Historians of science have long been intrigued by the impact of disparate cultural styles on the science of a given country and time period. Richard Olson’s book is a case study in the interaction between philosophy and science as well as an examination of a particular scientific movement. The author investigates the methodological arguments of the Common Sense philosophers Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, Thomas Brown, and William Hamilton and the possible transmission of their ideas to scientists from John (...) Playfair to James Clerk Maxwell. His findings point out the need for modifications to the Duhem-Poincaré interpretation of British scientific style and the reassessment of the extent of Kantian influence on British physics. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Abstract: I argue that for psychological and social reasons, the traditional “Conflict Model” of science and religion interactions has such a strong hold on the nonexpert imagination that counterexamples and claims that interactions are simply more complex than the model allows are inadequate to undermine its power. Taxonomies, such as those of Ian Barbour and John Haught, which characterize conflict as only one among several possible relationships, help. But these taxonomies, by themselves, fail to offer an account of why different (...) relationships prevail among different communities and how they succeed one another within particular communities—that is, they contain no dynamic elements. To undermine the power of the “Conflict Model,” we should be seeking to offer alternative models for science and religion interactions that can both incorporate the range of stances articulated by scholars like Barbour and which can offer an account of the process by which differing attitudes succeed one another. As a step toward this goal, I propose a general “interacting subcultures model” and illustrate its applicability in a small number of mini-case studies from Early Modern Britain and France and with glances toward contemporary America. (shrink)

John Millar's Origin of the Distinction of Ranks contains one of the first extensive and systematic discussions of the status of women in different societies. In this paper I attempt to show first that a combi nation of circumstances associated with the teaching of moral philos ophy at Glasgow and with the reform of Scots law undertaken by Lord Kames made the status of women a critical problem for Millar. Second, I attempt to demonstrate that Millar drew heavily upon the (...) resources of associationist psychology to explain how female status changed from hunting to pastoral to agricultural to commercial societies and that in doing so he diverged substantially from the perspectives developed by his mentor, Adam Smith. Finally, in view of Millar's extraordinarily positive reputation throughout Europe prior to the French Revolution and in view of the potential relevance of his analysis to early feminism and to mid-19th-century anthropological discussions of early matri archy, I seek to account for why his work was virtually ignored from around 1802 to 1960. (shrink)

In his early essay, "Truth by Convention," W.V.O. Quine scraps a programme for a conventionalistic account of logic on finding that the very logic which he wishes to stipulate by conventional truth assignments is presupposed in the stipulation of his conventions. Recently, however, Carlo Giannoni has offered us a variant of the Quine programme which, he maintains, avoids Quine's initial pitfall by shifting the emphasis from truth assignment to the conventional stipulation of inference rules. In the following essay I argue (...) that Quine and, hence, also Giannoni have misconceived the problem of conventionalism in their accounts and that the Giannoni reconstruction is consequently to no avail. The alternative account of Quine's initial difficulties which I offer is both incompatible with a classical conventionalism and Quine's own Duhemian conventionalism, while explaining these difficulties far more adequately than his account of them does. (shrink)

Evidence of a causal role for genes in human behavior underpins genetic essentialism, the scientifically flawed and socially hazardous idea that heritable characteristics are immutable. Behavior geneticists can challenge this idea by designing research that brings the contextual dependence of heritability estimates into sharper focus, and by incorporating a relevant statement into research reports and public outreach.

Ten of the twelve essays in this fine collection treat subjects that are relevant to any reasonably comprehensive understanding of the nature of the history of science. The first four essays are either completely or largely historiographical. Each explores the extent to which the natural sciences have been, or should be, seen as central to the Scottish Enlightenment. As all four provide extended descriptive historiographies, there is extensive repetition here, but as the four also offer radically different answers, they are (...) worth reading.In the first essay Paul Wood argues that Dugald Stewart created an imaginary picture of the Scottish Enlightenment that has influenced almost all subsequent interpretations of the movement. These interpretations have promoted the idea that there was a coherent “Scottish school” of philosophy of which David Hume and Francis Hutcheson were the cofounders; that the Scottish school emphasized moral philosophy and social theory; and that it included figures from Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen. Wood claims that Stewart downplayed the relationship between natural knowledge and social theory, except for some minor methodological commonalities, for several reasons. In part, he desperately wanted to maintain the mind‐body dualism that characterized the Scottish school. In addition, his main statement on the Scottish Enlightenment appeared as an essay on the history of the progress of metaphysics and morals that was paired with John Leslie's essay on the progress of the natural sciences in the supplement to the fourth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and he was simply responding to the limits of his assignment. Regardless of his motives, one major consequence of Stewart's approach has been the exclusion of the natural sciences from a central role in most subsequent interpretations of the Scottish Enlightenment not written by historians of science—an exclusion Wood laments.The second essay, by John Robertson, seems, on one level, almost designed to prove Wood's main point, for it explicitly denies natural science a significant role. For Robertson, moral philosophy, history, and, above all, political economy are at the core of Scottish concerns. He departs from Stewart, however, by insisting on a fundamental opposition between Hume and Hutcheson and by arguing that the Scottish Enlightenment would be better understood as part of a broader European Enlightenment, with less patriotic fervor about Scots exceptionalism.Richard Sher's essay on what book history can tell us about science and medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment is remarkably insightful and illuminating; it left me waiting with great anticipation for his book‐length study on the subject. Although Sher rejects Roger Emerson's claims that the natural sciences were the driving force for the Enlightenment in Scotland, he insists that science and medicine were important. He then goes on to suggest a series of fascinating ways in which characteristics of the book trade both shaped and can illuminate the place of science.Among the other essays likely to interest historians of science are those by Anita Guerrini, John Wright, and Fiona MacDonald. These authors explore aspects of medical theory and medical care in very different but very illuminating ways. One other related set of essays consists of pieces by James Moore, Christopher Berry, and Alexander Broadie, all of which focus on aspects of the theorized relationship between science and religion. Here, the major theme is the difference in emphases between those who followed the ancient materialists in seeing fear as the primary motive in the origins of religion and those who emphasized some version of the design argument.This volume provides a good introduction to the current state of interpretations of the Scottish Enlightenment, and its special emphasis on the place of science among eighteenth‐century Scottish intellectuals should make it attractive to many readers of Isis. (shrink)