Although the literature on the logic of historical enquiry is already vast and still growing, it continues to polarise overwhelmingly around a single disputed point—whether historical explanations have their own logic, or whether every successful explanation must conform to the same deductive model. Recent discussion, moreover, has shown an increasing element of agreement—there has been a marked trend away from accepting any strictly positivist view of the matter. It will be argued here that both the traditional polarity and the recent (...) trend in this debate have tended to be misleading. The positiviste have been damagingly criticised. But their opponents have produced no satisfying alternative. They have tended instead to accept as proper historical explanations whatever has been offered by the historians themselves in the course of trying to explain the past. But a further type of analysis must be required if some account is to be given of the status, and not merely the function, of the language in which these explanations are offered. Such an analysis, moreover has implications of some importance in considering the appropriate strategy for historical enquiries. (shrink)

In the late eighteenth century Newton's Principia was studied in the Scottish universities under the influence of the local school of ‘Common Sense’ philosophy. John Robison, holding the key chair of natural philosophy at Edinburgh from 1774 to 1805, provided a new conception of ‘mechanical philosophy’ which proved crucial to the emergence of physics in nineteenth century Britain. At Cambridge the emphasis on ‘mixed mathematics’ was taken to a new level of refinement and application by the introduction of analytical methods (...) in the 1820s. The fusion of these two schools, with emphasis on conceptual unity on the one hand, and mathematisation on the other, came about from the 1830s onwards, and reached full expression in the new framework of a unified mathematical physics based on the energy principle. (shrink)