There are a bewildering variety of claims connecting Darwin to nineteenth-century philosophy of science—including to Herschel, Whewell, Lyell, German Romanticism, Comte, and others. I argue here that Herschel’s influence on Darwin is undeniable. The form of this influence, however, is often misunderstood. Darwin was not merely taking the concept of “analogy” from Herschel, nor was he combining such an analogy with a consilience as argued for by Whewell. On the contrary, Darwin’s Origin is written in precisely the (...) manner that one would expect were Darwin attempting to model his work on the precepts found in Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on Natural Science. While Hodge has worked out a careful interpretation of both Darwin and Herschel, drawing similar conclusions, his interpretation misreads Herschel’s use of the vera causa principle and the verification of hypotheses. The new reading that I present here resolves this trouble, combining Hodge’s careful treatment of the structure of the Origin with a more cautious understanding of Herschel’s philosophy of science. This interpretation lets us understand why Darwin laid out the Origin in the way that he did and also why Herschel so strongly disagreed, including in Herschel’s heretofore unanalyzed marginalia in his copy of Darwin’s book. (shrink)

This paper argues for continuity in purpose and specific results between some hand drawn nebulae, especially those ‘descriptive maps’ by John F. W. Herschel and E. P. Mason in the late 1830s, and the first photographs made of the nebulae in the 1880s. Using H. H. Turners’ explication in 1904 of the three great advantages of astrophotography, the paper concludes that to some extent Herschel’s and Mason’s hand-drawings of the nebulae were meant to achieve the same kinds (...) of results. This is surprising not only because such drawings were conceived and achieved over forty-years earlier, but also because the procedures used in the production of these pictorially and metrically rich images were those directly inspired by cartography, geodesy, and land-surveying. Such drawings provided the standard for what was depicted, expected and aimed at by way of successful representations of the nebulae; standards that seemed to have been used to judge the success of nebular photographs. Being conditions of expectation and possibility for later photography, these drawings were themselves made possible by such techniques of representation and measurement as isolines and triangulation, so fundamental to Imperial and ‘Humboltian science.’Keywords: Ebenezer Porter Mason; Cartography; Draughtsmanship; Observation; Scientific Representation; Philosophy of Scientific Practice. (shrink)

Today we are all familiar with the iconic pictures of the nebulae produced by the Hubble Space Telescope’s digital cameras. But there was a time, before the successful application of photography to the heavens, in which scientists had to rely on handmade drawings of these mysterious phenomena. Observing by Hand sheds entirely new light on the ways in which the production and reception of handdrawn images of the nebulae in the nineteenth century contributed to astronomical observation. Omar W. Nasim investigates (...) hundreds of unpublished observing books and paper records from six nineteenth-century observers of the nebulae: Sir John Herschel; William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse; William Lassell; Ebenezer Porter Mason; Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel; and George Phillips Bond. Nasim focuses on the ways in which these observers created and employed their drawings in data-driven procedures, from their choices of artistic materials and techniques to their practices and scientific observation. He examines the ways in which the act of drawing complemented the acts of seeing and knowing, as well as the ways that making pictures was connected to the production of scientific knowledge. An impeccably researched, carefully crafted, and beautifully illustrated piece of historical work, Observing by Hand will delight historians of science, art, and the book, as well as astronomers and philosophers. (shrink)

An acceptable empiricist account of laws of nature would havesignificant implications for a number of philosophical projects. For example, such an account may vitiate argumentsthat the fundamental constants of nature are divinelydesigned so that laws produce a life permittinguniverse. On an empiricist account, laws do not produce the universe but are designed by us to systematize theevents of a universe which does in fact contain life; so any ``fine tuning'' of natural law has a naturalistic explanation.But there are problems for (...) the empiricist project. This paper develops a ``perspectival'' version of the Humean bestsystem approach and argues that this version solves the standard problems faced by the empiricist project.Furthermore, the paper argues, this version is best able to answer the proponents of divine design while leaving scientificlaw a suitably objective matter.[I]t is possible tocondense the enormous mass of results to a large extent – that is to find laws which summarize...Richard Feynman It has become fashionable in some circles to argue thatscience is ultimately a sham, that we scientists read order into nature, not out of nature, and that the laws of physicsare our laws, not nature's. I believe this is arrant nonsense. You would be hard-pressed to convince a physicist thatNewton's inverse square law of gravitation is a purely cultural concoction. The laws of physics, I submit, reallyexist in the world out there, and the job of the scientist is to uncover them, not invent them. True, at any giventime, the laws you find in the textbooks are tentative and approximate, but they mirror, albeit imperfectly, a reallyexisting order in the physical world. Of course, many scientists do not recognize that in accepting the reality of anorder in nature-the existence of laws `out there' – they are adopting a theological world view. P. C. W. Davies. (shrink)

