (well, for me it is, at least) at the possible influence of C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures lectures in 1959, coming two years after Frank’s previously mentioned book, as contributing to Frank’s own motivation to expand upon and refine what he originally published in 1957.

I don’t expect to have further insights to share on The Humanistic Background of Science until I have completed a reading of his The Philosophy of Science, as well as one or two other works I’ve noted as likely useful to an assessment of it. However if you are already familiar with Frank’s ideas, or if not Frank’s specifically but the philosophy of science in general, then this may very well be a book you don’t need my thoughts about in order to take up a reading of it yourself.