Observation and Explanation: A Guide to Philosophy of Science

Abstract

Norwood Russell Hanson (1924–1967) was a man out of his time, a character from the Florentine Renaissance growing up in the contemporary United States. Hanson showed how much can still be achieved, even within the professionalized technocratic society of the mid-twentieth century, by the true amateur: the man who makes himself the master of an art or science out of curiosity, love or sheer cussedness, quite unconnected with the business of earning a living. And he showed how such an amateur can achieve a kind of richness and variety of experience in a whole range of activities which spills over the boundaries between them. In this way, he became a “jack of many trades” and, in his own very special way, a master of them all.