Many women wrote philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain, and they wrote across the full range of philosophical topics. Yet these important women thinkers have been left out of the philosophical canon and many of them are barely known today. The aim of this book is to put them back on the map. It introduces twelve women philosophers - Mary Shepherd, Harriet Martineau, Ada Lovelace, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Helena Blavatsky, Julia Wedgwood, Victoria Welby, Arabella Buckley, Annie Besant, Vernon Lee, and (...) Constance Naden. Alison Stone looks at their views on naturalism, philosophy of mind, evolution, morality and religion, and progress in history. She shows how these women interacted and developed their philosophical views in conversation with one another, not only with their male contemporaries. The rich print and periodical culture of the period enabled these women to publish philosophy in forms accessible to a general readership, despite the restrictions women faced, such as having limited or no access to university education. Stone explains how these women became excluded from the history of philosophy because there was a cultural shift at the end of the nineteenth century towards specialised forms of philosophical writing, which depended on academic credentials that were still largely unavailable to women. (shrink)

Recently there has been considerable revaluation of the development of natural sciences in the early nineteenth century, dealing among other things with the works and ideas of Charles Lyell. The task of interpreting Lyell in balanced terms is extremely complex because his activities covered many fields of research, and because his views have been unwarrantably distorted in order to make him the precursor of various modern scientific positions. Martin Rudwick in particular has contributed several papers relating to Lyell's Principles of (...) geology, and has repeatedly stressed the need for a comprehensive evaluation of Lyell's scientific proposals, and of his position in the culture of his time. In the present paper I hope to contribute to the reassessment of Lyell's work by concentrating on his discussion of transformism, which constituted the central theme of the second volume of the Principles of geology: the very length of Lyell's detailed and critical analysis of Lamarck's theories reveals the importance he attributed to the question of transformism in the contemporary natural sciences. (shrink)

The theoretical system Lyell presented in 1830 was composed of three requirements or principles: 1) the Uniformity Principle which states that past geological events must be explained by the same causes now in operation; 2) the Uniformity of Rate Principle which states that geological laws operate with the same force as at present; 3) the Steady-state Principle which states that the earth does not undergo any directional change. The three principles form a single thesis called uniformitarianism which has been repeatedly (...) questioned and which has been reputed to be unable to face the competing directional synthesis based on the theory of the earth's cooling down. As a result, the significance of Lyell's system has been reduced to a simple actualism which admits the validity of the only Uniformity Principle. I believe that the only way to understand Lyell's role in the history of science is to maintain the unity of his synthesis. To show the Newtonian roots of this synthesis I will compare Lyell's principles and Newton's Rules of Reasoning. I will conclude with an analysis of the methodological function of principles in Lyell's scientific endeavour. (shrink)

. The object is to examine strategies commonly used to heighten a sense of the sacred in nature. It is argued that moves designed to reinforce a concept of Providence have been the very ones to release new opportunities for secular readings. Several case studies reveal this fluidity across a sacred‐secular divide. The irony whereby sacred readings of nature would graduate into the secular is also shown to operate in reverse as anti‐providentialist strategies invited their own refutation. The analysis is (...) used to support the claim that the sciences have put fewer constraints on religious belief than is generally assumed. (shrink)

One of the major benefits of interdisciplinary research is the chance to swap tools between fields, to save having to reinvent the wheel. The fields of language evolution and evolutionary biology have been swapping tools for centuries to the enrichment of both. Here I will discuss three categories of tool swapping: conceptual tools, where analogies are drawn between hypotheses, patterns or processes, so that one field can take advantage of the path cut through the intellectual jungle by the other; theoretical (...) tools, where the machinery developed to process the data in one field is adapted to be applied to the data of the other; and analytical tools, where common problems encountered in both fields can be solved using useful tricks developed by one or the other. I will argue that conceptual tools borrowed from linguistics contributed to the Darwinian revolution in biology; that theoretical tools of evolutionary change can in some cases be applied to both genetic and linguistic data without having to assume the underlying evolutionary processes are exactly the same; and that there are practical problems that have long been recognised in historical linguistics that may be solved by borrowing some useful analytical tools from evolutionary biology. (shrink)

This article questions whether philosophical considerations play any substantial role in the actual process of scientific research. Using examples mostly from the nineteenth century, it suggests that scientists generally choose their basic theoretical orientation, and their research strategies, on the basis of non-rationalized feelings which might be described as instinct or intuition. In one case where methodological principles were the driving force (Charles Lyell's uniformitarian geology), the effect was counterproductive.

