International Encyclopedia of Unified Science

In 1938 a new series of publications started in the USA, the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (IEUS). An ambitious project and never completed, it was devoted to unified science.

It was an output of the Vienna Circle to address the "growing concern throughout the world for the logic, the history, and the sociology of science...". Only the first section Foundations of the Unity of Science (FUS) was published; it contains two volumes for a total of nineteen monographs published from 1938 to 1969.

Influence

James Burnham refers to the Encyclopedia in Science and Style: A Reply to Comrade Trotsky (1940), his penultimate tract discussing his differences with Trotsky, before breaking with dialectical materialism. In this text he responds to Trotsky's request to draw his attention to "those works which should supplant the system of dialectic materialism for the proletariat" by referring to Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead and "the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science".^[1] He resigned from the Workers Party three and a half months later declaring "that dialectical materialism, though scientifically meaningless, is psychologically and historically an integral part of Marxism" and that he had "for several years had no real place in a Marxist party."^[2]

Volume I

Encyclopedia and Unified Science (FUS I-1)
Otto Neurath, Niels Bohr, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, and Charles Morris

Foundations of the Theory of Signs (FUS I-2)
Charles Morris

Foundations of Logic and Mathematics (FUS I-3)
Rudolf Carnap

Linguistic Aspects of Science (FUS I-4)
Leonard Bloomfield

Procedures of Empirical Science (FUS I-5)
Victor F. Lenzen

Principles of the Theory of Probability (FUS I-6)
Ernest Nagel

Foundations of Physics (FUS I-7)
Philipp Frank

Cosmology (FUS I-8)
E. Finlay-Freundlich

Foundations of Biology (FUS I-9)
Felix Mainx

The Conceptual Framework of Psychology (FUS I-10)
Egon Brunswik

Volume II

Foundations of the Social Sciences (FUS II-1)
Otto Neurath

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (FUS II-2)
Thomas S. Kuhn

Science and the Structure of Ethics (FUS II-3)
Abraham Edel

Theory of Valuation (FUS II-4)
John Dewey

The Technique of Theory Construction (FUS II-5)
Joseph H. Woodger

Methodology of Mathematical Economics and Econometrics (FUS II-6)
Gerhard Tintner

Concept Formation in Empirical Science (FUS II-7)
Carl G. Hempel

The Development of Rationalism and Empiricism (FUS II-8)
George De Santillana, Edgar Zilsel

The Development of Logical Empiricism (FUS II-9)
Joergen Joergensen

Bibliography and Index (FUS II-10)
Herbert Feigl, Charles Morris

References