The intersection between art, poetry, philosophy and science was the leitmotif which guided the lives and careers of romantic natural philosophers including that of the Danish natural philosopher, H. C. Ørsted. A simple model of Ørsted’s career would be one in which it was framed by two periods of philosophical speculation: the youth’s curious and idealistic interest in new attractive thoughts and the experienced man’s mature reflections at the end of his life. We suggest that a closer look at the (...) epistemological aspects of his works on the theory of beauty reveals a connection between this late work and his early philosophical work including experimental philosophy, but also with the work in teaching and textbook writing, that lies in between. The latter includes Ørsted’s view on the application of mathematics in natural philosophy as well as his failed attempt at a genetic presentation of elementary geometry.Keywords: H. C. Ørsted; Anschauung; Naturphilosophie; Aesthetics; Genetic epistemology; Geometry. (shrink)

On 11thOctober 2007, at the first international conference on Integrated History and Philosophy of Science (&HPS1) hosted by the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh, Ernan McMullin (University of Notre Dame) portrayed a rather gloomy scenario concerning the current relationship between history and philosophy of science (HPS), on the one hand, and mainstream philosophy, on the other hand, as testified by a significant drop in the presence of HPS papers at various meetings of the American Philosophical Association (APA).

Ultraviolet radiation is generally considered to have been discovered by Johann Wilhelm Ritter in 1801. In this article, we study the reception of Ritter’s experiment during the first decade after the event—Ritter’s remaining lifetime. Drawing on the attributional model of discovery, we are interested in whether the German physicists and chemists granted Ritter’s observation the status of a discovery and, if so, of what. Two things are remarkable concerning the early reception, and both have to do more with neglect than (...) with reception. Firstly, Ritter’s observation was sometimes accepted as a fact but, with the exception of C. J. B. Karsten’s theory of invisible light, it played almost no role in the lively debate about the nature of heat and light. We argue that it was the prevalent discourse based on the metaphysics of Stoffe that prevented a broader reception of Ritter’s invisible rays, not the fact that Ritter himself made his findings a part of his Naturphilosophie. Secondly, with the exception of C. E. Wünsch’s experiments on the visual spectrum, there was no experimental examination of the experiment. We argue that theorizing about ontological systems was more common than experimenting, because, given its social and institutional situation, this was the appropriate way of contributing to physics. Consequently, it was less clear in 1810 than in 1801 what, if anything, had been discovered by Ritter.Keywords: Johann Wilhelm Ritter; Carl Johann Bernhard Karsten; Christian Ernst Wünsch; Ultraviolet radiation; Conceptions of heat and light. (shrink)