Science (Philosophies of)
Philosophies of science
Mach, Duhem, Bachelard
Babette E.Babich
THE TRADITION OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
If the philosophy of science is not typically represented as a ‘continental’ discipline it is
nevertheless historically rooted in the tradition of continental thought. The different
approaches to the philosophy of science apparent in the writings of Ernst Mach, Pierre
Duhem and Gaston Bachelard suggest the range of these roots. But for a discussion of the
tradition of continental philosophy of science—as the term ‘continental’ characterizes a
contemporary style of philosophic thinking—it is important to emphasize that while
Mach, Duhem and Bachelard may be said to be historically continental, a properly
continental-style philosophy of science should not be ascribed to any one of them.
Contemporary philosophy of science is pursued in what is largely an analytic or Anglo-
American-style philosophic tradition. And Mach, Duhem and Bachelard made the
formative contributions for which they are known in the philosophy of science within this
same almost quintessentially analytic framework.1
Nevertheless, this very necessary historical precision is itself witness to a changing
circumstance in mainline philosophy of science. Although continental philosophy has
been marginalized in professional philosophy in general, and where this marginalization
has perhaps been greatest within the philosophy of science, the very centre would seem to
have shifted. In past years, traditional philosophers of science have begun to broaden
their analytic conception of the philosophy of science to include approaches compatible
with or even drawn from continental styles of philosophy. Such approaches reflect the
philosophical reflections on science expressed from the tradition of important individual
continental thinkers such as Edmund Husserl (Gethmann, Heelan, Orth, Rang, Seebohm,
etc.) and Martin Heidegger (Gadamer, Heelan, Kisiel, Kockelmans), Habermas and
Foucault (Radder, Rouse, Gutting), and even Friedrich Nietzsche (Babich, Maurer,
Spiekermann). In this context, the philosophical reflections on science to be found in
Mach, Duhem and Bachelard may be mined for what should prove to be a productive
historical foundation between these two traditions addressed to a common focus.
Exemplifying such a common focus, the philosophy of science is not inherently or
essentially analytic if it is also not obviously continental.
The question of stylistic conjunction between continental and analytic philosophic
perspectives is complicated and, before it can be addressed, one further preliminary
clarification is necessary. Because of the possibility of geographic confusion, it must be
emphasized that the rubric ‘continental’ in the context of the philosophy of science does
not pertain to the geographic locus of the European continent except historically and
circumstantially. Despite German and French scholars interested in specifically
continental approaches to the philosophy of science in contemporary European
philosophy, the character of the philosophy of science is decidedly analytic. It is telling
and to the point in this last connection that Wolfgang Stegmüller, familiar as he was with
traditional philosophy including phenomenological approaches, could find the appeal of
analytic philosophy for a formalist and foundationalist interest in scientific theories so
inspiring that he devoted his own life to its dissemination and through his influence
analytic styles of philosophic thought consequently assumed their current leading role in
German philosophy of science. In turn, this means that continental philosophy (and
philosophy of science) remains as professionally marginal on the ‘continent’ as in
English-speaking scholarly domains.
But if not defined as the dominant tradition in philosophy and if not a matter of
geographic reference, continental philosophy (especially with respect to philosophic
reflection on science) is also a multifarious tradition and not a single style or school. Just
as Rom Harré could speak of ‘philosophies’ of science,2 it is best to speak of ‘continental
philosophies’ and hence of ‘continental philosophies of science’. Not necessarily linked
by ‘family resemblances’—for example, Husserlian-influenced thinking bears almost no
resemblance to Habermasian or Foucauldian social, critical theory—what is called
‘continental philosophy’ comprises several conceptual traditions and reflects a manifold
of differing styles of philosophy with cross-disciplinary influences and applications. But
one general characteristic might be said to be a strong historical sensibility. This
sensibility distinguishes continental philosophic styles from analytic (progress-oriented
and often expressly ahistoricist and sometimes expressly anti-historical) styles of
philosophy. A critically reflective historical sensibility in addition to an explicit reference
to lived experience—the life-world of Husserlian and Diltheyan usage—indicates some
of the major advantages to be brought by continental styles of philosophy to the broader
and general philosophic project of reflection on science.
It is this historical dimension and reference to life (practice, experience, etc.) that
makes continental styles of philosophy so important for the philosophy of science today.
Since the radical critique of the received, analytic style of modern philosophy of science
through the writings of N.R.Hanson and the work of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend,
contemporary philosophy of science has been increasingly transformed by an intensified
and today decisive sensitivity to the importance of historical and sociological studies of
actual scientific practice. The turn to history so characteristic of Mach’s as of Duhem’s
philosophic writing on science, witnessed by their valuable contributions to the history of
science, and implicit in Bachelard’s reading of the culture of science, has come to be
recognized as an irreducible component of the philosophy of science. In the same way,
the resources of continental philosophy with a tradition of reflection on history seem
increasingly essential to the practice of the philosophy of science beyond stylistic
differences.
As fons et origo, the shared destiny and origin of continental philosophy and analytic
philosophy is evident in a recent trend reviewing the connection between Husserl and
Frege (Hill, Wiener, Cobb-Stevens, Dummett), suggesting that Husserlian-style
philosophies of science may go furthest towards bridging the stylistic gap between
analytic and continental philosophy. Likewise it is significant that the philosophy of
technology, related to the philosophy of science because of its importance for reflection
on experimental science, not only features continental practioners (Ellul, Ihde, Jonas,
Schirmacher, Winner, Zimmerman) but is in its rigorously philosophic aspect a direct
resultant of this same tradition (drawing as it does on the work of Heidegger but also
Ricoeur and Gadamer).
Although Mach’s (as indeed Duhem’s) positivist successors were ultimately to
disregard his concern with history in their focus on the formal analysis and logical
reconstruction which characterizes the hypothetico-deductive account of theory formation
and justification and which in its most developed form came to be known as the ‘received
view’, recent reviews of Mach seek to examine his philosophy of science in terms
germane to its own reflective scientific constellation and philosophical project
(Feyerabend, Haller) rather than merely in terms of its influence on the logical empiricist
tradition of the philosophy of science (beginning with Frank). Thus a reassessment of
Mach’s philosophy of science stresses his historical interests, while Feyerabend
emphasizes aspects in his work which anticipate the insights of Hanson and Kuhn (as
well as Michael Polanyi who is, according to Alasdair MacIntyre, significantly
underacknowledged in this connection)3 in Mach’s sensitivity to the element of finesse
(or in Polanyi’s language: ‘tacit knowledge’). Discussion of the role of tacit knowledge or
finesse represents the researcher’s ‘art’, an an which, if we follow Mach’s words, is
unteachable in the sense of being inherently unamenable to the programmatic Baconian
project and which project, conversely for its part, was held by Bacon to have its singular
advantage in being manageable by underlabourers—that is, by technicians literally, as
Bacon has it: without ‘wit’. For Mach, precisely such a programmatization
(automatization, industrialization) is not desirable even if it were possible. We may note
that the actuality of what Derek de Solla Price called ‘big science’ has long demonstrated
that such ‘programmatization’ is possible and Hugh Redner details the same in his study
of giant, industrial-sized science.4 Against the artless routinization of science, Mach held
that an unteachable ‘art’ must be indispensable for the practice of experimental science
because, in Mach’s conception of scientific inquiry, it is the sine qua non of invention
and discovery.
A turn to history and the role of the experimenter’s art is not the only parallel
resonance between continental philosophies of science and traditional analytic
approaches: there are others. Despite stylistic differences, analytic and continental styles
of philosophy share a common future as complementary approaches to the philosophy of
science where both disciplinary styles can enhance one another. But what is inevitably
more important than the prospects of such stylistic reconciliation on a scholarly level, it
now seems eminently clear that the philosophy of science cannot be conducted from an
analytic perspective uninformed by the hermeneutic turn or, as analysts prefer to speak of
it: the interpretive turn (Hiley et al). In concert with the phenomenological turn (to the
things themselves), the interpretive, hermeneutic turn represents the foundation of
continental thought. And it goes without saying, or calling it hermeneutics, that the
interpretive turn is a turn of thought in which, like the historical turn, the reflective
advantage of continental philosophy comes to the fore.
In both existing and possible expressions, continental philosophy of science includes
approaches drawn from the larger tradition of phenomenology (as found in the works
expressed by Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty) as well as hermeneutics
(beginning with some say Vico, but certainly with Schleiermacher and Dilthey, and also
Heidegger, Gadamer, Betti, Gramsci, Ricoeur). Continental philosophy also reflects the
influence of structuralism in linguistics, semiotics, and literary criticism and psychology,
as well as the Heidegger-inspired Daseinsanalyse and existential psychoanalysis (Piaget,
Binswanger, Boss, Fromm, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Lacan). Related philosophic styles
of deconstruction and recent postmodern conceptions of philosophy (Foucault, Derrida,
Lyotard, Baudrillard) have had a decisive influence on late twentieth-century philosophic
reflection on science in line with the hermeneutic perspective (Heelan, Kockelmans,
Kisiel, Hacking, Böhme, Gadamer, Bubner). With specific reference to the philosophy of
the social sciences, particularly representing the Frankfurt school, which often
incorporates analytic-style distinctions in its focus on language and discourse (Habermas,
Apel, Tugendhat), characteristically ‘continental’ influences are traced in a variety of
lineages to Hegel or Schleiermacher, Marx or Feuerbach (Althusser, Bhaskar, LeCourt)
and Kierkegaard or Dilthey, Heidegger, Weber, Simmel.
As representatives of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century empiricism and
positivism, the particular names Ernst Mach (1838–1916), Pierre Duhem (1861–1916)
and Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) have of course and as already noted much more than
a merely historical significance. In analytic philosophy of science, an ongoing tradition of
reinterpretations of their work continues to influence the current linguistic or theoretical
crisis in analytic philosophy and semiotics/semantics of scientific theory (Duhem not
only as represented by W.V.O.Quine but also Stanley Jaki) as well as, on the other hand,
the current emphasis on experiment representing the counter-absolutist turn to the history
(and historiography) and practice of science in the philosophy of science (specifically
Mach, as represented by Feyerabend and others, and Bachelard—and in routine
conjunction with analyses of Michel Foucault—for Bruno Latour, Ian Hacking, Mary
Tiles, Gary Gutting).
MACH AND THE POSITIVIST CONNECTION: FROM ELEMENTS TO PHENOMENOLOGY
Ernst Mach was born in 1838 at Turas, formerly in Moravia—a region to be found in
Bohemia, Silesia, and lower Austria which later was to become part of the modern
republic of Czechoslovakia and is now part of the Czech republic. He studied in Vienna,
teaching physics there in 1861, becoming professor at Graz in 1864, then at Prague in
1867, finally at Vienna in 1895. In 1901, upon his appointment to the upper house of the
Austrian Parliament, Mach gave up his Vienna chair in the history and theory of
inductive science. He spent the last three years of his life living with his son, Ludwig
Mach and died in 1916 at Haar, near Munich.
At the risk of inviting distracting historical confusion, the above listing of the details of
the historical name-changes concerning Mach’s original nationality and the proper name
or country of his birthplace—where names such as Moravia, Bohemia, Silesia, Lower
Austria or, indeed, Czechoslovakia do not currently denominate legitimate nations within
today’s Europe—dramatizes the fortunes of the Austro-Hungarian empire and eastern
Europe as well as the philosophy of science conceived within the broad European
tradition of natural philosophy. Although this is also given as Galileo’s achievement in
historical accounts of science, it is usually claimed that the tradition of natural philosophy
was transformed by Newton himself into modern physical science. But this is only to say
that the practice of science (natural science) came to be regarded as identical to the
practice of the more speculative and often explicitly metaphysical tradition known as
natural philosophy, and, conversely, that the practice of natural science was identified
with natural philosophy. By the turn of the century, the project of the philosophy of
nature was identified with the project of natural science. In Mach’s day and well before,
then, philosophy (including the philosophy of science or natural philosophy) was not
thought to be necessarily separate and distinct from (understood as a business of
reflection, interpretive or speculative, either subsequent to or independent of) the physical
or natural sciences in both theoretical and experimental manifestations as Duhem and
more recently Jardine and Crombie have shown. As Kurt Hübner has it, ‘theory of
science coming into prominence at the turn of the century was still closely tied to the
study of the history of science. Names like Mach, Poincaré, La Roy and especially
Duhem clearly bear witness to this. However this development ceased to follow the path
opened up for it by these men.’5 Here we may add that the divisions between philosophy
and science and between philosophy of science and other kinds of philosophy were not
always the same. Thus the debate between Hobbes (a speculative philosopher not merely
a theoretician) and Boyle (an experimentalist not merely a physical scientist) or Berkeley
and Newton were not regarded by either the participants or their contemporaries as taking
place across, let alone mixing, categories (of philosophical speculation or hypothesis and
scientific experiment and theory). For Mach and Duhem, the importance of philosophic
reflection was to be evaluated with respect to its contribution to the progress of science.