ArgumentKeeping records has always been an essential part of science. Aside from natural history and the laboratory sciences, no other observational science reflects this activity of record-keeping better than astronomy. Central to this activity, historically speaking, are tools so mundane and common that they are easily overlooked; namely, the notebook and the pencil. One obvious function of these tools is clearly a mnemonic one. However, there are other relevant functions of paperwork that often go unnoticed. Among these, I argue, is (...) the strategic use made of different procedures of record keeping to prolong observational time with a target object. Highlighting this function will help us to appreciate the supporting role played by the notebook and the pencil to extend the observational time spent with a target object. With objects as delicate, faint, and mysterious as the nebulae, the procedures used to record their observations helped nineteenth-century observers overcome the temporal handicaps and limitations of large and clumsy telescopes, mounted in the altazimuth manner. To demonstrate the importance of paper and pencil, I will closely examine the observing books, the drawings found therein, and the telescopes of three nineteenth-century observers of the nebulae: Sir John F. W. Herschel, Lord Rosse, and William Lassell. (shrink)

There have been attempts to subsume Charles Darwin's theory of evolution under either one of two distinct intellectual traditions: early Victorian natural science and its descendants in political economy (as exemplified by Herschel, Lyell, or Malthus) and the romantic approach to art and science emanating from Germany (as exemplified by Humboldt and Goethe). In this paper, it will be shown how these traditions may have jointly contributed to the design of Darwin's theory. The hypothesis is that their encounter created (...) a particular tension in the conception of his theory which first opened up its characteristic field and mode of explanation. On the one hand, the domain of the explanandum was conceived of under a holistic and aesthetic view of nature that, in its combination with refined techniques of observation, was deeply indebted to Humboldt in particular. On the other hand, Darwin fashioned explanations for natural phenomena, so conceived, in order to identify their proper causes in a Herschelian spirit. The particular interaction between these two traditions in Darwin, it is concluded, paved the way for a transfer of the idea of causal laws to animate nature while salvaging the romantic idea of a complex, teleological and harmonious order of nature. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Two of the most influential evaluations of Charles Lyell's geological ideas were those of the philosophers of science, John F. W. Herschel and William Whewell. In this paper I shall argue that the great difference between these evaluations—whereas Herschel was fundamentally sympathetic to Lyell's geologizing, Whewell was fundamentally opposed—is a function of the fact that Herschel was an empiricist and Whewell a rationalist. For convenience, I shall structure the discussion around the three key elements in Lyell's (...) approach to geology. First, he was an actualist: he wanted to explain past geological phenomena in terms of causes of the kind that are operating at present. Second, he was a uniformitarian: he wanted to explain only in terms of causes of the degree operating at present; that is, he wanted to avoid ‘catastrophes’. Third, as a geologist he saw the earth as being in a steady-state, in which all periods are essentially similar to one another. Because they will prove important, I draw attention also to two major features of Lyell's programme. First, there is his theory of climate, which suggests, ‘without help from a comet’, that earthly temperature fluctuations are primarily a function of the constantly changing distribution of land and sea. Clearly this theory is actualistic, for it is based on such present phenomena as the Gulf Stream; it is also uniformitarian and supports a steady-state world picture. Second, there is Lyell's denial that the fossil record is progressive, his criticism of Lamarckian evolutionism, ostensibly on the grounds that modern evidence is against it , and his rather veiled claim that the origins of species will nevertheless prove in some way natural, that is, subject to causes falling beneath lawlike regularities in principle discernible by us. (shrink)

