Struan Jacobs
Biographic Data
| ID | 5689118 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Struan Jacobs |
| GIVEN NAMES | Struan |
| FAMILY NAME | Jacobs |
| SIGNATURE | JACOBS S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Deakin University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 44 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Recovering the Thought of Edward Shils
This article provides an extended review of The Calling of Social Thought, a collection of essays about the thought of social theorist Edward Shils. The article includes preliminary observations about Shils’ life and work, brief summaries of the essays included in the collection, and several suggestions aimed at encouraging additional study of Shils’ writings
Anthropological Materials in the Making of Michael Polanyi’s Metascience
Anthropological discussions were important for Michael Polanyi in the middle phase of his intellectual career, in which he articulated in some detail his understanding of science, culture and society. This middle period commenced with his 1946 Riddell Memorial Lectures at Durham University in early 1946, published as Science, Faith and Society later that year, and extended through the publication of Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Phi…
How Role Replaced Personality as a Major Category of Sociology
Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi in Correspondence
Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi corresponded with each other for the best part of thirty years. They had shared interests that included science, social science, economics, epistemology, history of ideas and political philosophy. Studying their correspondence and related writings, this article shows that Hayek and Polanyi were committed Liberals but with different understandings of liberty, the forces that endanger liberty, and the policies re…
Rationalism and tradition
In 1948 Karl Popper sent a copy of his paper, ‘Utopia and Violence’, to Michael Oakeshott. Popper had recently read Oakeshott’s essay ‘Rationalism in Politics’, appreciating its relevance to views he had expressed in The Open Society. Oakeshott wrote to Popper at some length, explaining his thoughts about reason, tradition and kindred matters, to which Popper responded. This paper reproduces these letters and discusses them with reference to pert…
Relations between Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi
Thomas Kuhn’s Memory
Faith, tradition, and dynamic order
In his writings between 1941 and 1951, Michael Polanyi developed a distinctive view of liberal social and political life. Planned organizations are a part of all modern societies, according to Polanyi, but in liberal modernity he highlighted dynamic social orders whose agents freely adjust their efforts in light of the initiatives and accomplishments of their peers. Liberal society itself is the most extensive of dynamic orders, with the market e…
Edward Shils' Theory of Tradition
Edward Shils presented his book Tradition (1981) as the first extensive study of the subject. This article casts light on Shils' multifaceted understanding of tradition, comprising pragmatic, Burkean, veridical, and evolutionist perspectives. His typology of traditions is noted, and his view of institutional bearers of tradition described. In assessing Shils' theory, however, we find that it overreaches, collapsing differences that exist between …
T.S. Eliot’s Idea of the Clerisy, and its Discussion by Karl Mannheim and Michael Polanyi in the Context of J.H. Oldham’s Moot
In 1938, Joseph Oldham, a leading British Christian ecumenist, formed a discussion group that came to be known as the Moot. The Moot met in a retreat setting for several long weekends each year until early 1947, its discussions carefully organized and convened by Oldham. More than anything else, the discussions of the Moot revolved around the topic of order and, more particularly, around the problem of how order might be restored in British socie…
Models of scientific community
n\t\t\t\t\tScientific community' is common currency in the study of science, largely due to Kuhn's use of the term in his highly influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As this article explains, however, 'scientific community' was not of Kuhn's coining. It was hinted at by Peirce, and expressly designated by Royce. On a few occasions Fleck affirmed a scientific community, while Polanyi studied it in some detail. The article conc…
Michael Polanyi and Karl Mannheim
n\t\t\t\t\tThis essay reviews historical records that set forth the discussions and interaction of Michael Polanyi and Karl Mannheim from 1944 until Mannheim’s death early in 1947. The letters describe Polanyi’s effort to assemble a book to be published in a series edited by Manneheim. They also reveal the different perspectives these thinkers took about freedom and the historical context of ideas. Records of J.H. Oldham’s discussion group “the M…
