Talbot C., Pattison O. (eds.) Boris Hessen: Physics and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, 1927-1931. Neglected Debates on Emergence and Reduction

Springer, 2021. — 169 p. — (History of Physics)This book presents key works of Boris Hessen (1893-1936), outstanding Soviet philosopher of science, available here in English for the first time. Quality translations are accompanied by an editors' introduction and annotations. Boris Hessen is known in history of science circles for his “Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” presented in London (1931), which inspired new approaches in the West. As a philosopher and a physicist, he was tasked with developing a Marxist approach to science in the 1920s. He studied the history of physics to clarify issues such as reductionism and causality as they applied to new developments. With the philosophers called the “Dialecticians”, his debates with the opposing “Mechanists” on the issue of emergence are still worth studying and largely ignored in the many recent works on this subject. Taken as a whole, the book is a goldmine of insights into both the foundations of physics and Soviet history.Introduction (by Chris Talbot).
The Fifth Congress of Russian Physicists.
On Comrade Timiryazev’s Attitude to Modern Science.
On the Bicentenary of Isaac Newton’s Death. Foreword to the Articles by A. Einstein and J. J. Thomson.
Marian Smoluchowski (On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death).
Mechanical Materialism and Modern Physics (Section 1).
Mechanical Materialism and Modern Physics (Section 2).
Mechanical Materialism and Modern Physics (Section 3).
(Selections from) The Main Ideas of the Theory of Relativity.
Selected Material on the Work of Richard von Mises.
On the Question of the Causality Problem in Quantum Mechanics. Preface to the 1931 Russian Translation of Arthur Haas, Materiewellen und Quantenmechanik.
Materialist Dialectics and Modern Physics. Report Abstracts. The First All-Union Congress of Physicists, Odessa, August 19, 1930.