Thus retaining a defining reference to and even identification with natural science (as)
natural philosophy, philosophia naturalis acquired the methodological, historical and
epistemological profile of what would later become modern philosophy of science.
Around the turn of the century, as practised by Henri Poincaré and by Duhem, philosophy
of science bore the name critique des sciences and this same science-critical emphasis
(that is, philosophical critique expressed for the sake of scientific advance or progress) is
echoed in Mach’s empirio-criticism. Under the influence of Wittgenstein, Carnap and
Schlick, Hempel’s mature expression of the ‘received view’ of the philosophy of science
or the hypothetico-deductive expression of professional analytic-style philosophy of
science represents a decisive and increasingly bankrupt departure from this late
nineteenth-century tradition of critique des sciences with its particular and explicit
reference to science in practice.
Almost from its inception then, the analytic tradition of the philosophy of science
lacked any reference to the historical ‘fortunes’ or ‘scenes’ of actual scientific inquiry
(Jardine). If the ‘new science’ of the seventeenth century had involved a transformative
turn (whether revolutionary and world-shattering as Koyré maintains or evolutionary and
therefore less radical a transformation as Duhem and Crombie would argue) to
experiment, analytic philosophy of science has so far found itself less able to complete
the same turn. If the difference is between, as the Galileo experts have it, Platonic
(formal) speculation and Aristotelian mathematical (functional) science, philosophers of
science have tended towards Platonism. The turn away from history characteristic of
logical positivism was only an expression of this idealizing, analytic tendency.
Although Mach in particular was especially devoted to experiment and its context in
the history of science, many analytic authors nevertheless hold Mach to have been
responsible for the divorce of traditional philosophical (metaphysical) concerns from the
historical sensibility of the application of philosophic reflection to scientific practice.
This is a misprision of a devastating kind but it was a constitutive one: seminal for the
professional development of analytic-style philosophy of science.6 The separation
between philosophic expression and the lived world characteristic not only of logical
positivism but of the division between continental and analytic styles of philosophy is no
accident of location or tastes, as the talk of ‘styles’ may suggest. Rather, a necessary
consequence, it might be argued, of the self-definition of modern science (as distinct
from medieval and ancient science), the gap between theory and practice has shaped the
analytic tradition of the philosophy of science, while at the same time leaving the
philosophy of science as a theoretical discipline (qua, philosophy) addressed to a
particular theoretic practice (science) singularly unable to support the disjoint
consequences of a separation between theory and historical practice.
Despite Mach’s ‘physicalism’ or ‘phenomenalism’, the members of the Vienna circle,
in the telling words of one commentator, ‘wrote as though they believed science to be
essentially a linguistic phenomenon’.7 Hence this disposition to analyse ‘language’—be it
ordinary or logical language—together with a naive (non-historical, non-hermeneutic or
ideal) view of direct observation (i.e., observation sentences) effectively limited the
analytic concern of the philosophy of science to the analysis of theory, which last is the
project of the received view or hypothetico-deductive nomological ideal of science
(theory).
Such a focus on the elements of language—and not on the elements construed
according to Mach’s conception as physical-physiological-psychological—separates
language and world. One obvious advantage of such a focus is the advantage of certainty.
But this, its strength, to paraphrase Mach, and as is so often the case, is also its weakness.
Philipp Frank, one of the founding members of the Vienna circle, who expressed the
virtue of scientific analyticity, combining the essence of Mach’s insights with Duhem’s
Kantian conventions, explains, ‘the principles of pure science, of which the most
important is the law of causality, are certain because they are only disguised definitions.’8
If the essence of tautology or logical linguistic self-reference is not problematic when
what is analysed is language use (the game or its rules), this same tautological expression
becomes problematic when what is analysed must correspond to scientific facts or
empirical matters. As Harré has observed, ‘the philosophy of science must be related to
what scientists actually do, and how they actually think’.9 The imperative for such a
correlative project between the philosophy of science and scientific practice,
corresponding to the force of the socio-historical turn that comes after the linguistic turn,
represents a much-needed philosophic mandate for the philosophy of science.
The revolutionary shifts, reversals and paradigmatic conflicts within the analytic
tradition of the philosophy of science also correspond to the revolutionary shifts,
reversals and paradigmatic conflicts in physical science. These witness to the need to
develop a ‘new’ philosophy of science appropriate to the ‘new science’. But the history
of science tells us that novelty is itself relative, for the history of science is just such a
record of ‘new’ sciences. One of the first ‘new sciences’, that of Galileo and Newton (and
Hooke and Boyle), inaugurated a tradition that has since developed beyond its initial
programme. That tradition was the tradition of modernity (as the cult of the new), and if
one can speak of postmodern science today that is just because the programme of
modernity can no longer be viewed unproblematically. The fortunes of the ‘new’ science
and enlightenment thought mirror the problem of modernity and postmodernity, the
problem of the conflict between the grand narratives of science and society and the
distintegration of the promise of those same narratives throughout the modern era. This is
not unconnected to the new historical and social turns in philosophic thinking about the
sciences. These turns are not a sign of the times so much as they reflect a tension interior
to post-Galilean science. As Mary Tiles explains the dynamics of this internal tension in
post-Galilean (or ‘new’) science: ‘The new science was to be abstract and mathematical,
but also experimental; it was to yield both enlightenment and mastery of nature. It was to
strive for an objective, purely intellectual, value-free view of the world in order to
improve the lot of mankind by rendering technological innovations possible.’10 There is
an inherent conflict in this juxtaposition of material, practical progress and ideal or
objective knowledge. Today’s post-analytic or ‘new’ philosophy of science is manifestly
directed to an expression of the consequences of this conflict.
Here, with reference to Mach’s own particular historical context, it must be observed
that Mach’s declared opposition to philosophy—even where such an opposition may be
rendered on Pascal’s account as the best affective precondition for the best kind of
philosophy—is, if taken literally as applying to philosophy today, anachronistic. Mach
wished to avoid identification with the more metaphysical fashions often associated with
or characteristic of philosophy. But his reflection on science was nothing other than a
philosophy (albeit a philosophy of nature). This point highlights the value of a return to
history for the sake of the broadening illumination of context. And where the return to
history represents Mach’s own phenomenalist version of Husserl’s phenomenological
call to return ‘To the things themselves!’, it cannot truly be Mach who is to be blamed for
the logicization of the philosophy of science.
In all, the history of modern philosophy of science may be said to begin at the juncture
epitomized by Mach’s biography; but the rupture between theory and experiment that
followed from the increasing logicization of empiriocriticism or critical positivism related
to the rise of analytic-style philosophy of science has no precedent in Mach. This point is
essential if one is to understand the growing attention paid to Mach’s historical emphasis
along with his very prescient sense of the importance of the art of the researcher, of the
technical and social flair essential for the practice of the experimental life of the sciences.
Mach was greatly influenced by Berkeley and Fechner as well as by Kant and Hume.
His thinking on the logical ‘economy’ of thought was shared by Richard Avenarius and
his views on the nature of science engaged not only the scientists Helmholtz, Kirchhoff,
Boltzmann, Einstein and Schroedinger but also the American pragmatist philosophers
James and Pierce. It has been suggested that Mach’s concern was to understand
experience. But this concern with experience was not the same as the anglophone
preoccupation with sensation. It has already been noted that many authors also tend to
associate positivism’s characteristic distance or alienation from the world with Mach’s
scepticism. Given Mach’s sympathy with Berkeley and Hume, such an identification is
not surprising. Mach’s philosophy of science is commonly described as a
‘sensationalism’ or ‘phenomenalism’, expressed as an ‘idealism’, or by the catchwords
positivist, empiricist, and anti-metaphysical. Endowed with the radical scepticism of a
working scientist, as Mach was and because his sensationalism does not express an
ontology as such, it is best to understand his perspective as fundamentally or even
propaedeutically heuristic. Hence whatever metaphysical interests Mach may have had,
they are not propositional but rather reflect his project of articulating what Paul
Feyerabend describes as a non-foundational epistemology, and such an epistemology is
not only essentially scientific but also represents the philosophic spirit of epistemology as
such. In the same way, reference to a simplistic notion of parsimony, or Denkökonomie,
linking that principle to an ontology, is misguided. And without emphasizing the extreme
and today uncommon philosophical breadth of Mach’s interests, the claim made in his
Analysis of Sensations (1886) that ‘the world consists only of our sensations’ must be
confusing. Again, Mach does not reduce the world to sensation so much as he finds the
world given in and, as both Duhem and Bachelard would also stress, knowable only
through sensation: ‘Science does not create facts from facts, but simply orders known
facts’ (Popular Scientific Lectures). It is this connection that suggests a natural affinity
between Mach’s elemental phenomenalism and Husserlian phenomenology borne out by
Mach’s initial (and then specifically continental) reception (Brentano, Musil, Dingler)
and which has more than once been reviewed in its connections not only with Husserl but
even with Nietzsche (Sommer, Gebhard).
Mach deliberately sought to distance himself from the metaphysical pretensions of
traditional philosophy as well as those assumed (sometimes by scientists) in the name of
science. Like Duhem, Mach eschews the claims to certainty which have come to
characterize traditional scientific expression and serve as an identifying feature of today’s
analytic heirs to the logical positivist tradition of the philosophy of science. For Mach, as
for Duhem and Bachelard, enquiry, conceived via experiment, was the benchmark of the
scientific enterprise and a classical but not necessarily pyrrhonian scepticism was the best
guarantee of such an enquiring or open attitude. But this scepticism did not mean that
Mach gave up any claim to offer an account of the scientific knowing enterprise, with
respect to either practice or progress. Hence William James upon meeting Mach in 1882
could write not only that he had ‘read everything’ but that he ‘knew everything’. James
was not merely impressed with Mach, polymath extraordinaire, but by Mach’s
pragmaticist turn, which is one way to understand the very practical but not ontological
imperative guiding Mach’s endorsement of a logical economy. In this way, Mach’s
thinking illustrates the continental spirit of philosophy as questioning conceived in that
authentic sense charac-terizing what Martin Heidegger calls thinking and which
Nietzsche critically pronounces as the highest scientific virtue: intellectual probity or
Redlichkeit. In Mach’s Popular Scientific Lectures (1882), starting from the axiom that
‘Physics is experience, arranged in economical order’, such a questioning or open-ended
reflection means that a philosophic consideration of the goals of science following the
ordering value of economy as a thought principle is not proposed as or purported to yield
a finished system: ‘In the economical schematism of science lie both its strength and its
weakness. Facts are always represented at a sacrifice of completeness and never with a
greater precision than fits the needs of the moment.’ This very Aristotelian practicality,
which Gadamer has expressed in another context as the prudential core of hermeneutic
judgment, works on Mach’s account to exclude anything like ‘absolute forecasts’.
Considered on its own terms, Mach’s view is an elemental sensationalism, a factual,
specifically non-factitious or empiri[ocriti]cism. Mach’s thinking is radically sceptical.
And it is a kind of conventionalism, like that of Duhem and Poincaré, which influenced
the positivist protophysics of Dingler and the Erlangen school of Lorenzen’s
constructivism and its related development in evolutionary epistemology (Wuketis). But
so far from the flat positivism of a reduction of the world to fact, Mach’s ‘mental mastery
of facts’ offers the only understanding to be had from or about those same ‘facts’, where
the question of order or mastery in each case is hypothetical and ever subject to revision.
This perspective in its historicist extension explains Mach’s positivist appeal but an
attention to the elemental mentality of this ‘mastery of facts’ shows its fruitfulness for
current issues. This is evident in contemporary analytic philosophy of science after Kuhn
and Feyerabend.