Two Sources of Michael Polanyi's Prototypal Notion of Incommensurability
Michael Polanyi argues in Personal Knowledge (1958) that conceptual frameworks involved in major scientific controversies are separated by a `logical gap'. Such frameworks, according to Polanyi (1958: 151), are logically disconnected: their protagonists think differently, use different languages and occupy different worlds. Relinquishing one framework and adopting another, Polanyi's scientist undergoes a `conversion' to a new `faith'. Polanyi, in…
Misunderstanding John Stuart Mill on science
Feyerabend, 1975; Feyerabend, 1981 and Feyerabend, 1987 takes J. S. Mill’s On Liberty to support the proliferation of theories in science and to emphasize the fallibility of scientific knowledge. On Liberty, according to Feyerabend, contradicts and overthrows Mill’s major study of science, A System of Logic. Staley (1999) reads the 2 works of Mill as giving complementary accounts of science. The present author rejects these interpretations of Mil…
Social structures of science and approaches to outcomes-based medical research
Recently, two seemingly divergent approaches have emerged in outcomes-based medical research. Proponents of evidence-based medicine (EBM) argue that the most effective treatments will be found by adopting a hierarchical approach that gives pre-eminence to randomized controlled clinical trials, where these are available. Proponents of participatory medical research argue that research undertaken with consumers and other partners in the community w…
Polanyi's presagement of the incommensurability concept
Spontaneous order
This paper compares Hayek and Polanyi on spontaneous social order. Although Hayek is widely believed to have first both coined the name and explicated the idea of ‘spontaneous order’, it is in fact Michael Polanyi who did so. Numerous differences emerge between the two thinkers. The characterisation of spontaneous order in Hayek, for example, involves different types of freedom to those advanced by Polanyi. Whereas Hayek (usually) portrays sponta…
Sociology as a Source of Anomaly in Thomas Kuhn's System of Science
It is a testimony to the enduring importance of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that, 30 years on, its doctrines of normal science and paradigm, incommensurability and revolution continue to challenge metascien tists and stimulate vigorous debate. Critique has mainly come from philosophers and historians; by and large, interested sociologists have embraced Kuhn. Un justifiably so, this article argues, bringing to light a ser…
La destructivité des clercs
John stuart mill on the tyranny of the majority
For an idea so central to the thought of a figure so prominent in the history of political philosophy, John Stuart Mill's ‘tyranny of the majority’ has been badly neglected. In this paper examination of strategic texts leads to the conclusions that Mill developed different conceptions of majority tyranny focussed on the middle class and the labouring class respectively, and that with regard to such tyranny he contrasted the situations of differen…
Life among the Scientists
Bentham, science and the construction of jurisprudence
(1990). Bentham, science and the construction of jurisprudence. History of European Ideas: Vol. 12, No. 5, pp. 583-594
Post‐liberalism vs. temperate liberalism
John Gray's recent critique of liberalism, and his case for an apparently relativistic “post‐Pyrrhonian”; political philosophy, are shown to be wanting. Weaknesses in Gray's critique are identified and discussed: the characterization of liberalism as universally prescriptive, confusion about whether liberalism is a genuine tradition, and misunderstanding of the relation between conduct and the value of freedom. A formulation of liberalism that is…
Popper, Weber and the Rationalist Approach to Social Explanation
The doctrine at the centre of Karl Popper's methodology for social science-situational logic-is notoriously obscure. The present paper addresses this doctrine and undertakes three tasks. The first, involving an excursion in intellectual history, is to sketch in the doctrine's background and the sources on which Popper drew in formulating it. The contention is that mediately or otherwise, the paramount influence was Max Weber's rationality method.…
Vindicating Universalism
Popper, Weber and the Rationalist Approach to Social Explanation
The doctrine at the centre of Karl Popper's methodology for social science-situational logic-is notoriously obscure. The present paper addresses this doctrine and undertakes three tasks. The first, involving an excursion in intellectual history, is to sketch in the doctrine's background and the sources on which Popper drew in formulating it. The contention is that mediately or otherwise, the paramount influence was Max Weber's rationality method.…
Spontaneous order
