Abstraction and Generalization in the Logic of Science: Cases from Nineteenth-Century Scientific Practice

2021 ◽  
pp. 000-000
Author(s):  
Claudia Cristalli ◽  
Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Logic Of Science

Faith and Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 179-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Mathieson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Conservative Christianity ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Teleological Argument ◽  
William Paley ◽  
Eternal Punishment ◽  
Evangelical Theology

This chapter examines Stokes as an outspoken scientist of faith. It uses Stokes to examine the intellectual threats to conservative Christianity in the second half of the nineteenth century, and highlights his leading role among Victorian Britain’s religious scientists, through bodies such as the Royal Society and the Victoria Institute. It also explains how Stokes’s upbringing and education formed the basis for his own evangelical theology, and highlights his two most significant contributions to that field. First, it explores Stokes’s opposition to the doctrine of eternal punishment, and his promotion of conditional immortality as an alternative. Second, it highlights how Stokes continued to advocate the natural theology and teleological argument of William Paley a century after they were first proposed, as a method of harmonizing faith and scientific practice.

IRELAND, COLONIAL SCIENCE, AND THE GEOGRAPHICAL CONSTRUCTION OF BRITISH RULE IN INDIA, c. 1820–1870

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 963-987 ◽  
Author(s):  
BARRY CROSBIE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Irish People ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Global Exchange ◽  
Geological Research ◽  
Colonial Science

ABSTRACTThis article examines the role that Ireland and Irish people played in the geographical construction of British colonial rule in India during the nineteenth century. It argues that as an important sub-imperial centre, Ireland not only supplied the empire with key personnel, but also functioned as an important reference point for scientific practice, new legislation, and systems of government. Occupying integral roles within the information systems of the colonial state, Irish people provided much of the intellectual capital around which British rule in India was constructed. These individuals were part of nineteenth-century Irish professional personnel networks that viewed the empire as a legitimate sphere for work and as an arena in which they could prosper. Through involvement and deployment of expertise in areas such as surveying and geological research in India, Irishmen and Irish institutions were able to act decisively in the development of colonial knowledge. The relationships mapped in this article centre the Irish within the imperial web of connections and global exchange of ideas, technologies, and practices during the long nineteenth century, thereby making a contribution towards uncovering Ireland's multi-directional involvement in the British empire and reassessing the challenges that this presents to existing British, Irish, and imperial historiography.

Agustín Aragón and Mexico's Religion of Humanity

1969 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 441-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
William D. Raat
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
The Political ◽  
French Society ◽  
Logic Of Science ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Religion Of Humanity ◽  
Political Turmoil

In 1817, Henri de Saint-Simon won the nineteen-year-old Auguste Comte over to his views concerning the lamentable condition of post-revolutionary French society and the necessity for a radical scheme of reform, and it was during the political turmoil of the second quarter of the nineteenth century that Comte, intending to reorder society through the application of scientific knowledge to social ills, presented his philosophy of positivism. Comte's project was nothing less than a blueprint for universal reform that would not only save France from ruin but would also, hopefully, rescue all of humanity. In its entirety the Comtean doctrine included a philosophy of history, a theory of knowledge and pedagogy, a method or logic of science, a positivist ethic (the so-called "subjective synthesis"), a socioeconomic plan, a theory of government, and a type of secular faith which he called the Religion of Humanity.

scholarly journals The French Roots of Duhem’s early Historiography and Epistemology

2017 ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Stefano Bordoni
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pierre Duhem ◽  
Theoretical Issues ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

Pierre Duhem can be looked upon as one of the heirs of a tradition of historical and philosophical researches that flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century. This tradition opposed the naïve historiography and epistemology of the positivist school. Beside the positivists of different leanings such as Littré, Laffitte, Wyrouboff, and Berthelot, we find Cournot, Naville, and Tannery, who developed sophisticated histories and philosophies of science focusing on the real scientific practice and its history. They unfolded elements of continuity and discontinuity in the history of science, and enlightened the complex relationship among experimental, mathematical, logical and philosophical components in scientific practice. In Pierre Duhem we find a systematic and vivid interpretation of these meta-theoretical issues, and a meaningful development of a cultural tradition that re-emerged in the second half of the twentieth century.