Thus Mach proposes that if the future of science may not be forecast as such (on pain
of abandoning the open enterprise of science itself), its non-absoluteness may
nevertheless be surmised and he suggests, in a fashion that is as Nietzschean as it is
radically, elementally pluralistic, reflecting the spirit of what today has come to be called
the ‘new physics’—and what might likewise be named the ‘new biology’ and the ‘new
ecology’—that ‘the rigid walls which now divide man from the world will gradually
disappear; that human beings will not only confront each other, but also the entire organic
and so-called lifeless world, with less selfishness and with livelier sympathy’ (Popular
Scientific Lectures).11
It has been noted that Mach sought to articulate the project of science in terms of its
history and its practical or working functionality. But Mach’s particular historicism was
that of a philosopher—in spite of his protests against such an identification, where, as
was also noted in a preliminary way, these protests themselves must be interpreted with
reference to Mach’s own, historical, circumstantial context. As a philosopher, Mach’s
historical focus shows him as a positivist, in the original, pristine Comtean sense of the
word.12 Ian Hacking, in a timely effort to broaden the current flattened and negative
reading of ‘positivism’ with reference to August Comte’s original use of the term, defines
positivity as ‘ways to have a positive truth value, to be up for grabs as true or false’.13
Positivistic to this extent then, not only was Mach a philosopher, but he was a quasianalytic—
if also as we have seen a proto-phenomenological and even hermeneutic—kind
of philosopher. Moreover, Mach remained as consistently committed to expressing the
logical and philosophical foundations of science as any member of the Verein Ernst
Mach (which was in fact and significantly the original name for the Vienna circle) or the
modern heirs of the logical empiricist tradition in analytic philosophy of science.
Yet it must be emphasized that Mach was committed to the positivist ideal of science,
that is, in Hacking’s Comtean sense, to its ‘positivity’ but not its sheer logical expression.
Thus, and, as we shall see, like Duhem, Mach’s critical analytic turn far exceeds anything
like an exclusive commitment to the expression or clarification of scientific method or
theory as an end in itself where he criticizes the working functionality of the latter. More
critical than Kant, Mach believes that there is no possibility of a priori knowledge as
such: the basis of all knowledge is sense experience. Mach’s elementalism—as his
‘sensationalism’ is best described as outlined above and following the letter of Mach’s
own account—repudiates the ‘arbitrary, one-sided theory’ which is implied in talk of
‘sensations’ or ‘phenomena’. This is important, for what Mach repudiates as ‘arbitrary,
one-sided theory’ focusing upon ‘sensations’ or ‘facts’ represents the idea of the self or
subject apart from or as substrate underlying or undergoing such ‘sensations’. In this
way, Mach’s elementalism mirrors the critique of the subject familiar to continental
scholars and others acquainted with the works of Nietzsche and Freud, as well as
Heidegger, Lacan and Wittgenstein. As the central tenet of Mach’s psychology, the self is
a bundle of elements, an expression which must be understood not as Locke or Berkeley
would understand it but rather as signifying a fundamental continuity between the unit of
the perceiving self, or the physiological (elemental) subject, and the mental matter of
psychological (elemental) knowing and the physical (elemental) world. Physical,
physiological and psychological, Mach’s convertible elements comprise his
elementalism. This continuity suggests the intentional commonality requisite for
developing a phenomenological reading of Mach’s ‘sensationalism’ in the line of
Husserl. This same connection also suggests the relevance of Mach’s thought for
interpretations of quantum physics. Mach’s principle, so important on Einstein’s own
account for Einstein’s theory of relativity, implies the interdependence of all things—that
is: relativity (Mach’s own views concerning relativity are no matter in this context).
Hence there is no need for an absolute frame of reference (whether Newtonian space or
time) but only for a relative frame of reference. The law of inertia stated by Newton can
be understood either from the perspective of the body at rest or motion or from the related
perspective of external impingent forces.
Scientific laws for Mach are abstract, general, and in all we might say: abbreviated
descriptions of phenomena. The value of such laws, the ‘meaning’ of such laws for
Mach, as for Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, lies in their use: their value for prediction. This
too is not an ontological statement. Since Mach is not concerned with absolute truth as is
the more metaphysically inclined philosopher of science, he is free to share the physical
scientist’s focus on working utility. It was this dedication which led to Mach’s notorious
repudiation of unobservables (unusable—untestable) as explanatory components in the
atomic theory of physics and chemistry. Needless to say this prejudice, like his emphasis
upon the researcher’s ‘unteachable’ art (Knowledge and Error), has acquired the
triumphant patina of prescience which is the fruit of a convergence with contemporary
science, for today’s atomic theorists have since discarded the nineteenth-century
mechanistical vision of the atom.
PIERRE DUHEM AND THE DAMNATION OF RELIGION: THE LIMITS OF ANALYTIC REHABILITATION
Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem was born in Paris in 1861, a son of a businessman of
Flemish descent. Duhem’s mother could trace her origins to the south of France and the
village of Cabrespine, near Carcassonne, to the very house where Duhem himself was to
die at the age of 54. In 1882, Duhem entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure at the head of
the yearly competition. Proving his initial promise, Duhem completed a dissertation in
thermodynamic physics in only three years. But through no evident fault of the work
itself, Duhem’s dissertation was none the less rejected by a jury headed by Gabriel
Lippman. Two years after this first academic frustration, Duhem would successfully
submit another thesis in thermodynamics, to earn his doctorate (in mathematics).
Duhem’s rejected first thesis was not only subsequently published but published to a
broad and approbative scholarly reception. We shall have cause to note below that the
complicated circumstances of this rejection are important for understanding Duhem’s
intellectual and academic career. In 1887, Duhem became maître de conférences at Lille,
where he taught physical mechanics. Following a pedagogic dispute at Lille, Duhem
moved to Rennes in 1893, but soon afterwards took a chair at Bordeaux in 1895, which
he occupied until his death in 1916.
Duhem’s philosophic interest in scientific theories is seen in his still-influential 1906
book, La Théorie physique: son objet, sa structure (The Aim and Structure of Physical
Theory). Duhem, who shared Mach’s belief in the vital importance of history for
scientific progress, also made significant and substantial contributions to the history of
science with his Les Origines de la statique (1905–6) and his voluminous study of
medieval cosmology, Le Système du monde (1913–58), for the most part published
posthumously and which has recently appeared in highly truncated form in English
translation as the one-volume Medieval Cosmology.
If a discussion of place names can illuminate the changes necessary for an
understanding of the transformation of natural philosophy into the kind of philosophy of
science familiar today, the absent name of Paris is significant for understanding Duhem’s
intellectual position in that same tradition of the critique des sciences. For Duhem to all
appearances had, with the submission of his first dissertation, opposed a then leading
scholar, Marcellin Berthelot.14 Duhem’s biographers are largely agreed in reporting that
the reasons for the jury’s refusal of the thesis stem from the offence given to Berthelot in
Duhem’s theoretical repudiation of Berthelot’s thermodynamical views on minimal work.
And, indeed, more than a motive indicating a subjective and not an objective reason on
Berthelot’s part, we also have a tacit confession. In a 1936 biography written to secure
support for the posthumous project of editing and publishing the remaining volumes
(ultimately to number ten in all) of Duhem’s Système du Monde, Duhem’s daughter,
Hélène, reported Berthelot’s oft-cited professional edict which consigned (or better said,
effectively damned) the Parisian-born Duhem to the provinces: ‘This young man will
never teach in Paris.’15
But to leave the question of the merits of Duhem’s first dissertation to one side, and
likewise to reserve the related question of the tactical wisdom of offending the leading
scholar of one’s day (for, as a recent biographer of Duhem’s life and work,
R.N.D.Martin, has observed, both are more properly questions to be directed to Duhem’s
teachers at the Ecole Normale than against Duhem himself), I would note that Berthelot’s
personal antagonism towards Duhem nevertheless retains resonant dimensions which
exceed the indignant prejudice of the offended vanity of a leading Parisian scientist. For,
betraying something more than a personal idiosyncrasy, Berthelot’s views echo the
general tenor of Duhem’s philosophical reception, both then and now, where at least for
our times it may be assumed that questions of professional conviction and ego are not
similarly relevant. Nevertheless, questions of personality, understood in the broad,
psychological and, in Duhem’s particular case, confessional sense, play an essential role.
Hence it is not insignificant that we are informed again and again that Duhem was a
Catholic. Thus the newly published contribution to Duhem scholarship by Duhem’s
foremost English-language commentator, Stanley L.Jaki, bears the title Scientist and
Catholic. Jaki, himself a priest, certainly does not mean to underline this conjunction
unsympathetically. But Duhem’s religious faith is common stock in reviews of his
philosophical merit. And an evaluation of the objective significance of Duhem’s faith
with respect to Duhem’s historical circumstance is not easy. And Martin’s study of
Duhem’s intellectual biography, appropriately subtitled Philosophy and History in the
Work of a Believing Physicist, begins by adverting to the significance of the specific
fortunes of Duhem’s intellectual reception. Martin notes that Duhem’s work is from the
start clouded by a number of persistent critical reservations. Thus it is essential to
underline the fact that a French scholar of importance as, beyond all dispute, Duhem must
be accounted, should none the less be denied, as Duhem was denied, a Paris chair.
Whereas Bachelard, born in the provinces, and mentioned here for the sake of contrast,
would not be similarly denied this same token of recognition. The difficulty here in the
case of Duhem, arguably the superior philosopher, surely the superior scientist, is to trace
the proximate cause.
In the conflict with Berthelot, reservations concerning Duhem’s achievements
preceded Duhem’s scientific and academic career. Martin sums up the general scholarly
judgment with respect to Duhem’s historical stature with the resounding ambiguity of an
understated reservation as, in a word, ‘problematic’. For many, Martin writes, Duhem
was ‘a brilliant maverick who continually got things frustratingly wrong: producing
brilliant arguments against atomic explanations in physics and chemistry, a muddled
instrumentalism in the philosophy of science, and a voluminous collection of misreadings
of mediaeval Scholastics’ ([6.50], p. 194). In general, for Duhem’s biographical
commentators and interpreters, that is for Martin, for Jaki, Roberto Maiocchi, etc.,
Duhem’s problem was fundamentally and in its essence a religious one, and, like most
confessional affiliations, this was one that cut two ways. Not only was Duhem’s Catholic
faith an obstacle to the largely Protestant ideals of modern science but Catholics were
uneasy with his totally modern (and in the Catholic view ‘modernist’) opposition to neoscholasticism.
Duhem for his part was an iconoclast, and his position in the provinces
was not such as to inspire him to restraint (Duhem, let it be remembered, despite his lack
of a Paris chair, was a native Parisian).16 He was particularly impatient with the neo-
Thomism of the day, evident in the works of Jacques Maritain with his quasi-Aristotelian
classification of the sciences. In the long run, what this meant was that Duhem could be
dismissed as a Catholic apologist by non-Catholics while simultaneously being
condemned as ‘modernist’ by the French Catholic intellectual elite.17 And these
reservations made on two sides were not the result of unthinking prejudice on one side or
the other, but were in fact founded at least to some degree in both cases. For it is clear
that the realist metaphysics and authoritarianism of the aims of the neo-scholastic
movement in philosophy were undermined by the substance of Duhem’s views.
Conversely, Duhem’s non-Catholic readers could regard Duhem’s historical interest in
medieval science as representing little more than another version of neo-scholasticism.
The historical researches of Crombie and others suggest that the problem requires a
clearer understanding of the differences between historical eras rather than matters of
faith, but Martin’s observation that ‘Duhem seems to have fallen between every available
stool’ ([6.50], p. 211) would seem to be the least one could say not only of Duhem but of
the judgments made concerning him. What the new concern with history illustrates is the
value of Butterfield’s insight that a ‘Whig interpretation of history’ (or ‘presentism’ as it
is also called)—that is, an interpretation of other eras from the perspective of one’s own
era—illuminates only one’s own prejudices (and that only from the point of view of a
subsequent historiographer) without shedding light on the period in question. History
without hermeneutics is blind.
Against Koyré’s reading of the revolutionary transformation from the medieval to the
modern world-view, which corroborates the non-or anti-Catholic reading of Duhem’s
reactionary scholasticism, Jaki maintains that Duhem’s sympathetic account of the
scholastic opposition to Aristotelian philosophy of natural place suggests that this
medieval perspective fostered rather than hindered the modern scientific turn such as that
associated with, for example, Galileo’s speculations concerning the role of impetus.
Other scholars, such as William Wallace, have offered corroborating readings of the
‘Galileo affair’, showing the importance of taking Galileo’s terms not in a putatively
modern context (following the conviction of Galileo’s visionary genius) but in their more
patent and for the modern reader all the more tacit historical and that is medieval
context.18 Wallace’s discussion of Galileo’s use of the Latin term ex suppositions
illustrates this point.19 The problem is not only that readers from the perspective of
modern (analytic) philosophy of science tend to translate ex suppositione as ex hypothesi,
but that the perspective of the Catholic Church is automatically identified with that of an
anti-modern, progress-retarding influence. This, in the apposite context of the contest
between religion and science, shows the tenacity of the Whig interpretation of history.