This paper compares Hayek and Polanyi on spontaneous social order. Although Hayek is widely believed to have first both coined the name and explicated the idea of ‘spontaneous order’, it is in fact Michael Polanyi who did so. Numerous differences emerge between the two thinkers. The characterisation of spontaneous order in Hayek, for example, involves different types of freedom to those advanced by Polanyi. Whereas Hayek (usually) portrays sponta…
Rationalism and tradition
In 1948 Karl Popper sent a copy of his paper, ‘Utopia and Violence’, to Michael Oakeshott. Popper had recently read Oakeshott’s essay ‘Rationalism in Politics’, appreciating its relevance to views he had expressed in The Open Society. Oakeshott wrote to Popper at some length, explaining his thoughts about reason, tradition and kindred matters, to which Popper responded. This paper reproduces these letters and discusses them with reference to pert…
Two Sources of Michael Polanyi's Prototypal Notion of Incommensurability
Michael Polanyi argues in Personal Knowledge (1958) that conceptual frameworks involved in major scientific controversies are separated by a `logical gap'. Such frameworks, according to Polanyi (1958: 151), are logically disconnected: their protagonists think differently, use different languages and occupy different worlds. Relinquishing one framework and adopting another, Polanyi's scientist undergoes a `conversion' to a new `faith'. Polanyi, in…
Scientific Community
Until recently it was a presupposition of sociology and philosophy of science that scientific knowledge is produced within organic communities. This paper traces the career of the concept scientific community through three discernible stages. The formative stage is represented by Ludwik Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact ( 1935). One of the early expositions of the theme that scientific knowledge is socially conditioned, Fleck's…
John stuart mill on the tyranny of the majority
For an idea so central to the thought of a figure so prominent in the history of political philosophy, John Stuart Mill's ‘tyranny of the majority’ has been badly neglected. In this paper examination of strategic texts leads to the conclusions that Mill developed different conceptions of majority tyranny focussed on the middle class and the labouring class respectively, and that with regard to such tyranny he contrasted the situations of differen…
How Role Replaced Personality as a Major Category of Sociology
Models of scientific community
n\t\t\t\t\tScientific community' is common currency in the study of science, largely due to Kuhn's use of the term in his highly influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As this article explains, however, 'scientific community' was not of Kuhn's coining. It was hinted at by Peirce, and expressly designated by Royce. On a few occasions Fleck affirmed a scientific community, while Polanyi studied it in some detail. The article conc…
Misunderstanding John Stuart Mill on science
Feyerabend, 1975; Feyerabend, 1981 and Feyerabend, 1987 takes J. S. Mill’s On Liberty to support the proliferation of theories in science and to emphasize the fallibility of scientific knowledge. On Liberty, according to Feyerabend, contradicts and overthrows Mill’s major study of science, A System of Logic. Staley (1999) reads the 2 works of Mill as giving complementary accounts of science. The present author rejects these interpretations of Mil…
Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi in Correspondence
Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi corresponded with each other for the best part of thirty years. They had shared interests that included science, social science, economics, epistemology, history of ideas and political philosophy. Studying their correspondence and related writings, this article shows that Hayek and Polanyi were committed Liberals but with different understandings of liberty, the forces that endanger liberty, and the policies re…
Relations between Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi
Thomas Kuhn’s Memory
Faith, tradition, and dynamic order
In his writings between 1941 and 1951, Michael Polanyi developed a distinctive view of liberal social and political life. Planned organizations are a part of all modern societies, according to Polanyi, but in liberal modernity he highlighted dynamic social orders whose agents freely adjust their efforts in light of the initiatives and accomplishments of their peers. Liberal society itself is the most extensive of dynamic orders, with the market e…
Edward Shils' Theory of Tradition
Edward Shils presented his book Tradition (1981) as the first extensive study of the subject. This article casts light on Shils' multifaceted understanding of tradition, comprising pragmatic, Burkean, veridical, and evolutionist perspectives. His typology of traditions is noted, and his view of institutional bearers of tradition described. In assessing Shils' theory, however, we find that it overreaches, collapsing differences that exist between …
