Online research in philosophy

Referring to the Whig Party, the former political opponents of the Tories in Great Britain, British historian Herbert Butterfield once coined the term ‘Whiggish’ historiography for any account that looks at the past from the perspective of the present, as if the goal of the past were the achievement of the present. Thus, a ‘Whiggish’ history of science carefully ignores everything of the past that does not suit the idea of a steady growth of science towards the current state. Strangely (...) enough, that approach has been prominent in philosophy too, from Hegel to recent philosophy science, so that we could equally speak of ‘Hegelian historiography’. (shrink)

In a recent essay review of William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy (2006), Ursula Klein defends her position that philosophically informed corpuscularian theories of matter contributed little to the growing knowledge of "reversible reactions" and robust chemical species in the early modern period. Newman responds here by providing further evidence that an experimental, scholastic tradition of alchemy extending well into the Middle Ages had already argued extensively for the persistence of ingredients during processes of "mixture" (e.g. chemical reactions), and that (...) this corpuscular alchemical tradition bore important fruit in the work of early modern chymists such as Daniel Sennert and Robert Boyle. (shrink)