Alexander Yu Antonovskiy & Raisa Ed Barash (2020) The Mission of the Scientist Yesterday and Today: On the Centenary of Max Weber’s Wissenschaft als Beruf, Social Epistemology, 34:2, 117-129

Abstract

The idea of a special role of the scientist in modern society was proposed by Max Weber in his lecture ‘Science as a Vocation’. Weber saw the scientific community as an entity possessing the exclusive ability to produce ‘objective’ (and not subjective evaluative) statements about nature and society. In this sense, representatives of science (in its Pythagorean setup, which Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and others used to share), viewed themselves as people endowed with the highest mission to implement the Divine Plan for the design of the universe and development of society. This century-old idea of the sovereign right of scientists to determine trends of scientific and technological development has widespread relevance in today’s situation, in which science is becoming increasingly professionalized, while the individual motivations of the scientist and his idea of his special mission are losing their significance. This article focuses on the actualization of Max Weber’s ideas on science in modern conditions. A substantiation is provided to the fact that the concept of scientific cognition in Weber’s interpretation conceptually bundles together all other basic concepts of social philosophy, primarily time (scientific), objectivity, sociality, truth, and values.

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