For this reason, Butterfield writes, ‘It matters very much how we start upon our labours—
whether for example we take the Protestants of the sixteenth century as men who were
fighting to bring about our modern world, while the Catholics were struggling to keep the
medieval or whether we take the whole present as the child of the whole past and see
rather the modern world emerging from the clash of both Catholic and Protestant.’20 For
Butterfield the problem is the tendency to reduce the problem to one between Protestant
and Catholic, between enlightened Whig and darkage traditionalist. To understand
Duhem, one must go beyond confessional prejudice.
In fact, as Martin takes pains to demonstrate, Duhem must be characterized as a
reluctant convert to his ultimately continuous account of the transition from medieval
science to modern science. Duhem moved towards this view in spite of his own original
views as a scientist working at the peak of the modern self-understanding of the sciences,
that is, despite his typically scientific (high modern or scientistic) formation at the turn of
the last century. According to science’s own self-understanding then, and which is in part
still true for scientists today, the transition from the (in Koyré’s words ‘closed’) medieval
view of the world to the (‘open’) modern world-view was—like the birth of the fully
armoured Athena from the forehead of her father Zeus—a sudden, completely
discontinuous or punctual, radical leap from classical and hellenic to fully-fledged
modern science. This view eclipsing the scientific value of the Middle Ages was as
typical for the average scientist in Duhem’s time as it can still be said to be true of
scientists and of many philosophers today. Against the bias of this formation, it was less
Duhem’s religious faith, one could argue, than his rigorous education as a formal logician
that brought him, indeed compelled him, to re-examine the historical record. In Jaki’s
view, a view now with considerable historiographical support, in addition to Duhem’s
axiom-atician’s rigour, the record suggests that the medieval cosmological viewpoint
worked not to obstruct the path to modern science in effect, where even Galileo’s term
impeto may be traced to Jean Buridan in the fourteenth century, but rather to further its
advance. Duhem’s reading of medieval science as an essential bridge between classical
science and Galileo’s inauguration of Newton’s project of modern scientific thinking
reflects a revolution, but the revolution for Duhem takes place in his own thinking,
against his modern scientist’s ingrained thought-style but in accord with his trained
axiomatician’s loyalty to the importance of first principles and logical coherence.
Duhem’s argument stressed both subtlety and complexity, but it is clear that for him
the key question for any theory or hypothesis was its utility in ‘saving’ the phenomena.
On such accounting, of course, not only was Galileo a child of his times, indebted to the
scholasticism of Oresme and Buridan, but Galileo’s account was less successful than the
Ptolemaic alternative. From this point of view, Cardinal Bellarmine’s prudential caution
may be read less as an illustration of jesuitry than as a representative of that kind of
French common sense or Pascalian bons sens where the spirits of geometry and finesse
intersect and for which, as both Martin and, years earlier, Dorothy Eastwood have
argued, Duhem had a notable affinity. Yet beyond the still-unsettled questions of
Duhem’s personal reception, Duhem’s significance for analytic philosophy of science is
not in fact a subject of much debate owing to the prominence of the philosophers
routinely listed as having responded to Duhem’s influence, most notably Popper and
Quine.
Duhem’s argument against crucial experiments may also be seen to turn on his
understanding of theories as axiomatic systems and his appreciation of the nature of such
systems. For Duhem, physical experiments cannot refute isolated theories. Where
alternative theoretical views are to be tested, an experiment designed to enable the
experimenter to choose between them only confirms one hypothesis or another. But as an
experiment confirms or refutes the theory and not the theoretical system, the results are
inconclusive for not only may a subsequent experiment fail to confirm the theory, but a
related experiment may refute a related theory; the experimenter is free to make ad hoc
adjustments, and what has come to be called the ‘theory-ladenness’ of observations
means that such adjustments may well be already or subsequently ‘built into’ the
interpretation of the experimental results, without necessarily involving the awareness of
the experimenter. Apart from such phenomenological hermeneutic questions as contextdependence
and interpretation, the significance of the theory in any case is articulated
only within the theoretical complex of which it is a part. Just as there are no isolated
phenomena, there are no isolated theories but only theoretical systems. This
interdependence points to the reason for Duhem’s (as for Mach’s own) conviction
concerning the importance of history. Modification in the theory may preserve the system
and vice versa, and an understanding of the system requires an understanding of the
original meaning of its terms. For Duhem, experiment is crucial, but neither falsification
nor demonstration provides certain or sure tests of eternal, unchanging truth. On this
point, it is the history of science which justifies Duhem.
Apart from Duhem’s views on history and related to his views on theoretical
indecidability, Duhem held a form of instrumentalism that was shared not only by Mach
and Poincaré, but also by Kirchoff, Hertz, Bridgman, Eddington and the Copenhagen
school of quantum physics. For Duhem, two aspects of theory must be distinguished, the
explanatory and the representational. As far as Duhem was concerned, although scientists
and philosophers of science of a realist bent regarded theories as explanation, the value of
theory is ultimately its instrumental or conventional value. Instrumentalism is a view of
scientific theories founded, as Karl Popper says, by ‘Osiander, Cardinal Bellarmine and
Bishop Berkeley’.21 Linking Osiander to Cardinal Bellarmine, as most theoreticians stage
this drama, it is clear that the great antagonist to such instrumentalism for Popper and for
others is Galileo. And, as Ian Hacking puts it, ‘Galileo is everybody’s favourite hero—
not only Chomsky and Weinberg but also Husserl.’22 To say as has already been
suggested that Galileo was not as radical or as ahead of his times as had been thought is
to oppose the general conception of Galileo as a canonic scientific hero (or saint). This is
the associative point MacIntyre makes (arguing in a different direction) when he speaks
of Feyerabend’s ‘anarchism’ as Emersonian in spirit, advocating ‘not “Every man his
own Jesus” but “Every man his own Galileo”’.23 If Duhem is an instrumentalist, he also
stands opposed to Galileo. And he cannot do otherwise. Duhem, with his claim that ‘a
law of physics is properly speaking neither true nor false’ (The Aim and Structure of
Physical Theory), is consequently one of the principal antagonists not only of Popper’s
realist-falsificationist view of physical theories but of all realist views of science.
Duhem’s instrumentalism continues to be important for the present profile of the
philosophy of science in the English-speaking world. For Duhem, the same physical law
has a potentially different extension at different times owing to the historical
development of these laws and their embodiment in experimental praxis. The meaning of
a physical law is to be determined in the final analysis by the context of scientific practice
and the scheme of related laws involved in determining the meaning of that law. This
principle provides the basis for the underdeterminist perspective on the relationship
between experimental evidence and theory and the constellation of related theories.
Through the work of Quine and Davidson, this notion of underdeterminism led to the
current position on theoretical indecidability that has done so much to bring analytic
philosophy to a (theoretical) cul de sac if also, albeit indirectly, generating the current
emphasis on the importance of experiment in discussions within analytic philosophy of
science.
It is a testimony to the seminal character of the influence of both Duhem and Mach that
it is today thought necessary to return to their philosophic understanding of scientific
practice (as theory and experiment/praxis). This is not to say that they were in individual
agreement among themselves but rather that each had distinct insights which similarly
failed to be transmitted in subsequent debates. And the current urgency of an historical
turn in the philosophy of science, clear since the work of Hanson, Feyerabend and Kuhn,
is accordingly necessary largely if not only because of a correspondent refusal of history
in mainline or analytic philosophy of science.
GASTON BACHELARD: SCIENTISM WITH A HUMAN FACE
Gaston Bachelard was born at Bar-sur-Aube in 1884. Bachelard’s studies were
conducted, as he himself was given to muse, under the sign of delay and he worked as a
part-time mechanical technician for the French postal service until 1913 when he earned
his licence in mathematics and science, becoming a teacher at the Collège of BarsurAube.
Upon earning his doctorate in 1927, he assumed the chair of philosophy at
Dijon and was then called to the chair of the history and philosophy of science at the
Sorbonne in 1940, where he remained until his retirement in 1954. He died in Paris in
1962.
Bachelard’s philosophy of science is expressed as a ‘dialectical rationalism’ or
‘dialectical naturalism’. Just as Duhem’s anti-idealist conventionalism was read as
conducive to the aims of materialism, although instrumentalist and thus inherently antirealist,
so Marxist authors such as Louis Althusser and Roy Bhaskar have read
Bachelard’s naturalism as a kind of dialectical materialism to be employed against
ideological appropriations of science. Although the current interest in Bachelard’s
epistemology and consequently in his philosophy of science doubtless owes a good deal
to Althusser, and without denigrating the value of Althusser’s reading for Marxist or
materialist epistemology, the Marxist reception of Bachelard’s work and the word
‘dialectic’, if drawn exclusively from Althusser’s programme, can be misleading
(LeCourt). Still it should be emphasized that those working from Marxist perspectives
have been far more assiduous in examining Bachelard’s philosophy for its epistemic
component than other traditionally analytic philosophers of science (Bhaskar).
Bachelard’s emphasis is on a dialogical exchange, that is to say, a dialogue between
the knower and the known, a dialogue between poetic and scientific discourse. This is not
to be construed as inherently (or essentially related to) a dialogue between poetry proper
and science proper. Instead the capital dialogical exchange is that between the scientist
and the dreaming scientist himself:24 the scientist and himself poetizing, or projecting
(and thus ‘dreaming’ or effectively constituting or technically constructing) the world of
scientific nature. Thus Bachelard wrote on the psychoanalysis of the history of the
discovery of fire as a dialogue between psychoanalysis and that history to find its
psychoanalysis metaphorically in (and of) the history of sexual desire. The metonymic
association between the origin of fire (and electricity) and the fire (and electricity) of
sexual passion points to a dialogue between image (the discovery of fire) and the human
reflection or projection of that same discovery. Similarly, the philosophy of no, by which
expression Bachelard seeks to characterize the openness of the scientific attitude, is a
dialogical philosophy—or better a dialogical account—of scientific practice. To say that
the scientist constitutes the phenomena, the objects of science, is not to describe a
unilateral construction; rather the constitution is a formative, informative, reciprocal
creation, a making of the scientist himself as much as a making (a projection or
constitution) of the scientist’s world. This exchange with the world of scientific or
technical experience articulates the scientist’s characteristic capacity for an anticipatory
openness to scientific phenomena, an attitude ever open to possible revision upon
encountering a new phenomenon. Such a ‘no’ is then heuristic in function not destructive
or eliminative: it describes what for Bachelard will be the enabling condition for the
possibility of openness to (scientific) novelty. The scientist is thereby summoned to
further innovative and creative efforts, reconstituting a new framework embracing the
new experience.
Bachelard sought to go beyond phenomenology and regarded Husserl’s own
contributions as so many points of (dialectical) departure for Bachelard’s own avowedly
polemical reflections. Thus Bachelard could speak of the need for a ‘phenomenotechnology’
to reflect the engaged role of the human investigator and the world under
investigation. Hermeneutically and phenomenologically sensitive authors have read this
perspective as compatible with a hermeneutic phenomenology of (reading) scientific
instrumentation.25 But against such a tolerant syncretism of Bachelard’s poetizing science
and phenomenological hermeneutics of scientific culture, Bachelard’s inherently
antagonistic emphasis is more than clear in its original context. In the interest of and
following upon the inspiration of science, Bachelard aims to correct phenomenology.
Owing to the scientific phenomenology implicit in the doing of science, as Bachelard’s
philosophy of ‘no’, ‘observation is always polemical; it either confirms or denies a prior
thesis, a preexisting model, an observational protocol’. For Bachelard, philosophic
reflection on science must be prepared to be instructed by science in practice. ‘A truly
scientific phenomenology is therefore essentially a phenomeno-technology’ (The New
Scientific Spirit [6.54]). The result of this perspective is not merely the banal pragmatism
one might expect. Because Bachelard expects that the prime experience of science is to
be a mathematical one, and that, as ‘the mathematical tool affects the craftsman who uses
it’, it is not only safe to say that ‘Homo mathematicus is taking the place of homo faber’,
but that ultimately ‘it is mathematics that opens new avenues to experience’. Close as this
point of view is to Husserl, the gap remains and is widened by Husserl’s sense of crisis,
as a separation even more exacerbated by Heidegger’s hermeneutic critique of
technology along with the knowledge ideal of mathesis, or axiomatic certainty.