Despite the venerable place that "justice" occupies in social scientific theory and research, little effort has been made to see how members of society themselves define and use the concept when confronted with determining "what has happened" in some social arena, theorizing about why it happened, and deciding what should ensue. We take an ethnomethodological approach to justice, attempting to recover it as a feature of practical activity or a "phenomenon of order." Our analysis involves an actual videotaped jury deliberation. (...) In his classic study of decision making by juries, Garfinkel observed that jurors changed their reliance on commonsense reasoning very little, even though they were instructed to adhere to official and legal criteria for guilt. The vacillation between commonsense reasoning and using official criteria creates a tension; in our data this tension is manifested as the choice between adhering to law and procedural rules and providing "justice." By articulating this tension as a puzzle, several of the jurors prepare the way for using "justice," and then use this concept in formal ways which, along with other discursive patterns and strategies, constitute the deliberation as a structured, concerted activity. We show four stages in the use of the term justice as it is embedded in jurors' practical reasoning. (shrink)

Ten tekst przedstawia trzy różne sposoby, w jakie ludzie, którzy mieli kontakt z nauką, odpowiadają na następujące pytania: „Czy nauka jest zgodna z wiarą religijną?” oraz „Czy nauka nie wyklucza istnienia osobowego Boga?”. Pierwsza odpowiedź zakłada, że nauki przyrodnicze i wiara religijna wykluczają się wzajemnie. To jest sytuacja konfliktu. Jej przedstawiciele należą do dwóch głównych podgrup: sceptyków, którzy wierzą, że nauki przyrodnicze uczyniły wszystkie twierdzenia religijne niewiarygodnymi, oraz ludzi wiary, którzy odmawiają przyjęcia pewnych naukowych idei, takich jak kosmologia Wielkiego Wybuchu (...) i ewolucja biologiczna. W obecnym tekście konflikt dotyczy tylko naukowych sceptyków, którzy twierdzą, że metody i odkrycia naukowe zdezaktualizowały wiarę religijną i teologię. Drugi typ odpowiedzi na wymienione pytania utrzymuje, że nauka i wiara dotyczą różnych poziomów lub wymiarów rzeczywistości. Zgodnie z tym podejściem, nauka i teologia stawiają zupełnie inne rodzaje pytań, dlatego nie można ich traktować jako konkurencyjnych obszarów. W stanowisku kontrastu podkreśla się, że nie może być prawdziwego konfliktu między twierdzeniami nauk przyrodniczych a twierdzeniami wiary i teologii. Wiara i nauka nie rywalizują o jakiś wspólny cel, więc nie mogą wchodzić ze sobą w konflikt. Trzecim stanowiskiem jest konwergencja. Można je również nazwać „współbrzmieniem”, „współpracą”, „kontaktem” lub „konwersacją”. To stanowisko zgadza się z tezą „kontrastu”, według którego wiara religijna i nauki przyrodnicze są różnymi sposobami rozumienia świata, ale argumentuje zarazem, że te dwa obszary nieuchronnie oddziałują na siebie. Konwergencja promuje tę interakcję. Celem zwolenników konwergencji jest osiągnięcie syntezy, w której zarówno nauka, jak i wiara zachowują swoją tożsamość, a jednocześnie pozostają w ścisłym związku ze sobą we wspólnym dążeniu do inteligibilności i prawdy. Konwergencja zakłada, że odkrycia naukowe mają znaczenie dla wiary, innymi słowy, odkrycia naukowe mogą znacząco wpłynąć na to, jak myślimy o Bogu i sensie naszego życia. Konwergencja zakłada, że nauka i wiara, o ile nie są ze sobą mylone, mogą razem prowadzić do bogatszego spojrzenia na rzeczywistość. (shrink)

