The Continental Drift Controversy: Volume 1, Wegener and the Early Debate

Henry R. Frankel was awarded a Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1974 and then took a position at the University of Missouri, Kansas City where he became Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department (1999–2004). His interest in the continental drift controversy and the plate tectonics revolution began while teaching a course on conceptual issues in science during the late 1970s. The controversy provided him with an example of a recent and major scientific revolution to test philosophical accounts of scientific growth and change. Over the next thirty years, and with the support of the United States National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society, Professor Frankel's research went on to yield new and fascinating insights into the evolution of the most important theory in the Earth sciences.

1. How the mobilism debate was structured; 2. Wegener and Taylor develop their theories of continental drift; 3. Sub-controversies in the drift debate, 1920s–50s; 4. The mechanism sub-controversy: 1921–51; 5. Arthur Holmes and his theory of substratum convection, 1915–55; 6. Regionalism and the reception of mobilism: South Africa, India and South America from the 1920s through the early 1950s; 7. Regional reception of mobilism in North America: 1920s through the 1950s; 8. Reception and development of mobilism in Europe: 1920s through the 1950s; 9. Fixism's popularity in Australia: 1920s to middle 1960s; Index.