More negatively, resolutely committed as Bachelard was to the scientific and
Enlightenment ideal disposition of a constitutional happiness or cheerfulness, Bachelard
found the existentialist world-view particularly pernicious for it expressed what in his
view was a false opposition between enquiring subject (poetizing poet or scientist—for
they are or at least inherently can be considered the same) and world object (as created or
as world to be known). Bachelard refused the distinction between the living subject and a
dead or alien or meaningless world. The poetic world of human meaning was continuous
with the scientific world, which for Bachelard bore the manifest imprint of the human
projective imagination. Bachelard’s positivism accordingly preserves the casual
colloquial meaning of the word ‘positive’ as an optimistic outlook, or, in Bachelard’s
words, a ‘happy’ perspective. This affirmative and essentially scientistic humanism is
expressed where Bachelard writes ‘Science calls a world into being, not through some
magic force, immanent in reality, but through a rational force immanent in the mind….
Scientific work makes rational entities real, in the full sense of the word’ (New Scientific
Spirit [6.54]).
Bachelard’s work is extensively cited and has been the subject of numerous
commentaries, less in the context of the philosophy of science than in principally literary
and philosophical discussions of Bachelard’s poetics. Beyond anglophone continental
philosophic interests, Bachelard’s eclectic style of reading between literature and science
has found significant hearings in France and Germany in part through the efforts of a
tradition of literary theorists (as Barthes recounts). In (particularly French) history and
philosophy of science, this reception is due to the influence of Bachelard’s student,
Georges Canguilhem, the historian of physiological science, and R.Cavailles. In this
company, Michel Foucault may also be regarded as within Bachelard’s intellectual
sphere. But if Foucault’s value may be traced to—better and more significantly, if here it
can be argued that Foucault’s value for science can only be understood in terms of—
Bachelard’s influence (cf. Tiles who prefaces her own study [6.83] by saying that her
representation of Bachelard ‘is a rational construct’,26 or Gutting who reads Bachelard
and Canguilhem as background to Foucault, or Bhaskar who also prefers not to treat of
Bachelard on his own, or on his own terms, but sets and thus inevitably defines Bachelard
in opposition to Feyerabend), the question of the nature of the enduring significance of
Bachelard’s philosophy for the philosophy of science is more elusive. This difficulty is
not a matter of the conflict between religion and modern scientific sensibility—as it was
in Duhem’s case—but is doubtless due to Bachelard’s style. This is a style that is less
esoteric than simply dated and rather specific to French literary culture, at least according
to Jonathan Culler’s plausible and sympathetic account. Culler implies that the lack of
conceptual resonance among philosophers of science or philosophers proper in response
to Bachelard’s works (a limitation which is also shared by non-francophone literary
theorists) is due to Bachelard’s nineteenth-century style of rhetorical and imaginative
reference. The style in question is one of diffuse allusion and allegory, like that of
Jacques Lacan. In Culler’s view, Bachelard’s style is simply out of synch with current
modes of expression and particularly unsuited for today’s impatient styles of reading.27
To the late twentieth-century reader’s impatience may be added a fatal incapacity, that is
an inability to appreciate the sense, to infer and so to understand the full value of
Bachelard’s allusions. An allusive, allegorical or metaphorical—in Bachelard’s words
poetic—style presumes and is necessarily dependent upon the reader’s aptness for and
familiarity with the conventions used.
The capacity to note such allusive resonances in Bachelard’s work is essential both for
readers of Bachelard’s philosophy of science and for readers of his literary criticism.
Accordingly, the literary theorist Ralph Smith notes that it is Bachelard’s ‘philosophy of
science [which] must be understood in order to truly appreciate the full significance of his
essays on the imagination and to assess properly his contribution to literary criticism’.28
Where, for Bachelard, ‘Science in fact creates philosophy’ (The New Scientific Spirit
[6.54]), any clear distinction between Bachelard’s value for literary criticism and science
must perforce be difficult to make. Still the lion’s share of this attribution of value is
represented by studies in literary criticism. Apart from Gutting’s background reference to
Bachelard’s work in line with the philosophy of science, and Tiles’s related discussions,
Bachelard is better known for his literary contributions, in so far as Bachelard’s emphasis
on the imaginary continues to appeal to a distinctively French fascination with fantasy
and the domains of reverie and poetic invention.
Mary McAllester Jones’s recent study [6.76] employs the term ‘subversive’ to
emphasize Bachelard’s predilection for the literary and for the imagination not on the
terms of humanism but rather as ‘unhinging’ humanism.29 This inverse, ‘subverting’
emphasis corresponds to the fashionable celebration of the postmodern but also testifies
to the need to come to terms with scientism’s recondite and irrecusable humanism. Citing
Bachelard’s claim that ‘Man’s being is an unfixed being. All expression unfixes
him’ (Bachelard in Jones [6.76], 193), Jones reads this ‘unfixing’ in her account of
Bachelard’s focus on the salutary spiritual value of challenge, dynamic flexibility and
innovation. Thus, in Jones’s expression of such an unhinged humanism, the movement or
fluidity of articulation is paramount: ‘Man is unfixed by language, not decentered’ (Jones
[6.76], 193).
I think it helpful to add that this openness, as a very literal flexibility, is akin to Paul
Valéry’s anti-Platonic celebration of the divinity that is not given negative or oblique
testament, that is, not at all missed or failing, but which speaks precisely in our muteness
in the presence of beauty.30 Such an awe or expression of silence in the face of the
beautiful rather than revealing an incapacity (such silence betrayed in the human inability
to hold to a steady glance in the face of beauty proves the body’s counter-divinity as
Plato maintains) is the caesura, the glancing gaping that affirms and confirms, sees, sings
and consecrates what is seen. In Bachelard’s words with reference to Valéry, ‘the
temporal structure found in ambiguity can help us to intellectualize rhythms produced by
sound…. We have come to realize that it is the idea that sings its song, that the complex
interplay of ideas has its own particular tonality, a tonality that can call forth deep within
us all a faint, soft murmuring’ (La Dialectique de la durée, cited in Jones [6.76], p. 73).
Silence thus testifies to the moving power or dynamis so important for Bachelard, who
was of course a reader of Valéry’s poetry and theory as well as a high-school teacher of
chemistry and university professor of epistemology. For Bachelard’s enduring aim was to
show that the work of the scientist was not only comparable to that of the poet, but was in
its own and full sense a poetics as well. And if, as noted, ‘science creates philosophy’, for
Bachelard it will also be science that, most properly said and equal to any poetic
discipline, creates poetry.
In the creative processes of poet and scientist, the play of thought echoes or responds
to what is in each case. This is what Bachelard means by writing, ‘Science calls a world
into being, not through some magic force, immanent in reality, but through a rational
force immanent in the mind.’ And it is in this creative, reflective way that Bachelard
claims that ‘Science in fact creates philosophy’. But that is to say that philosophy is
science reflecting on itself. The scientist is creator (poet) and philosopher, a modern
Prometheus calling ‘a world into being’. Here, the different senses evoked by the idea of
a ‘modern Prometheus’ in an English literary context (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and
a continental context (romanticized Titanism) are significant and testify to the difficulties
inherent in assimilating such an elusive and allusive author as Bachelard.
A contemporary physicist and philosopher of science, and one who may be counted
within the continental tradition, Bernard d’Espagnat, takes Bachelard’s important
references to Valéry a step further. For d’Espagnat, Valéry’s notion of spiritual value
expresses a mysticism more veiled than obvious in Valéry’s contrast between spiritual
and material(ist) domains. D’Espagnat suggests that the nuance to be grasped here is that
between a spiritual life without God (atheist) and spiritual life of a human (here, to be fair
to d’Espagnat, perhaps not necessarily a humanist) kind. The difference is again not
necessarily disjoint.
Yet the association with mysticism should perhaps only be emphasized in a limited
way. Furthermore, for the sake of rigour, Bachelard’s version of humanist scientism can
be named a subversion of scientism only on the most fancifully esoteric level and that
level is ambivalently problematic because of its insistent humanism. Bachelard’s project
must be conceived as a subversive humanism far more than a postmodernstyle subversion
of humanism as Jones maintains. Such a subversive humanism must, it would seem, be
rethought if it may not in the end be said to yield the absence of the subject. Which is of
course only to say that a subversive humanism remains a humanism. This subtle
humanism is such as d’Espagnat, for example, finds in Valéry. It is elusive because it
entails the conjunction of mysticism and what d’Espagnat calls Valéry’s ‘positivism of
principle’.31 As the proponent of a mysticism which is simultaneously, coextensively in
the human, the ambiguity of Valéry’s position is rightfully his as poet. Bachelard’s
poetics of science offers an illumination of why a contemporary scientist such as
d’Espagnat could turn to Valéry, a poet, as guide for ‘thinking’ science. Bachelard’s
philosophy of science represents (a position on) science as the high point of human
culture (as its most profitable-productive and progressive expression). But this scienceapprobative
perspective offers a valorization of science echoing not only Bachelard’s
well-rounded conservative cultural views but in uncanny resonance with the spirit of the
‘two cultures’ debate (and their interplay) popularized for the anglophone and traditional
reader in the philosophy of science by C.P.Snow’s essay The Two Cultures.
In Bachelard’s as well as Snow’s approach to the human achievement of science,
science remains an ideal to be valued (and, post-Foucault, we can observe that this value
is also the power of science, a power Nietzsche and Lacan would tell us which
contributes to the Enlightenment role or reign of terror). Where Snow glamorizes science,
Bachelard renders science a kind of poetizing and its products, its ‘phenomenotechnologies’,
a kind of poetry. In effect, science becomes myth. But this does not resolve
the opposition between logos and mythos, an opposition which has been traditional since
the beginnings of Socratic philosophy. Since a glamorization of science is a part of our
contemporary high-industrialist culture, Bachelard’s mythification of science, as a
poetizing venture, far from being a revolutionary coding (much less a double or
subversive coding) only underlines the ruling mystique of science. In this supplanting of
mythos by logos, mythos is not eliminated but absorbed by or subsumed under logos.
Mythos becomes (is and as so named always was) a function of logos. With a cultural
presumption exceeding Mach or Duhem, Bachelard asserts the very poetic function of
science. On Bachelard’s enthusiastic account, science as scientistically—which is also to
say (for such is the force of the mythic-logical conversion) science as poetically—
conceived truly is poetry at its best.
Bachelard’s express identification of the project of scientific practice and method, in
theory and experiment, where the scientist is taken to constitute the manifest entities (and
not merely the image) of science (what Bachelard calls poetizing) inspired the structure
of the sociological turn so decisive for the development of the new philosophy of science
beyond the received hypothetico-deductive or reconstructivist view (Latour, Bloor,
Woolgar). Literally constructed, the poetic project of the world of science is a suitable
object for a sociology of knowledge and scientific practice or, in Bachelard’s esoteric
coinage, a psychoanalysis of science.
THE HISTORY OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
From the perspective of Anglo-American analytic-style philosophy, continental
philosophy may be identified as the tradition of philosophy committed to thinking within
the philosophic tradition, that is, committed to explicitly reconstituting the enduring value
of the history of philosophy. For its part, analytic philosophy is not concerned with the
history of philosophy although to be sure it is rooted in it. Nor is analytic philosophy, as
defined by Müller and Halder, concerned with the traditional objects of philosophic
inquiry such as things or relations or events, but rather with ‘expressions, concepts,
axioms, principles’.32 On the basis of such a distinction between the objects of
continental and analytic philosophic concern, Husserl’s otherwise putatively realist ‘To
the things themselves!’ articulates an interest that is not merely stylistically but
constitutively antithetical to analytic philosophy.
