The article deals with the argument about free will and determinism between A. I. Herzen (1812—70) and his son, the physiologist A. A. Herzen (1839—1906). The topic, sufficiently familiar to Herzen scholars, interests me above all for its relevance to the history of science. The polemics between father and son touched upon such burning questions of the day as materialism in understanding human beings, positivism as scientific methodology, and the relation of the human sciences to the natural sciences. Seeing physiological (...) materialism as a threat to the values he shared, Herzen the father sought to convince his son of the limitations of mechanistic explanation. At first, Herzen had invested his hopes in the human sciences which were then in the course of forming disciplines — psychology, sociology, and history. He believed they would encompass freedom and consciousness, rejected by the natural sciences, as their subject-matter. But, when it had become clear that these disciplines were following the model of the natural sciences, Herzen then abandoned arguments taken from science and turned towards literature. His argument with his son, which was to do with rethinking rationality, was both critical and constructive for the nascent human sciences. (shrink)

The decline of Naturphilosophie deeply polarized the philosophical and scientific debate. Naturalistic–materialistic positions gained powerful influence, but the latent role of the Kantian critical position also re-emerged in the context of an “ideal-realism”. I will first consider in detail two opposing treatments of Kant’s perspective. After Lotze had criticized his earlier materialistic position, advising him to read Kant, Czolbe finally addressed Kant, thereby progressing to a non-materialistic form of naturalism. However, whether to defend or to dismiss naturalism, neither philosopher addresses (...) Kant as a transcendentalist thinker, and I go on to examine this common feature in their writings. This invites us to reconsider what exactly in Kant’s system conflicts with naturalism. Is transcendentalism too broad a requisite for that task? Within “ideal-realism”, the realist part actually implies a denial of transcendental idealism; still, it shows how a realism which refuses to be naturalism could well learn from Kant. (shrink)

This article revisits the author’s influential account of Nietzche as a philosophical naturalist. It identifies the sources of Nietzsche’s position in the German naturalism of the mid-nineteenth century, in particular the work of Friedrich Lange. His naturalism is, however, “speculative” in that he postulates causal mechanisms not confirmed by science. Nietzsche’s ambition to explain morality naturalistically coexists with a “therapeutic” ambition to induce some readers to escape from morality. The article also addresses doubts that might arise against reading Nietzsche as (...) a naturalist. (shrink)

Despite all that has been written about Russian historiography and how it profoundly changed after the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, very little is known about the historical tradition immediately before the Soviet era. This article attempts to begin to address this issue by examining the major forces that shaped the historical and sociological thought of Nikolai Alesandrovich Rozhkov (1868–1927). It argues that as Kliuchevskii’s successor and as the first professional historian to eventually present a Marxist analysis of Russian history, (...) Rozhkov was not only the most important historian at that time but one whose work best represented the most significant transition in Russia’s historical tradition. The article concludes that an examination of Rozhkov’s historical methodology offers a new interpretation of the origins of Soviet historiography. (shrink)

In the late 19th century, physiologists such as David Ferrier, Eduard Hitzig, and Hermann Munk argued that cerebral brain functions are localized in discrete structures. By the early 20th century, this became the dominant position. However, another prominent physiologist, Friedrich Goltz, rejected theories of cerebral localization and argued against these physiologists until his death in 1902. I argue in this paper that previous historical accounts have failed to comprehend why Goltz rejected cerebral localization. I show that Goltz adhered to a (...) falsificationist methodology, and I reconstruct how he designed his experiments and weighted different kinds of evidence. I then draw on the exploratory experimentation literature from recent philosophy of science to trace one root of the debate to differences in how the German localizers designed their experiments and reasoned about evidence. While Goltz designed his experiments to test hypotheses about the functions of predetermined cerebral structures, the localizers explored new functions and structures in the process of constructing new theories. I argue that the localizers relied on untested background conjectures to justify their inferences about functional organization. These background conjectures collapsed a distinction between phenomena they produced direct evidence for (localized symptoms) and what they reached conclusions about (localized functions). (shrink)

Diffusion theory explains in physical terms how materials move through a medium, e.g. water or a biological fluid. There are strong and widely acknowledged grounds for doubting the applicability of this theory in biology, although it continues to be accepted almost uncritically and taught as a basis of both biology and medicine. Our principal aim is to explore how this situation arose and has been allowed to continue seemingly unchallenged for more than 150 years. The main shortcomings of diffusion theory (...) will be briefly reviewed to show that the entrenchment of this theory in the corpus of biological knowledge needs to be explained, especially as there are equally valid historical grounds for presuming that bulk fluid movement powered by the energy of cell metabolism plays a prominent note in the transport of molecules in the living body. First, the theory's evolution, notably from its origins in connection with the mechanistic materialist philosophy of mid nineteenth century physiology, is discussed. Following this, the entrenchment of the theory in twentieth century biology is analyzed in relation to three situations: the mechanism of oxygen transport between air and mammalian tissues; the structure and function of cell membranes; and the nature of the intermediary metabolism, with its implicit presumptions about the intracellular organization and the movement of molecules within it. In our final section, we consider several historically based alternatives to diffusion theory, all of which have their precursors in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy of science. (shrink)

The physician, sexologist and psychical researcher Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (1862-1929) was without a doubt one of the most unusual and controversial figures in the history of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century German medicine and science. As a young student, he sought – together with his one-time mentor Carl du Prel, the philosopher-psychologist Max Dessoir and others – to expand the methodological and epistemological scope of fledgling German professionalized psychology by serving as an important conduit for strands of psychological experimentation from France (...) and England as alternatives to the physiologically grounded experimental psychology of Wilhelm Wundt and its offshoots (Kurzweg, 1976; Sommer, 2013). An early leading proponent of sexology and medical hypnotism, his work was well received in- and outside Germany by authors such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Albert Moll, Sigmund Freud (with whom he had studied hypnotism under Bernheim in the 1880s), Auguste Forel, Morton Prince and Havelock Ellis (see, e.g., Gauld, 1992; Sommer, 2012a; Sulloway, 1992). After obtaining economic independence by marrying into one of the richest families in Germany, he abandoned his promising medical career and began to focus his energies on the study of probably the most controversial and disputed area of psychical research, i.e. physical mediumship. Thanks to his immense wealth and former academic credentials, shortly after World War 1 Schrenck-Notzing began to dominate German psychical research and became its doyen and sponsor. (shrink)

Summary of the major innovations of Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896).