Alexander Catcott: Glory and Geology

1977 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Neve ◽  
Roy Porter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Field Observation ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
Regional Geology ◽  
Important Phenomenon ◽  
Rock Formations

Central to the development of geology has been the growth of systematic empirical observation as a programme of scientific practice. Fieldwork has focused on many objects—strata, fossils, and landforms—and has issued in a variety of products, such as maps, sections, and monographs on regional geology, particular rock formations and fossils. Early in the nineteenth century, above all, many influential geologists sought to define their science as one exclusively of field observation, description, and the accumulation of data. The rise of fieldwork, in Britain as elsewhere, is an important phenomenon in the making of geology. It must be explained.

scholarly journals Corresponding interests: artisans and gentlemen in nineteenth-century natural history

1994 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 383-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Secord
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Books ◽  
The Way

Early nineteenth-century natural history books reveal that British naturalists depended heavily on correspondence as a means for gathering information and specimens. Edward Newman commented in his History of British Ferns: ‘Were I to make out a list of all the correspondents who have assisted me it would be wearisome from its length.’ Works such as William Withering's Botanical Arrangement show that artisans numbered among his correspondents. However, the literary products of scientific practice reveal little of the workings or such correspondences and how or why they were sustained. An exchange or letters is maintained if the interests of both recipient and writer are satisfied. Withering's book tells us only that his interests were served by his correspondents; it allows us to say nothing with certainty about the interests of those who wrote to him. Published texts effectively hide the means by which the author determined the veracity of distant correspondents and also the way these informants demonstrated their credibility.

scholarly journals Illustrating natural history: images, periodicals, and the making of nineteenth-century scientific communities

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
GEOFFREY BELKNAP
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Imagined Communities ◽  
Scientific Communities ◽  
Public Meetings

AbstractThis paper examines how communities of naturalists in mid-nineteenth-century Britain were formed and solidified around the shared practices of public meetings, the publication and reading of periodicals, and the making and printing of images. By focusing on communities of naturalists and the sites of their communication, this article undermines the distinction between amateur and professional scientific practice. Building on the notion of imagined communities, this paper also shows that in some cases the editors and illustrators utilized imagery to construct a specifically British naturalist community. Following three ‘amateur’ natural-history periodicals (Science Gossip, Midland Naturalist and the Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club) the article demonstrates how the production and reproduction of natural history in the nineteenth century was contingent on community debate – and that this debate both was highly visual and moved across printed and geographical boundaries. This paper investigates images both for their purported success and for their ascribed value to natural history. Additionally, it considers the debates over their limitations and alleged failures of printing. Altogether, the article argues that investigating the communal practices of observation, writing, drawing and engraving allows for a better understanding of the shared practices of nineteenth-century natural history.

scholarly journals Eighteenth-century visions of the Stone Age

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 11-27
Author(s):  
Liisa Kunnas-Pusa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Initial Phase ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Stone Age ◽  
Human History ◽  
Academic World ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Set Up

Archaeological concepts of prehistory and the Stone Age are rooted in nineteenth-century scientific discoveries, which extended the human past much further back in time than was previously thought. Without this deep past, the disciplines of archaeology and history would not be what they are today. However, when the division of prehistory into the ages of stone, bronze, and iron was introduced in 1836, it was already an old idea. Stone Age artefacts and the initial phase of human history were discussed in the eighteenth-century academic world, even though the periodisation of history was constructed differently. In the philosophy of the Enlightenment several ideas surfaced which were essential to the formation of archaeology as a scientific practice, and which still affect the way the prehistoric past is imagined. This article examines the concept of a prehistoric, furthest past in Finnish scientific texts, within the framework of eighteenth-century Swedish traditions of science and historiography. How did the scholars in the Academy of Turku view Stone Age artefacts that had a multi-faceted nature in the antiquarian tradition? In what way did their visions of the earliest phase of the Nordic past set up later nationalistic narratives about prehistory?

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