Patrick A.Heelan characterizes continental philosophy according to two interests: ‘(1)
its preoccupation with the problem of the ‘constitution’ of knowledge, and (2) the effect
of the historical and cultural world context of science on the ‘social constitution’ of
scientific knowledge’.33 Although the word ‘constitution’ occurs twice in this definition,
rather than focusing on the phenomenological account of such constitution, recent efforts
to articulate continental philosophies of scientific theory and practice emphasize the
interpretive turn to hermeneutics (Hiley, Bohman et al.). The hermeneutic turn is the
interpretive turn taken by many analytic philosophers after Rorty, and in so far as this
interpretive turn is necessarily an historical turn it is also, as mentioned above, one that is
familiar to analytic philosophers of science after Kuhn. The interpretive and historic turn,
which may be designated the hermeneutic turn, thus represents the most salient line of
intersection between continental and analytic-style philosophy. But preliminary to any
rigorous and significant expression of this intersection, as Rüdiger Bubner has
demonstrated in a broader reflection on hermeneutics and critical theory, it is essential for
the hermeneutic turn to be properly conceived in its technical and (that means) historical
context.34 This background critical context (and constellation of related interests) does
not yet characterize the accepted path of received philosophy of science. Bubner’s
precision is of capital importance for the future of hermeneutic approaches to the
philosophy of science. In recent historical studies of science (Hacking, Jardine, Crombie),
a noteworthy attention is paid to the concept of the broadly hermeneutic rather than the
specifically phenomenological philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger. Authors such as
Gadamer and even Nietzsche may be invoked and references made to Ricoeur, but I think
it important to consider the consequences entailed by Bubner’s reservation that a genuine
conversance with critical hermeneutics (in its theoretical and historical context) is often
lacking.
What is more crucial than even this lack of interpretive and historical competency is
the question of the advantage for the philosophy of science to be gained by taking the
‘continental’ turn, as it were, be that turn construed more narrowly as a historical turn or
more radically as a hermeneutic turn. Would such a turn advance the fortunes of the
currently becalmed (post-Kuhnian, post-sociology of science and knowledge) philosophy
of science? Long ago, Immanuel Kant observed that philosophy itself seemed almost not
to progress at all if compared to the natural, formalizable or mathematical sciences. For
Kant, in the first Critique and the Prolegomena, to express the difference between
philosophy and science, where science shows clear signs of cumulative and accelerating
development, philosophy, in contrast, appears dissolutely aporetic: without issue or
advance, and without consensus, lacking even a unified perspective or standard for what
would count as such advance. To date, analytic-style philosophy seeks to be true to the
scientific standard for philosophic progress as implied by Kant’s criticism, and seeks the
kind of absolutist or cumulative understanding, including formal precision and consensus,
which constitutes or at least approximates the professional mien of a scientific endeavour.
If the ideal of science remains the ideal of our modern era, and where science, echoing
Kant’s reference, is offered as the standard for philosophy itself, it seems patently
obvious that only a scientific (here, analytic) project of understanding the project of
science could command our interest, and analytic philosophy, given its rightful or proper
distinction, should also exclude other styles as irrelevant. Thus, as we have seen, Mach, a
scientist who was hence already affiliated with the (as he thought) superior thought-style,
eschewed the title of philosopher. If science shows concrete or factual progress where
philosophy manifests only moribund confusion or intestine bickering, science by contrast
would appear to have the most progressive part.
But the history of science shows that even in science the idea of progress is a
conceptual chestnut. As Kuhn has it, one era’s idea of progress is the ‘paradigmatic’ error
to be overthrown by the ‘revolutions’ of another generation. Even with a cumulative, pre-
Kuhnian scheme of simple progress, the philosophy of science, failing to approximate
that ideal, is more ‘philosophical’ (indeed to the extent of following Kant’s aporetic
account) than Mach’s ideal science. The philosophy of science, even analytically
construed, even modelled as it is on science, is still not a science as such. Nor is it a
metascience: if the philosophy of science is to be a science of science, complete with
concrete progress and visible results, it has not been very successful. Offering an array
(with no end in sight) of logical accounts, analytic philosophy of science may explain and
offer an understanding of the workings of science as it conceives them. It is at this formal
juncture that an analogy with the practice of science must end. For where science has to
do with actual events, whether theoretically construed or experimentally constituted,
where science is predictive, and thus amenable to verification or refutation, where related
theories and experimental tests may be expected to proliferate, the philosophy of science,
in its project of explaining science, does not similarly test or check its explanations
against the substance or ‘fact’ of actual science. Thus the shock of the historical,
interpretive or hermeneutic, and sociological turns in the philosophy of science. Far from
a critique of science as a fact, the philosophy of science begins with science as it finds it:
as a fact, a given, and a given to be accepted on the scientist’s own terms. Neither Mach
nor Duhem would champion this perspective, precisely because of their commitment to
the project of science. And Bachelard was too much a scientist himself despite his
celebration of science to petrify it by treating it as an accomplished fact. Thus if the least
demanding definition of the business of science as an explanation of what the world is, of
the world as it is (truly, or really, or practically-pragmatically), is to ‘save the
phenomena’ on some level, either directly (observationally) or theoretically, the business
of the philosophy of science (qua, pretended science of science) will need to do the same
for science. But that means that the philosophy of science cannot, despite its scientistic
ambitions, become a science because such an account belongs within the perspective of
philosophy.
CONTINENTAL CURRENTS IN ANALYTIC-STYLE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
The concern of analytic philosophy is, as its name betrays, a concern with the logical
analysis of language. Indeed, for the sake of this distinction, it should be said that analytic
philosophy is committed to the dissolution (that is, literally, the analysis) of philosophic
problems through their clarification. Once the traditional questions concerning things in
the world, cause and effect or freedom are analysed in terms of their meaning and
significance one finds that one has to do with a logical account or tractatus concerning
the world (i.e., statements, claims and assertions).
The analytic tradition of the philosophy of science is marked by its attention to
questions relating to the structure of scientific explanation and theory-making. If science
is characterized by reciprocal theoretical and experimental activity, the philosophy of
science in its analytic mode has shed more light on theory than on experiment.
Conversely its disposition vis-à-vis experimental procedure is such that the very mention
of historical studies whether by historians of science (Kuhn, Crombie) or by sociologists
of science (Barnes, Shapin, Bloor, Latour, Woolgar, Knorr-Cetina) has had a disruptive
effect on the analytic programme. For the analyst, historical studies are often
characterized by attempts at normative historical reconstruction. Feyerabend’s work
offers an example of such reconstruction, where efforts to restore the sense and
significance of Mach’s contribution to the foundations of the philosophy of science
should be seen as a logical fulfilment of Mach’s appreciation of science as historically
and normatively progressive.
Note that this criticism of analytic-style philosophy of science is not a complaint raised
against analytic style philosophy of science from the side of continental philosophy.
These criticisms have been offered in tandem with the development of the philosophy of
science itself from the start, beginning with Mach and Duhem and offered as well in
various styles of historical reflection by philosophers and historians of science across
cultural boundaries, from Bachelard and Canguilhem to Hanson, Kuhn and Feyerabend.
None of these, not excepting Bachelard and Canguilhem (or French philosophy of
science today which remains as addicted to analytic as to continental approaches), may be
named a typical continental philosopher.
Mach, Duhem and Bachelard along with a number of other scholars have argued that
science itself is more critical, indeed more inherently ‘hermeneutic’, than philosophy. But
this point too is problematic, and not only because of its counter-intuitive content—
whereby science ends up with the virtue of being more hermeneutic than hermeneutics
itself. It is overhasty to conclude as Mach for one would argue, with Duhem and
Bachelard echoing him here, that scientists are the best judges of their own practice or
that science provides its own best philosophy.
Feyerabend has argued eloquently against this view in Against Method and his recent
books. But we should not need Feyerabend’s warnings that if science is not inherently a
socially responsible enterprise, science is nevertheless neither the Moloch nor the
redeemer of culture and it is as a practical matter of funding in fact socially responsive.35
We do need to add, that for Feyerabend’s programme of taking responsibility for getting
‘science’ to respond to social interests and needs, that if one is not to sink into the
platitudes of civic virtue, now more than Nietzsche could have imagined, we desperately
need a critique of critique, a critique of reason, of truth, of morality.
If the analytic philosophic perspective represents the notion that (natural and objective)
science is ‘mankind’s most successful truth enterprise’, as Heelan puts it, the continental
approach rejects the Whiggish implications of this ideal. However, this is a subtle point
for it must again be emphasized that today there is no approach to the philosophy of
science, analytic or otherwise, which would advocate an unreconstructedly Whiggish
ideal. Yet if the perspective of a continental approach to the philosophy of science is
inherently problematic owing to a perception of its views as ‘anti-science’, read off from
its explicit rejection of scientific knowledge as a ‘privileged kind’, the pluralism of
continental philosophy recommends a reconsideration. Such a review of continental
prospects for the philosophy of science is under way.
This phenomenological tradition begins with Husserl’s project of grounding
mathematics and physics begun in his work on arithmetic and continued in his Logical
Investigations and Ideas. Related to the Husserlian tradition in turn is Merleau-Ponty’s
The Primacy of Perception. Husserl’s interests grew out of the same tradition as and to
that extent matched analytic philosophy (Cobb-Stevens). Considering the common
origins of analytic and continental philosophy as a response (variously expressed in
Husserl and Frege) to the psychologism of Meinong and Brentano, one might propose, as
Michael Dummett has done, that a basic standard for bridging the continental-analytic
divide should be a scholarly conversance with both Husserl and Frege. In this way, Hugo
Dingler, a positivist and in that measure an analytic philosophic thinker, may also be
productively counted as one of Husserl’s students, indeed as a student who memorialized
the value of his teacher’s influence (Gethmann, Dingler). Recent reviews of the history of
the Vienna circle point to a revaluation of the historical relationship between
phenomenology and logical positivism. In line with this analytic/continental connection,
Ströker, Orth, Gethmann and Haller may be read as offering comprehensive discussions
of the phenomenological tradition beginning with Husserl, while Gethmann in particular
stresses the development of that tradition in Lorenzen and the Erlanger school and its
further development and the continuation of constructivist themes in evolutionary
epistemology (Wuketis, Löw, Maturana). According to Gethmann, beyond Husserl’s
transcendent phenomenology, Heidegger’s specific brand of hermeneutic phenomenology
may be counted as a indirect influence on the development of the Erlanger school. If
Foucault is included, this line of association running from Husserl to Heidegger and
beyond is more obviously seen to resonate with the Edinburgh school of strong sociology
of science (Rouse, Latour).
Joseph Kockelmans defends as proto-analytic the realist perspective of hermeneutic
continental approaches to the philosophy of science. For Kockelmans, a hermeneutic
philosophy of science requires a ‘new conception’ of truth understood in Heideggerian
terms as alētheic (truth as unconcealment), horizonal or, in Nietzsche’s terms,
perspectival truth (Kockelmans, Heidegger, Gadamer, Babich). But where Kockelmans’s
concern is meaning, his reading of truth and science is closer to a Fregean conception of
Sinn (sense meaning) and to the traditional Diltheyan Lebenswelt (life-world), articulated
in terms of a Gadamerian hermeneutics than to the later Heidegger’s conception of truth
and ambiguity.
Patrick Heelan’s interest remains true to the formal constitutive (eidetic,
transcendental, and genetic) phenomenology that is Husserl’s project to found philosophy
as a rigorous science and not just with respect to the so-called ‘crisis’ of his later work.
Heelan’s hermeneutic phenomenology expresses a realism which he calls a horizonal
realism, articulating the basis for a phenomenology of experiment to be integrated with
the theoretical expression of science. Heelan’s phenomenology holds with Husserl’s
eidetic project the possibility of approximating the essence of a scientific object through
successive profiles. The hermeneutic dimension reflects the necessity for considering the
historical, social and disciplinary circumstance of the researcher. Theoretical descriptions
denominate the experimental profiles that would be perceived under standard laboratory
conditions and, with a hermeneutic of experimental work, become truly descriptive of
what is eidetically perceived in the laboratory. Heelan’s perspective accords with strong
or robust realist readings of experimental science, but his is more promising than most for
with a hermeneutic phenomenological expression the realist perspective becomes a
matter of perception not faith.
In current English-language publications, the foremost representatives of so-called
‘continental’ approaches to the philosophy of science in addition to Heelan and
Kockelmans include Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Seebohm. Older continental scholars
seem rather more concerned with the special problems of phenomenology (intuition and
formal logic, the meaning of transcendence, etc.) rather than with questions specific to
the philosophy of science, while younger scholars read the value of Husserl’s and
Heidegger’s thought with respect to science rather more historically and less
theoretically. Recent studies (Gethmann, Orth, Harvey, Rouse, Crease) by contrast tend
to argue for the historical influence upon rather than the current value of phenomenology
and hermeneutic reconceptualizations of the expression of the philosophy of science.
