Boris Hessen: Physics and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, 1927-1931

This book presents key works of Boris Hessen, 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.

Author Biography

Chris Talbot has a Ph.D. in General Relativity. He lectured in mathematics at the University of Huddersfield, researching in Engineering Mathematics. Now retired, he has edited letters of David Bohm (David Bohm, Causality and Chance, Letters to Three Women, Springer, 2017 and David Bohm’s Critique of Modern Physics, Letters to Jeffrey Bub, 1966-1969, Springer, 2020). Studying Bohm’s work revived his interest in Marxism and the philosophy of physics and led to the translation of the largely forgotten work of Boris Hessen.

Olga Pattison completed B.Sc. in Maths and M.A. in Finance, MITI (Member of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting since 1996). Between 1991 and 1999, Olga worked as an inhouse translator for Glencore UK Ltd. Duties included translation and interpreting at the World Economic Forum (Davos) in 1993 and 1994. She worked at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, for 16 years until retiring last year.