Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- I Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
- II Logic and Mathematics
- III Nature
- 6 Conceptions of the Natural World, 1790–1870
- 7 Natural Sciences
- IV Mind, Language, and Culture
- V Ethics
- VI Religion
- VII Society
- VIII History
- References
- Index
- References
7 - Natural Sciences
from III - Nature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2012
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- I Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
- II Logic and Mathematics
- III Nature
- 6 Conceptions of the Natural World, 1790–1870
- 7 Natural Sciences
- IV Mind, Language, and Culture
- V Ethics
- VI Religion
- VII Society
- VIII History
- References
- Index
- References
Summary
The nineteenth century saw the flourishing of various natural sciences, such as we know them now: statistical mechanics, geology, evolutionary biology, cell theory, and so on. Many of what Kuhn used to call “paradigms” were invented in this period. Indeed, ontological commitments, methods, canonical sets of examples were devised in various sciences that were discussed throughout the century and longer, up until today (corpuscular ontology in mechanics, statistical analyses of gas, population thinking, and animal experimentation). Unsurprisingly, philosophers took into account such changes, and the general status of the natural sciences deeply changed in philosophical discourse. The present article aims at identifying the reasons for such changes, which are attested by several gross facts: (A) In this period, a methodology for the natural sciences was developed by philosophers and scientists alike and gave rise to work still considered by philosophers of science, such as Bernard (1865) on experimental reasoning, Whewell (1840) on consilience and inductive sciences, or Mill’s empiricist views on induction (1843). There was also an important effort to classify the sciences (Comte, Spencer) and demarcate human sciences from natural sciences (Dilthey, Schleiermacher) – a concern that would be crucial for later logical positivists. (B) On the other hand, during the century taken as a whole, there was a sharp contrast between such philosophical assessments of the natural sciences and their methods, and a flourishing theoretical framework elaborated in the beginning of the century, mostly in Germany, called Naturphilosophie – a program that has since been seen as one of the most speculative, hence unscientific, considerations of nature to be developed. (C) It is striking, if we compare theoretical works after 1800 to some previous texts, that it becomes far easier to distinguish “philosophers” from “scientists.” Most of the important contributors to the nineteenth-century natural sciences were not philosophers (Darwin, Maxwell, Lagrange, Faraday, Mendel, Lyell, etc.), by contrast with scientists of the previous centuries (Descartes, Leibniz, Pascal, Diderot, d’Alembert, Maupertuis, etc.). In works considered to be “philosophy” in the classical period or Enlightenment, one may find sections about applied physics (the fourth book of Descartes’s Principia philosophia, for example, includes considerations about where to find fountains), whereas in the nineteenth century, such investigations, even by the same authors (like Hegel on the orbits of planets, or Schelling on medicine) are not among the content of philosophical treatises as such.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012
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