In sum, this means that the work of Heelan, Kockelmans, Kisiel, Seebohm (all
continental scholars, most originally of geographically continental nationality but
working in the traditionally analytic academic world of United States philosophy of
science), etc., must be seen as rather singular representatives of the philosophical
development and application of the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions
towards an understanding of science including the natural sciences. And given the
factually analytic profile of professional philosophy of science, by far the most influential
contributions to the imperative value of a continental turn to historical and hermeneutic
expressions of the philosophy of science must be said to have come from traditional
analytic philosophers of science, complementing where not directly acknowledging the
work of Heelan et al. This is not due to the greater perspicacity of scholars in the analytic
tradition: it is only a function of its paradigmatic (and professional) dominance. Thus, for
example, Hacking’s recent work on statistics in The Taming of Chance and his recent
articles is characterized by more than a historical turn but a turn that must be properly and
fully named (although Hacking does not employ the term) hermeneutic. And this same
reference to hermeneutics is implicit when not explicit in many recent historical studies
of science (Jardine, Crombie). What is more, in the turn to the social (in old-fashioned
terms, to the life-world) dimensions of science inspired by the sociology of science and
knowledge (Hiley et al., Fuller, Latour, McMullin, Shapin/Scheffler), a new fusion of
styles in the philosophy of science is emerging. If philosophy of science may not be said
to be returning to its historical continental roots in all these revolutions, a review of these
roots cannot but be salutary for the life of the broader discipline, for the range of styles,
the plurality, of philosophies of science.
NOTES
1 The topic of the nature of a continental approach to the philosophy of science is almost
necessarily esoteric rather than general. The intersection of continental thought and the
philosophy of science is far from well defined in professional philosophy. Indeed, the focus
on Mach, Duhem and Bachelard may even appear tendentious for these authors might well be
represented as antecedent figures within traditional analytic philosophy of science. In fact
they serve this antecedent function for both analytic and continental expressions of the
philosophy of science. Hence the issues raised in this chapter correspond to the history of
continental philosophy and the philosophy of science, their intersection, and the current state
of research. As this last profile is constantly in flux, a more detailed bibliography has been
included to indicate this ferment and to benefit further research.
2 R.Harré, Philosophies of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
3 A.MacIntyre, ‘Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science’,
in G.Gutting (ed.), Paradigms and Revolutions: Appraisals and Applications of Thomas
Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), pp. 54–
74.
4 H.Redner, The Ends of Science (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987).
5 K.Hübner, Critique of Scientific Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 35.
6 As a recent and comprehensive contribution to this perspective and the debate concerning it
and the history of the Vienna circle as a whole in the North American context of what is by
and large an American discipline, the philosophy of science, see G.Holton, ‘Ernst Mach and
the Fortunes of Positivism in America’, Isis, 83:1 (1992):27–60.
7 C.Dilworth, ‘Empiricism vs. Realism: High Points in the Debate during the Past 150 Years’,
Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 21 (3):431–62 (447).
8 P.Frank, ‘Kausalgesetz und Erfahrung’, Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 6 (1906):443–50.
9 Harré (note 1), p. 29.
10 M.Tiles [6.245], 227.
11 Blackmore cites Hans Kleinpeter’s 1912 letter to Mach, reporting that ‘Nietzsche read one of
your essays in a scientific journal and spoke very favourably about it’ ([6.8], 123). And
according to Alwin Mittasch, Mach himself sent a copy of one of his articles to Nietzsche
bearing the hand-written dedication ‘Für Herrn Prof. Dr. Nietzsche hochachtungsvoll Ernst
Mach’ (Mittasch [6.151], 367). Mach’s views correspond to Nietzsche’s refusal to
distinguish between the organic and the inorganic world as discontinuous (indeed, as
opposed). For Nietzsche the living and the dead are representations of a non-discontinuous
order.
12 It goes without saying that positivism has an almost uniformly negative connotation. This
negative evaluation is not unique to our own times. F.Ringer notes that in the German
universities between the 1890s and the 1930s, during the Weimar period, ‘the label
“positivist” was almost invariably used in a deroga-tory sense’ (‘The Origins of Mannheim’s
Sociology of Knowledge’, in McMullin [6.202], 55). This parallel with contemporary
negative connotations of positivism extended to a critique that similarly accords with the
corrective turns to the historical, the interpretive or hermeneutic and the social. For Ringer,
the criticism of positivism entailed its own inherent ideology: ‘positivism was seen as a kind
of intellectual acid, a potentially disastrous dissolvent of wholistic concepts, traditional
beliefs, and socially integrative certainties. To “overcome” the problems raised by
specialization and positivism alike…there was an urgent need for a revitalization of
philosophical idealism that would also reinstate Wissenschaft as a ground for an integral and
partly normative Weltanschauung.’
13 I.Hacking, ‘“Style” for Historians and Philosophers’, Studies in the History and Philosophy
of Science, 23:1(1992):1–20 (12).
14 Berthelot, Duhem scholars seem pleased to observe, is himself today very nearly forgotten
and certainly more obscure than Duhem.
15 The issue is a socially and historically complicated one. For background information on this
topic, see chapter 6 of M.J.Nye [6.51]. For a fuller discussion of the particular circumstances
of Hélène Duhem’s efforts on behalf of her father’s unpublished work, see R.N.D.Martin
[6.50],
16 Parisians—and New Yorkers—will understand the profound implications of such a
circumstance. Although Duhem was characterized by his Bordeaux contemporaries as testy
(‘violence himself’), it is not hard to imagine this perception a result of a provincial point of
view.
17 Today we might understand this perspective as a reaction against scientism, and it is still
represented by thinkers such as Jacques Ellul and René Dubos. For a discussion of the French
intellectual landscape with respect to the historical features of scientific dogma and religious
belief including a discussion of Dubos’ situation regarded within such a vista, see H.W.Paul
[6.52].
18 W.A.Wallace, Prelude to Galileo: Essays on Medieval and Sixteenth Century Sources of
Galileo’s Thought (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1981).
19 See Wallace, Prelude to Galileo, ‘Galileo and Reasoning Ex Suppositione’, pp. 124–59.
Among others, see M.Clavelin, The Natural Philosophy of Galileo: Essay on the Origins and
Formation of Classical Mechanics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1974) and R.E.Butts and
J.Pitt (eds), New Perspective on Galileo (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978).
20 Butterfield [6.212], 27.
21 K.A.Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York:
Harper & Row, 1963), p. 99.
22 Hacking (note 13), p. 7. Hacking feels compelled to add for reasons I dare not surmise, for
Hacking does not comment on this addition, ‘…and also Spengler’.
23 A.MacIntyre, ‘Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science’,
in Gutting (ed.) (note 3), p. 67.
24 It is hard to read Bachelard as conceiving of the scientist as a woman, hence I use masculine
pronouns advisedly in what follows.
25 P.A.Heelan, ‘Preface’ to the English translation of Bachelard’s The New Scientific Spirit
[6.54], xiii.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mach
Translations
6.1 ‘On the Definition of Mass’, History and Root of the Principle of the Conservation of
Energy, trans. P.E.B.Jourdain, Chicago: Open Court, 1872, 1911.
6.2 The Science of Mechanics, trans. T.J.McCormack, Chicago: Open Court, 1893, 1960.
6.3 The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical, trans.
C.M.Williams and S.Waterlow, Chicago: Open Court, 1914; New York: Dover, 1959.
6.4 Popular Scientific Lectures, trans. T.J.McCormack, with additional lectures from
1865 and 1897, La Salle: Open Court, 1894, 1943.
6.5 Knowledge and Error: Sketches on the Psychology of Erring, trans. T.J. McCormack
(chaps xxi and xxii) and P.Foulkes, ed. B.McGuiness, Dordrecht and Boston: D.Reidel,
1976.
6.6 Space and Geometry: In the Light of Physiological, Psychological, and Physical
Inquiry, trans. T.J.McCormack (three essays originally published in The Monist, 1901–
3) La Salle: Open Court, 1906, 1960.
Criticism
6.7 Adler, F. Ernst Machs Überwindung des mechanischen Materialismus, Vienna, 1918.
6.8 Blackmore, J.T. Ernst Mach: His Work, Life and Influence, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1972.
6.9 Blackmore, J.T. Ernst Mach—A Deeper Look: Documents and New Perspectives,
26 Tiles [6.83], xv.
27 See J.Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). See
too J.Llewellyn, Beyond Metaphysics: The Hermeneutic Circle in Contemporary Continental
Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1985). This dissonant reception may also
account for the recurrent fascination with Bachelard.
28 R.Smith [6.82], preface.
29 Cf. J.Derrida’s discussion of the ‘hinge’ (brisure) in Of Grammatology, trans. G.Spivak
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 65ff.
30 Paul Valéry (1871–1945), French poet, literary theorist and essayist.
31 B.d’Espagnat, Penser la science ou les enjeux du savoir (Paris: Bordas, 1990), p. 223.
32 M.Müller and A.Halder, ‘Analytische Philosophie’, Kleines Philosophisches Wörterbuch,
(Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1971), p. 19.
33 P.A.Heelan, ‘Hermeneutical Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Science’, in
H.Silverman, Gadamer and Hermeneutics: Science, Culture, Literature (New York:
Routledge, 1991), p. 213.
34 See for example R.Bubner [6.131] and in particular Bubner [6.132].
35 See Feyerabend [6.218, 6.219, 6.220].
Dordrecht, Boston: Kluwer, 1992.
6.10 Bradley, J. Mach’s Philosophy of Science, London: Athlone Press, 1971.
6.11 Brentano, F. Über Ernst Machs ‘Erkenntnis und Irrtum’, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1981.
6.12 Dingler, H. Die Grundgedanken der Machschen Philosophie, Leipzig: Barth, 1924.
6.13 Duhem, P. ‘Analyse de l’ouvrage de Ernst Mach: La mécanique, étude historique et
critique de son développement’, Bulletin des sciences mathématiques, 1.26
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6.14 Forman, P. ‘Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918–1927’,
Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 3 (1971):1–11.
6.15 Frank, P. Modern Science and its Philosophy, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1949, 1961, pp. 13–62 and 69–95.
6.16 Haller, R. and Stadler, F. (eds) Ernst Mach: Werk und Wirkung, Wien: Holder-
Pichler-Tempsky, 1988.
6.17 Hentschel, K. ‘Die Korrespondenz Duhem-Mach, zur “Modellbeladenheit” von
Wissenschaftsgeschichte’, Annals of Science, 14 (1988):73–91.
6.18 Holton, G. ‘Ernst Mach and the Fortunes of Positivism in America’, Isis, 83:1
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6.19 Janik, A. and Toulmin, S. Wittgenstein’s Vienna, New York: Simon & Schuster,
1973.
6.20 Jensen, K.M. Beyond Marx and Mach: Aleksandr Bogdanov’s Philosophy of Living
Experience, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978.
6.21 Kaulbach, F. ‘Das anthropologische Interesse in Ernst Mach’s Positivismus’, in
J.Blühdorn and J.Ritter (eds) Positivismus im 19 Jahrhundert, Frankfurt: Klostermann,
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6.22 Kraft, V. The Vienna Circle, New York: Greenwood Press, 1953.
6.23 Lenin, V.I. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, trans. A.Fineberg, London, Peking,
Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishers’ House, 1952, 1972, (1930).
6.24 Losee, J. A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1972, chapter 11.
6.25 Mises, R.von Ernst Mach und die empirische Wissenschaftsauffassung, The Hague:
Nijhoff, 1938.
6.26 Mises, R.von Positivism: A Study in Human Understanding, trans. J. Bernstein and
R.G.Newton, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951.
6.27 Musil, R. On Mach’s Theories, Washington, DC: University of America Press and
München: Philosophia Verlag, 1982.
6.28 Schlick, M. Gesammelte Aufsätze, Wien: Gerold, 1938; Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1969.
6.29 Smith, B. ‘Austrian Origins of Logical Positivism’, in B.Gower (ed.), Logical
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6.30 Sommer, M. Evidenz im Augenblick. Eine Phänomenologie der reinen Empfindung,
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6.31 Stadler, F. Vom Positivismus zur ‘Wissenschaftlichen Weltfassung’ am Beispiel der
Wirkungsgeschichte von Ernst Mach in Österreich von 1895 bis 1934, München (with
bibliography), Wien: Locker, 1982.
6.32 Weinberg, C.B. Mach’s Empirio-Pragmatism in Physical Science, New York: Albee
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Duhem
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6.33 The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans. P.Wiener, Princeton: Princeton
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6.34 Mediaeval Cosmology, trans. and selection R.Ariew, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press , 1985.
6.35 To Save the Phenomena: An Essay on the Idea of Physical Theory from Plato to
Galileo, trans. E.Dolan and C.Maschier, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.
