Discussion of William Whewell on Kepler on the orbit of Mars. A paper in *An Intimate Relation*, a volume presented to Robert E. Butts on his 60th Birthday.

In the nineteenth century, William Whewell claimed that his confirmation criterion of consilience was a truth-guarantor: we could, he believed, be certain that a consilient theory was true. Since that time Whewell has been much ridiculed for this claim by critics such as J. S. Mill and Bas van Fraassen. I have argued elsewhere that, while Whewell's claim that consilience can guarantee the truth of a theory is clearly wrong, consilience is indeed quite useful as a confirmation criterion (Snyder 2005). (...) Here I will show that, even when consilience gives evidence for a theory that turns out to be false, there is an important sense in which consilience shows that the theory has captured something correct about the natural-kind structure of the physical world. Whewell was therefore correct to claim that consilience provides a "criterion of reality" (Whewell [1847] 1967, vol. 2, 68). Consilience provides this by giving justification for the claim that we have really `cut nature at its causal joints', to adapt Plato's famous phrase. Because of this, consilience can play a role in an argument for scientific realism. (shrink)

The Victorian period in Britain was an “age of reform.” It is therefore not surprising that two of the era’s most eminent intellects described themselves as reformers. Both William Whewell and John Stuart Mill believed that by reforming philosophy—including the philosophy of science—they could effect social and political change. But their divergent visions of this societal transformation led to a sustained and spirited controversy that covered morality, politics, science, and economics. Situating their debate within the larger context of Victorian society (...) and its concerns, _Reforming Philosophy_ shows how two very different men captured the intellectual spirit of the day and engaged the attention of other scientists and philosophers, including the young Charles Darwin. Mill—philosopher, political economist, and Parliamentarian—remains a canonical author of Anglo-American philosophy, while Whewell—Anglican cleric, scientist, and educator—is now often overlooked, though in his day he was renowned as an authority on science. Placing their teachings in their proper intellectual, cultural, and argumentative spheres, Laura Snyder revises the standard views of these two important Victorian figures, showing that both men’s concerns remain relevant today. A philosophically and historically sensitive account of the engagement of the major protagonists of Victorian British philosophy, _Reforming Philosophy_ is the first book-length examination of the dispute between Mill and Whewell in its entirety. A rich and nuanced understanding of the intellectual spirit of Victorian Britain, it will be welcomed by philosophers and historians of science, scholars of Victorian studies, and students of the history of philosophy and political economy. (shrink)

William Whewell was a giant of Victorian intellectual culture. His influence, whether recognized or forgotten, is palpable in areas as diverse as moral philosophy, mineralogy, architecture, the politics of education, physics, engineering, and theology. Recent studies of the place of the sciences in nineteenth-century Britain have repeatedly indicated the significance of Whewell's sweeping and critical proposals for a reformed account of scientific knowledge and moral values. However, until now there has been no detailed study of the context and impact of (...) his project. This collection of essays by recognized authorities in the fields of history, history of science, and philosophy thus represents the first attempt to do justice to a magisterial nineteenth-century intellectual. More generally, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of Victorian intellectual life and its aftermath. (shrink)

This article examines the nineteenth-century debate about scientific method between John Stuart Mill and William Whewell. Contrary to standard interpretations (given, for example, by Achinstein, Buchdahl, Butts, and Laudan), I argue that their debate was not over whether to endorse an inductive methodology but rather over the nature of inductive reasoning in science and the types of conclusions yielded by it. Whewell endorses, while Mill rejects, a type of inductive reasoning in which inference is employed to find a property or (...) cause shared by the observed members of a class, which is generalized to all its members, including the unobserved ones. Because of this, Whewell’s inductivism, unlike Mill’s, is able to yield theoretical hypotheses referring to unob-servables such as molecules and light waves. This is contrary to the claims of some critics of inductivism who argue that inductivism is unable to yield such hypotheses. Moreover, I suggest that Whewell’s view of induction conforms more closely than Mill’s view to the practice of scientists such as Kepler, Newton, and Fresnel, who do attempt to discover laws involving unobservables. (shrink)