John F. Kavanaugh and W. Norris Clarke, two twentieth-century Jesuits, contributed to philosophy through their development of a Thomistic and personalist view of reality emphasizing the human endowments of knowing, freely choosing, and loving. While spiritual exercises played a role in the formation of both Jesuits, the function of spiritual exercises in their own philosophy has not been explored. Recent interest in philosophy as a way of life provides a means by which this can be accomplished. In their work (...) Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot have shown how spiritual exercises function in the formation of the self and in the acquisition of a synoptic vision that allows contemplation of one’s participation in the whole. This paper shows that while Kavanaugh primarily uses spiritual exercises in his philosophy to accomplish a disciplinary/formational aim Clarke’s aim is dialogical/exploratory. A brief examination of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola reveals how these different aims in fact complement one another. (shrink)

This volume contains a series of papers which were presented at the 22nd Mediävistentagung held at Cologne, 3-6 September, 1980. It includes a forward by A. Zimmerman, and the following studies: W. P. Eckert, on legends about Albert the Great; F. J. Kovach, on the infinity of the divine essence and divine power according to Albert; J. I. Saranyana, on Albert's contribution to the doctrine of actus essendi; R. McInerny, on Albert and Thomas on Theology; W. J. Hoye, on salvation (...) and resurrection in Albert; A. Zimmerman, on Albert's critique of an argument to prove that the world began to be; S. Ebbesen, on Albert's Companion to the Organon; I. Craemer-Ruegenberg, on Albert's teaching concerning the soul and the intellect; A. Goddu, on Albert's contribution to discussions of natural and violent motions; G. C. Anawati, on Albert and alchemy; K. Bernath, on Albert's views concerning education as presented in his Commentary on the Politics; A. Cazenave, on some European views of the exotic at the time of Albert; G. Federici Vescovini, on some witnesses to Albert's influence at Padua at the end of the fourteenth century--Angelo of Fossombrone and Biagio Pelacni of Parma; M. Markowski, on Albert and Albertism at Krakow; S. Wlodek, on Albert and the Albertists of the fifteenth century and the problem of universals; J. Korolec, on Heymeric de Campo and his Neoplatonic vision of God; H. G. Senger, on Albertism and some reflections on the via Alberti in the fifteenth century; G. Piaia, on the historical and philosophical interpretations of Albert which developed from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries; M. Borzyszkowski, on Albert and his influence in Ermland, Pomesanien, and Pommerellen ; H. Kümmerling, "'Das muss alles einen andern geistlichen Sinn haben'. De concordiae mundanae rationibus," a contribution to the history of music. While limitations of space preclude detailed discussions of these articles, their variety in terms of the particular issues treated reflects both the interdisciplinary character of the original meeting which occasioned them and the breadth of vision and talent of the volume's focal point-Albert the Great. Among articles of interest to students of Albert's philosophical thought are, to mention but a few, those by Kovach, Saranyana, Zimmermann, Ebbesen, Craemer-Ruegenberg, and Goddu. Zimmermann not only presents Albert's critique of argumentation intended to prove that the world began to be, but after noting Albert's agreement on this point with the view defended by Thomas Aquinas, Zimmermann then resumes his continuing discussion with another twentieth-century scholar--Fernand Van Steenberghen of Louvain-concerning the merits of the argumentation rejected by Thomas and by Albert. Zimmermann defends the view developed by Albert and by Thomas, while Van Steenberghen favors the position associated especially with Bonaventure--that one can demonstrate the temporal origin of the universe.--John F. Wippel, The Catholic University of America. (shrink)

The contributions to this sparkling new book conclude that Neurath touched on many of the most critical problems of economic theory during its formative years as a modern discipline.

What makes one event have more historical importance than another event? Why, for example, do historians consider Caesar's decision to cross the Rubicon more important than Caesar's decision to shave in the morning? In this example, the answer should be obvious. The contrast is between a decision of great consequence and a decision of little consequence. Perhaps we can generalize from the example to say that the ranking of events with respect to their historical importance is a function of the (...) magnitude of their respective consequences.W. H. Dray holds that in some cases historical importance is determined by factors other than the size of consequences. For example, events may be important because of what they anticipate or what they reveal. (shrink)