FEUER, LEWIS SAMUEL

FEUER, LEWIS SAMUEL (1912–2002), U.S. educator. Feuer was born in New York. He taught philosophy and social sciences at City College of New York, Vassar, the University of Vermont, and the University of California at Berkeley from 1957 to 1966. In 1966 he was appointed professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, where he taught sociological theory until 1976. He is the author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics (1955), Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism (1958), The Scientific Intellectual: The Psychological & Sociological Origins of Modern Science (1963), The Conflict of Generations: The Character and Significance of Student Movements (1968), and Marx and the Intellectuals (1969). He edited Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (1959). His special interest was in the sociology of ideas. In his study of Spinoza, he related the philosopher's thought to the political and economic currents of his time. In The Conflict of Generations and other works, he studied the psychoanalytical and personal factors in social and political thought. He also criticized the theory that the rise of Protestantism has been mainly responsible for scientific inquiry and development. Later books by Feuer include Einstein and the Generations of Science (1974), Ideology and the Ideologists (1975), Philosophy, History, and Social Action: Essays in Honor of Lewis Feuer: With an Autobiographical Essay by Lewis Feuer (1988), and Varieties of Scientific Experience: Emotive Aims in Scientific Hypotheses (1995). (Ben G. Kayfetz / Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)