Steven L. Goldman

Steven Louis Goldman (born 1941) is the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Lehigh University.

Biography Goldman studied as an undergraduate at Polytechnic University of New York, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics. He then attended Boston University, where he received Master of Arts and PhD degrees in Philosophy. In the 1970s, Goldman was on faculty in the philosophy department at the State College campus of Pennsylvania State University. At Pennsylvania State, he was involved in the development of one of the first U.S. academic programs in science, technology, and society studies (STS).

In 1977, Goldman joined the faculty at Lehigh University, as Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor in the Humanities.

Since the early 1960s, Professor Goldman has studied the historical development of the conceptual framework of modern science in relation to its Western cultural context, tracing its emergence from medieval and Renaissance approaches to the study of nature through its transformation in the 20th century.

He has published numerous scholarly articles on his social-historical approach to medieval and Renaissance nature philosophy and to modern science from the 17th to the 20th centuries and has lectured on these subjects at conferences and universities across the United States, in Europe, and in Asia. In the late 1970s, the professor began a similar social-historical study of technology and technological innovation since the Industrial Revolution. In the 1980s, he published a series of articles on innovation as a socially driven process and on the role played in that process by the knowledge created by scientists and engineers. These articles led to participation in science and technology policy initiatives of the federal government, which in turn led to extensive research and numerous article and book publications through the 1990s on emerging synergies that were transforming relationships among knowledge, innovation, and global commerce.

Goldman is the author of the following courses for The Teaching Company: Science in the Twentieth Century: A Social Intellectual Survey (2004) Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It (2006) Great Scientific Ideas That Changed the World (2007)