In this paper I sketch William Whewell’s attempts to impose order on classificatory mineralogy, which was in Whewell’s day (1794e1866) a confused science of uncertain prospects. Whewell argued that progress was impeded by the crude reductionist assumption that all macroproperties of crystals could be straightforwardly explained by reference to the crystals’ chemical constituents. By comparison with biological classification, Whewell proposed methodological reforms that he claimed would lead to a natural classification of minerals, which in turn would support advances in causal (...) understanding of the properties of minerals. Whewell’s comparison to successful biological classification is particularly striking given that classificatory biologists did not share an understanding of the causal structure underlying the natural classification of life (the common descent with modification of all organisms). Whewell’s key proposed methodological reform is consideration of multiple, distinct principles of classification. The most powerful evidence in support of a natural classificatory claim is the consilience of claims arrived at through distinct lines of reasoning, rooted in distinct conceptual approaches to the target objects. Mineralogists must consider not only elemental composition and chemical affinities, but also symmetry and polarity. Geometrical properties are central to what makes an individual mineral the type of mineral that it is. In Whewell’s view, function and organization jointly define life, and so are the keys to understanding what makes an organism the type of organism that it is. I explain the relationship between Whewell’s teleological account of life and his natural theology. I conclude with brief comments about the importance of Whewell’s classificatory theory for the further development of his philosophy of science and in particular his account of consilience. (shrink)

The dominant moral philosophy of nineteenth-century Britain was utilitarianism, beginning with Bentham and ending with Sidgwick. Though once overshadowed by his immediate predecessors in that tradition, Sidgwick is now regarded as a figure of great importance in the history of moral philosophy. Indeed his masterpiece, The Methods of Ethics, has been described by John Rawls as the 'most philosophically profound' of the classical utilitarian works. In this volume a distinguished group of philosophers reassesses the full range of Sidgwick's work, not (...) simply his ethical theory, but also his contributions as a historian of philosophy, a political theorist, and a reformer. (shrink)

Summary The object of this study is to analyse certain aspects of the debate between David Brewster and William Whewell concerning the probability of extra-terrestrial life, in order to illustrate the nature, constitution and condition of natural theology in the decades immediately preceding the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's Origin of species. The argument is directed against a stylised picture of natural theology which has been drawn from a backward projection of the Darwinian antithesis between natural selection and certain (...) forms of the design argument. Contrary to the popular image of natural theology as an essentially static, autonomous and monolithic set of presuppositions about the existence of design in nature, the paper underlines the existence of a fundamental divergence of strategies within natural theology, a divergence that, in the case of Brewster and Whewell, can be correlated with the religious cultures to which they most closely belonged. The fact that, in the plurality of worlds debate, their respective positions became mutually exclusive suggests that the fragmented and disordered state of natural theology, only too apparent before the Darwinian impact, was occasioned as much by the ulterior problem of rationalising the excessive space of the astronomers and the excessive time of the geologists as it was by any principle of the uniformity of nature in the biological sphere. The argument is substantiated with particular reference to the breakdown in communication as Brewster and Whewell developed conflicting strategies to expose the ?development hypothesis? that had appeared in Vestiges. Their altercation also reveals a certain conflict of status concerning the conclusions of astronomy and geology which, in turn, suggests that tensions between the physical and life sciences were not peculiar to the period following the publication of Darwin's theory. (shrink)