‘Non-Progression’, the interpretation of life-history launched by Lyell in 1830 and defended by him for over twenty years, can be summarized as follows. Palaeontologists, Lyell contended, should assume that at every period of the earth's recoverable past, each class of plants and animals has been represented somewhere on earth. Species have been created solely as responses to perpetually shifting environmental conditions, and not as temporally conditioned stages in the unique unrolling of a grand plan. If certain environments are especially suited (...) to reptiles, then the Creator tailors collections of beautifully adapted terrestrial, aquatic, and even aerial reptiles for them—as He did, for example, for the environments recorded in the British Jurassic; as He did, much more recently, for the Galapagos Islands; and as He will do again, if conditions somewhere on earth ever force mammals into extinction, leaving ecological niches which can more suitably be filled by reptiles. If, for example, changes in the topography and climate of the Sussex Weald eventually lead to the re-establishment of an environment that particularly suits iguanodons, then iguanodons will assuredly appear there again. The essential point about Lyell's interpretation is that time does nothing to determine a particular flora and fauna. When designing a new animal, the Creator, according to Lyell's view, has to take into account only the creature's or plant's destined environment: He has to consult no timetable, or lineage, governing the production of new forms. In notes for a speech given in 1852 Lyell reduced his interpretation to the epitome, ‘Adaptation to geographical circumst5 not progressive develop the real history of past changes’. (shrink)

This article ventures a reappraisal of Huxley's role in the Darwinian debates. First, the views on life-history held by Huxley before 1859 are identified. Next, the disharmony between these views and the view put forward by Darwin in the Origin of species is discussed. Huxley's defence of the Origin is then reviewed in an effort to show that, despite his fervour on Darwin's behalf, his advocacy of the case for natural selection was not particularly compelling, and that his own scientific (...) work took no revolutionary new direction after 1859. (shrink)

In the half century following Cook's entry into the Pacific in 1769, few tropical phenomena excited more attention than coral islands and the corals which evidently built them. In the eighteenth century corals occupied a critical position in the Great Chain of Being. Sometimes interpreted as animals, sometimes as plants, they built large topographic structures of limestone, and thus spanned the gap between the organic and inorganic worlds. ‘The strata which they form are at once living and fossil; we can (...) see them in the act of production, and the mountains grow up to the day before us, new parts of our own earth.’ Towards the end of the century, after Peyssonnel had conclusively shown that corals were animals—variously designated as worms, insects, or molluscous worms—this bridging significance was transferred to the coral islands, new areas of land emerging from the ocean and newly colonized by plants and animals, as an analogue of the primeval earth. This creative process served for some to counterbalance the Huttonian vision of universal degradation: ‘Whatever destroying tendencies … exist on the earth, these renovating powers compensate for them’. (shrink)

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is well known as a pre-Darwinian proponent of evolution. But much of what has been written on Lamarck, on his ‘Lamarckian’ belief in the inheritance of acquired characters, and on his conception of the role of the will in biological development mischaracterizes his views. Indeed, surprisingly little in-depth analysis has been published regarding his views on human physiology and development. Further, although since Robert M. Young’s signal 1969 essay on Malthus and the evolutionists, Darwin scholars have sought to (...) place Darwin’s work in its social and political context, this has yet to be done adequately for Lamarck. Here I address this gap. I argue that the will was of particular importance to Lamarck’s social commentary and his hopes for the transformation of the French people and nation. Further, I argue that if we are to really grasp Lamarck’s ideas and intentions we need to contextualize his works in relation to prevailing debates in France about the physiology of mind and morals and the future of the nation. (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 anactualist: he wanted to explain past geological phenomena in terms of causes of the kind that are operating at present. Second, he was auniformitarian: 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 asteady-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 (i.e. it fails actualistically), 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)