Sociology as a Source of Anomaly in Thomas Kuhn's System of Science
It is a testimony to the enduring importance of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that, 30 years on, its doctrines of normal science and paradigm, incommensurability and revolution continue to challenge metascien tists and stimulate vigorous debate. Critique has mainly come from philosophers and historians; by and large, interested sociologists have embraced Kuhn. Un justifiably so, this article argues, bringing to light a ser…
Bentham, science and the construction of jurisprudence
(1990). Bentham, science and the construction of jurisprudence. History of European Ideas: Vol. 12, No. 5, pp. 583-594
Tilley and Popper's Alleged Historicism
Scientific Community
Until recently it was a presupposition of sociology and philosophy of science that scientific knowledge is produced within organic communities. This paper traces the career of the concept scientific community through three discernible stages. The formative stage is represented by Ludwik Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact ( 1935). One of the early expositions of the theme that scientific knowledge is socially conditioned, Fleck's…
Vindicating Universalism
Bentham, science and the construction of jurisprudence
(1990). Bentham, science and the construction of jurisprudence. History of European Ideas: Vol. 12, No. 5, pp. 583-594
Post‐liberalism vs. temperate liberalism
John Gray's recent critique of liberalism, and his case for an apparently relativistic “post‐Pyrrhonian”; political philosophy, are shown to be wanting. Weaknesses in Gray's critique are identified and discussed: the characterization of liberalism as universally prescriptive, confusion about whether liberalism is a genuine tradition, and misunderstanding of the relation between conduct and the value of freedom. A formulation of liberalism that is…
Popper, Weber and the Rationalist Approach to Social Explanation
The doctrine at the centre of Karl Popper's methodology for social science-situational logic-is notoriously obscure. The present paper addresses this doctrine and undertakes three tasks. The first, involving an excursion in intellectual history, is to sketch in the doctrine's background and the sources on which Popper drew in formulating it. The contention is that mediately or otherwise, the paramount influence was Max Weber's rationality method.…
Life among the Scientists
John stuart mill on the tyranny of the majority
For an idea so central to the thought of a figure so prominent in the history of political philosophy, John Stuart Mill's ‘tyranny of the majority’ has been badly neglected. In this paper examination of strategic texts leads to the conclusions that Mill developed different conceptions of majority tyranny focussed on the middle class and the labouring class respectively, and that with regard to such tyranny he contrasted the situations of differen…
La destructivité des clercs
Sociology as a Source of Anomaly in Thomas Kuhn's System of Science
It is a testimony to the enduring importance of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that, 30 years on, its doctrines of normal science and paradigm, incommensurability and revolution continue to challenge metascien tists and stimulate vigorous debate. Critique has mainly come from philosophers and historians; by and large, interested sociologists have embraced Kuhn. Un justifiably so, this article argues, bringing to light a ser…
Spontaneous order
This paper compares Hayek and Polanyi on spontaneous social order. Although Hayek is widely believed to have first both coined the name and explicated the idea of ‘spontaneous order’, it is in fact Michael Polanyi who did so. Numerous differences emerge between the two thinkers. The characterisation of spontaneous order in Hayek, for example, involves different types of freedom to those advanced by Polanyi. Whereas Hayek (usually) portrays sponta…
Social structures of science and approaches to outcomes-based medical research
Recently, two seemingly divergent approaches have emerged in outcomes-based medical research. Proponents of evidence-based medicine (EBM) argue that the most effective treatments will be found by adopting a hierarchical approach that gives pre-eminence to randomized controlled clinical trials, where these are available. Proponents of participatory medical research argue that research undertaken with consumers and other partners in the community w…
Polanyi's presagement of the incommensurability concept
Two Sources of Michael Polanyi's Prototypal Notion of Incommensurability
Michael Polanyi argues in Personal Knowledge (1958) that conceptual frameworks involved in major scientific controversies are separated by a `logical gap'. Such frameworks, according to Polanyi (1958: 151), are logically disconnected: their protagonists think differently, use different languages and occupy different worlds. Relinquishing one framework and adopting another, Polanyi's scientist undergoes a `conversion' to a new `faith'. Polanyi, in…