In this essay, I call attention to Kant’s and Whewell’s attempt to provide bridging principles between a priori principles and scientific laws. Part of Kant’s aim in the Opus postumum (ca. 1796-1803) was precisely to bridge the gap between the metaphysical foundations of natural science (on the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) see section 1) and physics by establishing intermediary concepts or ‘Mittelbegriffe’ (henceforth this problem is referred to as ‘the bridging-problem’). I argue that the late-Kant attempted to show (...) that the concept of ‘moving force’, an intermediary concept derived from a priori principles, could be given empirical content so that concrete scientific knowledge is arrived at. Thus, the late-Kant wished not only to show that proper scientific laws are necessary a priori (as he had shown in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science) but also that intermediary concepts could be derived from a priori principles which, when interpreted empirically, resulted in the specific forces as established by physics (see section 2). Of course, William Whewell never knew about Kant’s Opus postumum and his attempt to bridge the gap between the metaphysical foundations of science and physics. However, it is striking that Whewell had similar concerns about the Critique of Pure Reason and the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science as Kant himself. According to Whewell, the Kantian project was incomplete because it did not show how ‘modifications’ (in the sense of concretizations) of a priori principles could result in empirical laws (section 3). Next, it will be argued, by taking into account several of Whewell’s philosophical notebooks which have scarcely been studied systematically, that Whewell’s doctrine of Fundamental Ideas grew out of his dissatisfaction with the Kantian project with respect to the bridging problem and that his own philosophical position should be seen as an attempt to bypass the bridging-problem. (shrink)

Most contributions to Whewell scholarship have tended to stress the idealistic, antiempirical temper of Whewell’s philosophy. Thus, the only two monograph-length studies on Whewell, Blanché’s Le Rationalisme de Whewell and Marcucci’s L’ ‘Idealismo’ Scientifico di William Whewell, are, as their titles suggest, concerned primarily with Whewell’s departures from classical British empiricism. Particularly in his famous dispute with Mill, it has proved tempting to parody Whewell’s position in the debate by treating it as a straightforward encounter between an arch-empiricist and an (...) arch-rationalist. There is, however, a danger that an emphasis on the necessitarian and a priori elements in Whewell’s philosophy may well obscure the unmistakable empirical emphasis in Whewell’s theory of science. I think it is time to begin to redress the balance, by focusing attention on the significant ‘empiricist’ strains in Whewell’s philosophy of science. One of the most important of those strains is connected with the operation which Whewell calls ‘the consilience of inductions’. (shrink)

In a series of articles and books published in the 1970s, David Hull (1935–2010) and Michael Ruse (1940–) proposed interpretations of the relation between nineteenth-century British philosophy of science, on the one hand, and the views and methods of Charles Darwin, on the other, that were incompatible or at least in strong interpretive tension with one another. According to Hull, John Herschel’s and William Whewell’s philosophies of science were logically incompatible with Darwin’s revolutionary theory. According to Ruse, however, Darwin discovered (...) and developed his theory through direct adherence to those philosophies. Here, I reconstruct Hull’s and Ruse’s interpretations of the Herschel-Whewell-Darwin relationship and then, drawing on Hull’s and Ruse’s published record and archival correspondence in the years 1968–76—particularly regarding reduction, laws, and species—I offer an explanation for their differences, namely, their different orientations to logical empiricism. (shrink)

SUMMARYIn recent years, historians have come to question earlier Whig interpretations that there was little science or science teaching done at Cambridge University prior to the appointment of Cambridge University Parliamentary Commissions in the 1850's. However, there has been no comprehensive survey of scientific activity at Cambridge in the first half of the nineteenth century. This essay, based upon research which penetrates beneath pedagogical tracts and Whig criticisms (both nineteenth and twentieth century varieties) reveals that Cambridge science professors researched, lectured, (...) gave experimental demonstrations and provided other educational opportunities. Furthermore, it shows that serious attempts to provide research and teaching facilities met with some success and might have met with more if not for the intervention of specific historical incidents compounded by financial problems and the consequences of the upgrading of the core of the Cambridge curriculum. Before the sciences became alternative routes to a Bachelor of Arts Degree and before the appointment of the first University Parliamentary Commissions, Cambridge dons laid the foundations for science at Cambridge in the second half of the century. (shrink)

In this paper Whewell’s concept of necessity is scrutinized and its historical development is outlined (ca. 1833-1860). Particular attention will be paid to how Whewell interpreted the laws of the inductive sciences as being necessary since the laws of nature are concretizations of the Fundamental Ideas which can be partially described by Axioms.