Early in 1826, at the age of 28, Charles Lyell began writing the first of a series of articles for J. G. Lockhart, the new editor of theQuarterly review. These articles gave him his first opportunity to express to the educated public his views on the state of science in general, and of geology in particular, in English society. According to the convention of theQuarterly, each article was nominally a review of one or more recently published works, but like other (...) reviewers Lyell clearly chose them as ‘pegs’ on which to hang his own arguments. In content, the articles form a kind of ‘gradualistic’ series, rather like his own later interpretations of geological phenomena. At one end of the series (though published third) was an essay on the place of science in general in English university education. Another article (the first to appear in print) focused on some of the English institutions specifically devoted to science. Here there was a hint that the need for reform in the place of science in English society was not unrelated to a similar need for reform in Lyell's chosen branch of science. The next article enlarged on this hint by examining the publications of the Geological Society of London, on which Lyell had recently served as Secretary. This essay expressed for the first time in a general context Lyell's characteristic emphasis on the need for actualistic comparison between present and past. Finally, what he needed to complete the series was an article in which he could show in detail the positive explanatory advantages of following this method in geology. The ‘peg’ which he chose for this purpose was a single work, George Poulett Scrope'sMemoir on the geology of central France. (shrink)

History is the science which investigates the successive changes that have taken place in the material and intellectual conditions of man; it inquires into the causes of those changes, and the influence which they have exerted in modifying the life and mind of mankind.

Following Michael Bartholomew's study of ‘Lyell and Evolution’ in 1973, scholars have become increasingly interested in the response of gentlemen geologists to Lamarckism during the reign of William IV (1830–7). Bartholomew contended that Charles Lyell was ‘alone in scenting the danger’ for man of using transmutation to explain fossil progression, and that he reacted to the threat of bestialisation by restructuring palaeontology along safe non-progressionist lines. Like his Anglican contemporaries, Lyell was concerned to prove that man was no transformed ape, (...) and that morals were not the better part of brute instinct. Dov Ospovat has subsequently suggested that Lyell's theory of climate was equally an attempt to thwart the transformists and ‘preserve man's unique status in creation’. In other words, Lyell's biology and geology were inextricably related inPrinciples of Geologyand his ideology affected his science as a whole. Finally, Pietro Corsi has identified the Continental materialists who most probably alerted Lyell to the danger, intimating that a conservative British response became imperative when Lyell ‘saw signs of the diffusion of transformism in England itself, where it could even form an unholy alliance with prevailing progressionist and directionalist interpretations of the history of life on earth’. (shrink)

Wakley in 1846 called Grant “at once the most eloquent, the most accomplished, the most self-sacrificing, and the most unrewarded man in the profession.”128 I have shown some of the reasons why this was so, and I have suggested that his Lamarckism was one of a number of factors that served to alienate him from the conservative scientific community in the 1830's and 1840's. I have further shown the need for a fundamental rethinking of Grant's position in the history of (...) biology. There is little profit in seeing him as a precursor of Darwin. His importance lies as a teacher of philosophical anatomy and as the disseminator of Geoffroy's views in London. With the recent interest of historians in the emergence of a non-Paleyite approach to design in the 1830's (that is, an approach stemming from a unity of plan), a reassessment of Grant along these lines seems in order.Also, by understanding Grant's professional and transmutational threat, we can more fully appreciate the anti-Lamarckian ploys of leading scientists like Owen and Lyell. These scientific and social tactics reinforced the isolation Grant suffered as a result of his radical, materialistic, and antimonopolist views. Together with the laissez-faire arrangements at the joint-stock university, they led to his financial collapse — and to the decline of his scientific output that Darwin found so inexplicable. Beddoe described Grant as a disappointed man. “Alas!” wrote Wakley. “Who would be an English Cuvier?”129. (shrink)