Misunderstanding John Stuart Mill on science
Feyerabend, 1975; Feyerabend, 1981 and Feyerabend, 1987 takes J. S. Mill’s On Liberty to support the proliferation of theories in science and to emphasize the fallibility of scientific knowledge. On Liberty, according to Feyerabend, contradicts and overthrows Mill’s major study of science, A System of Logic. Staley (1999) reads the 2 works of Mill as giving complementary accounts of science. The present author rejects these interpretations of Mil…
Michael Polanyi and Karl Mannheim
n\t\t\t\t\tThis essay reviews historical records that set forth the discussions and interaction of Michael Polanyi and Karl Mannheim from 1944 until Mannheim’s death early in 1947. The letters describe Polanyi’s effort to assemble a book to be published in a series edited by Manneheim. They also reveal the different perspectives these thinkers took about freedom and the historical context of ideas. Records of J.H. Oldham’s discussion group “the M…
T.S. Eliot’s Idea of the Clerisy, and its Discussion by Karl Mannheim and Michael Polanyi in the Context of J.H. Oldham’s Moot
In 1938, Joseph Oldham, a leading British Christian ecumenist, formed a discussion group that came to be known as the Moot. The Moot met in a retreat setting for several long weekends each year until early 1947, its discussions carefully organized and convened by Oldham. More than anything else, the discussions of the Moot revolved around the topic of order and, more particularly, around the problem of how order might be restored in British socie…
Models of scientific community
n\t\t\t\t\tScientific community' is common currency in the study of science, largely due to Kuhn's use of the term in his highly influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As this article explains, however, 'scientific community' was not of Kuhn's coining. It was hinted at by Peirce, and expressly designated by Royce. On a few occasions Fleck affirmed a scientific community, while Polanyi studied it in some detail. The article conc…
Edward Shils' Theory of Tradition
Edward Shils presented his book Tradition (1981) as the first extensive study of the subject. This article casts light on Shils' multifaceted understanding of tradition, comprising pragmatic, Burkean, veridical, and evolutionist perspectives. His typology of traditions is noted, and his view of institutional bearers of tradition described. In assessing Shils' theory, however, we find that it overreaches, collapsing differences that exist between …
Faith, tradition, and dynamic order
In his writings between 1941 and 1951, Michael Polanyi developed a distinctive view of liberal social and political life. Planned organizations are a part of all modern societies, according to Polanyi, but in liberal modernity he highlighted dynamic social orders whose agents freely adjust their efforts in light of the initiatives and accomplishments of their peers. Liberal society itself is the most extensive of dynamic orders, with the market e…
Thomas Kuhn’s Memory
Relations between Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi
Rationalism and tradition
In 1948 Karl Popper sent a copy of his paper, ‘Utopia and Violence’, to Michael Oakeshott. Popper had recently read Oakeshott’s essay ‘Rationalism in Politics’, appreciating its relevance to views he had expressed in The Open Society. Oakeshott wrote to Popper at some length, explaining his thoughts about reason, tradition and kindred matters, to which Popper responded. This paper reproduces these letters and discusses them with reference to pert…
Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi in Correspondence
Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi corresponded with each other for the best part of thirty years. They had shared interests that included science, social science, economics, epistemology, history of ideas and political philosophy. Studying their correspondence and related writings, this article shows that Hayek and Polanyi were committed Liberals but with different understandings of liberty, the forces that endanger liberty, and the policies re…
Anthropological Materials in the Making of Michael Polanyi’s Metascience
Anthropological discussions were important for Michael Polanyi in the middle phase of his intellectual career, in which he articulated in some detail his understanding of science, culture and society. This middle period commenced with his 1946 Riddell Memorial Lectures at Durham University in early 1946, published as Science, Faith and Society later that year, and extended through the publication of Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Phi…
Sociology (23 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · Philosophy and History of Science (9 works) · History (7 works)