6.36 The Origins of Statics: The Sources of Physical Theory, trans. G.Leneaux,
V.Vagliente and G.Wagener, Boston and Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991.
Criticism
6.37 Brenner, A. Duhem, science, realité et apparence, mathesis, Paris: J.Vrin, 1990.
6.38 Eastwood, D.M. The Revival of Pascal: A Study of his Relation to Modern French
Thought, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936.
6.39 Frank, P. Modern Science and its Philosophy, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1949.
6.40 Harding, S. Can Theories Be Refuted? Essays on the Duhem-Quine Thesis,
Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel, 1976.
6.41 Hentschel, K. ‘Die Korrespondenz Duhem-Mach, zur “Modellbeladenheit” von
Wissenschaftsgeschichte’, Annals of Science, 14 (1988):73–91.
6.42 Losee, J. A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1972, chapter 11.
6.43 Lowinger, A. The Methodology of Pierre Duhem, New York: Columbia University
Press, 1941.
6.44 Jaki, S.L. Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem, The Hague: Kluwer,
1984.
6.45 Jaki, S.L. Scientist and Catholic: An Essay on Pierre Duhem, Front Royal:
Christendom Press, 1991.
6.46 Maiocchi, R. Chimica e filosofia, scienza, epistemologia, storia e religions nell’
opera di Pierre Duhem, Firenze: Le Lettre, 1985.
6.47 Martin, R.N.D. ‘Darwin and Duhem’, History of Science, 20 (1982):64–74.
6.48 Martin, R.N.D. ‘Saving Duhem and Galileo: Duhemian Methodology and the
Saving of the Phenomena’, History of Science, 25 (1987):301–19.
6.49 Martin, R.N.D. ‘The Trouble with Authority: The Galileo Affair and One of its
Historians’, The Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society 9:5 (1989):294–301.
6.50 Martin, R.N.D. Pierre Duhem, Philosophy and History in the Work of a Believing
Physicist, La Salle: Open Court, 1991.
6.51 Nye, M.J. Science in the Provinces: Scientific Communities and Provincial
Leadership in France, 1860–1930, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986,
chapter 6: ‘Bordeaux: Catholicism, Conservativism, and the Influence of Pierre Duhem’.
6.52 Paul, H.W. The Edge of Contingency: French Catholic Reaction to Scientific
Change from Darwin to Duhem, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1979.
6.53 Rey, A. ‘La Philosophie scientifique de M.Duhem’, Revue de métaphysique et de
morale, 12 (1904):699–744.
Bachelard
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6.54 The New Scientific Spirit, trans. A.Goldhammer, Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.
6.55 The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind, trans. G.
C.Waterston, New York: Orion Press, 1969.
6.56 The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. A.Ross, Boston: Beacon Press and London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964.
6.57 The Poetics of Space, trans. M.Jolas, New York: Orion Press, 1964.
6.58 The Poetics of Reverie, trans. D.Russell, New York: Orion Press, 1969.
Criticism
6.59 Présence de Gaston Bachelard: Epistémologie pour une anthropologie complète,
Aix-en-Provence: Librarie de l’Université, 1988.
6.60 Gaston Bachelard: Profils epistémologiques, Philosophica, 32, Ottawa: Presses de
l’Université d’Ottowa, 1987.
6.61 Hommage à Bachelard: Etudes de philosophie et d’histoire des sciences, Paris.
1957.
6.62 Bhaskar, R. ‘Feyerabend and Bachelard: Two Philosophers of Science’, New Left
Review, 94 (1975):31–55.
6.63 Canguilhem, G. ‘Sur une épistémologie concordataire’, in [6.61].
6.64 Canguilhem, G. Ideology and Rationality in the Hisory of the Life Sciences, trans.
A.Goldhammer, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988.
6.65 Caws, P. Yorick’s World: Science and the Knowing Subject, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993.
6.66 Dubrulle, G. Philosophie zwischen Tag und Nacht: Ein Studie zur Epistemologie
Gaston Bachelards, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1983.
6.67 Gaukroger, S.W. ‘Bachelard and the Problem of Epistemological Analysis’, Studies
in the History and Philosophy of Science, 7 (1976):189–244.
6.68 Grieder, A. ‘Gaston Bachelard: “Phénoménologue” of Modern Science’, Journal of
the British Society for Phenomenology, 17:2 (1986):107–23.
6.69 Gutting, G. Chapter 1 in [6.167].
6.70 LaLonde, M. La Théorie de la connaissance scientifique de Gaston Bachelard,
Montréal: Fidés 1966.
6.71 Lecourt, D. Bachelard ou le jour et le nuit (un essai de matérialisme dialectique),
Paris: Grasset, 1974.
6.72 Lecourt, D. L’epistémologie historique de Gaston Bachelard, Paris: Vrin, 1978.
6.73 Lecourt, D. Marxism and Epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Foucault,
trans. B.Brewster, London: NLB, 1979.
6.74 McAllester Jones M. (ed.) The Philosophy and Poetics of Gaston Bachelard,
Washington, DC: University of America Press, 1989.
6.75 McAllester Jones, M. ‘Unfixing the Subject: Gaston Bachelard and Reading’, in
[6.74], 149–61.
6.76 McAllester Jones, M. ‘On Science, Poetry and the “honey of being”: Bachelard’s
Shelley’, in D.Wood (ed.) Philosopher’s Poets, London: Routledge, 1990, pp. 153–76.
6.77 McAllester Jones, M. Gaston Bachelard: Subversive Humanist, Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
6.78 Parker, N. ‘Science and Poetry in the Ontology of Human Freedom: Bachelard’s
Account of the Poetic and the Scientific Imagination’, in [6.74], 75–100.
6.79 Schaettel, M. Bachelard critique ou l’achèmie du rêve: Un art de lire et de rêver,
Lyon: L’Hermes, 1977.
6.80 Schaettel, M. Gaston Bachelard: le rêve et la raison, Saint-Seine-L’Abbaye:
Editions Saint-Seine-L’Abbaye, 1984.
6.81 Smith, C. ‘Bachelard in the Context of a Century of Philosophy of Science’, in
[6.74], 13–26.
6.82 Smith, R.C. Gaston Bachelard, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982.
6.83 Tiles, M. Bachelard: Science and Objectivity, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984.
6.84 Vadée, M. Bachelard ou le nouvel idéalisme épistémologique, Paris: Editions
Sociales, 1975.
Constructivism or evolutionary epistemology
6.85 Delbrück, M. Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit: Über die Evolution des Erkennens,
Hamburg/Zurich: Rosch & Röhring, 1986.
6.86 Dürr, H.P. Das Netz des Physikers, München: Hanser, 1988.
6.87 Eisenhardt, P. et al. (eds) Du steigst nie zweimal in denselben Fluss: Die Grenzen
der wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis, Hamburg: Rohwolt, 1988.
6.88 Janich, P. ‘Physics—Natural Science or Technology’, in W.Krohn et al., The
Dynamics of Science and Technology, Dordrecht, Boston: D. Reidel, 1978.
6.89 Janich, P. Grenzen der Naturwissenschaft, München: Beck, 1992.
6.90 Maturana, U. and Varela, F. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the
Living, Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel, 1980.
6.91 Riedel, R. Biology of Knowledge, New York: Wiley, 1979.
6.92 Safranski, R. Wieviele Wahrheit Braucht der Mensch: Über das Denkbare und das
Lebbare, München: Hanser, 1990.
6.93 Vollmer, G. Was können wir wissen? Bd 1: Die Natur der Erkenntnis, Stuttgart:
Hizel, 1985.
6.94 Watzlawick, P. and Frieg P. (eds) Das Auge des Betrachters: Beiträge zum
Konstruktivismus, München and Zürich: Piper, 1991.
6.95 Wolters, G. ‘“The first man who almost wholly understands me.” Carnap, Dingler
and Conventionalism’, in N.Rescher (ed.) The Heritage of Logical Positivism,
Lanham: University Press of America, 1985.
6.96 Wolters, G. ‘Evolutionäre Erkenntnistheorie—eine Polemik’, Vierteljahreschrift der
NaturforschendenGessellschaft in Zürich, 133 (1988):125–42.
6.97 Wuketis, F.M. (ed.) Concepts and Approaches in Evolutionary Epistemology:
Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Knowledge, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1984.
6.98 Wuketis, F.M. (ed.) Evolutionary Epistemology and Its Implications for Humankind,
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.
Phenomenologically oriented approaches to the philosophy of science: Husserl
and Merleau-Ponty
6.99 Cho, K.K. (ed.) Philosophy and Science in Phenomenological Perspective, The
Hague: Nijhoff/Kluwer, 1984.
6.100 Compton, J. ‘Natural Science and the Philosophy of Nature’, in J.Edie (ed.)
Phenomenology in America, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969.
6.101 Gutting, G. ‘Phenomenology and Scientific Realism’, New Scholasticism, 48
(1976), 263–6.
6.102 Gutting, G. ‘Husserl and Scientific Realism’, Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, 39 (1979):42–56.
6.103 Hardy, L. ‘The Idea of Science in Husserl and the Tradition’, in [6.104].
6.104 Hardy, L. and Embree, L. (eds) Phenomenology of Natural Science, Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 1992. Includes Steven Chasan, ‘Bibliography of Phenomenological
Philosophy of Science’.
6.105 Harvey, C.W. Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Foundations of Natural Science,
Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989.
6.106 Harvey, C.W. and Shelton, J.D. ‘Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Ontology of
the Natural Sciences’, in Hardy/Embree, Phenomenology of Natural Science.
6.107 Heelan, P.A. Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965.
6.108 Heelan, P.A. Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science, Berkeley: California
University Press, 1983.
6.109 Heelan, P.A. ‘Husserl, Hilbert, and the Critique of Galilean Science’, in R.
Sokolowski (ed.) Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition, Washington,
DC: University Press of America, 1988, pp. 158–73.
6.110 Heelan, P.A. ‘Husserl’s Philosophy of Science’, in J.Mohanty and W. McKenna
(eds) Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Textbook, Pittsburgh and Washington, DC:
University Press of America, 1989, pp. 387–428.
6.111 Husserl, E. Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy as a
Rigorous Science and Philosophy and the Crisis of Man, trans. Q. Lauer, New York:
Harper & Row, 1965.
6.112 Husserl, E. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,
trans. D.Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970.
6.113 Kockelmans, J. Phenomenology and Physical Science: An Introduction to the
Philosophy of Physical Science, Duquesne: Pittsburgh University Press, 1966.
6.114 Kockelmans, J. and Kisiel, T. (eds) Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences,
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970.
6.115 Langsdorf, L. ‘Realism and Idealism in the Kuhnian Account of Science’, in
[6.104].
6.116 Lohmar, D. Husserl’s Phänomenologie als Philosophie der Mathematik, Diss.
Köln, 1987.
6.117 Lohmar, D. Phänomenologie der Mathematik: Elemente der phänomenologische
Aufklärung der mathematischen Erkenntnis, Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer, 1989.
6.118 McCarthy, M. The Crisis of Philosophy, Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1990.
6.119 Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C.Smith, London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962.
6.120 Orth, E.W. (ed.) Die Phenomenologie und die Wissenschaften, Freiburg im
München: Alber, 1976.
6.121 Orth, E.W. ‘Phänomenologie der Vernunft zwischen Szientismus, Lebenswelt und
Intersubjektivität’, Phänomenologischen Forschungen, 22 (1989):63–87.
6.122 Rang, B. Husserls Phänomenologie der materiellen Natur, Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1990.
6.123 Seebohm, T.M., Føllesdal, D. and Mohanty, J.N. (eds) Phenomenology and the
Formal Sciences, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992.
6.124 Sommer, M. Husserl und die frühe Positivismus, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1985.
6.125 Strasser, S. Phenomenology and the Human Sciences: A Contribution to a New
Philosophic Ideal, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1974.
6.126 Ströker, E. ‘Husserl’s Principle of Evidence: The Significance and Limitations of a
Methodological Norm of Philosophy as a Science’, trans. R.Pettit, in Contemporary
German Philosophy, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982, pp.
111–38.
6.127 Ströker, E. Husserls transzendentale Phänomenologie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987.
Hermeneuticist approaches to the philosophy of science: Nietzsche and
Heidegger
6.128 Babich, B.E. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground
of Art and Life, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
6.129 Baier, H. ‘Nietzsche als Wissenschaftskritiker’, Zeitschrift für philosophische
Forschung, 21 (1966):130–43.
6.130 Bleicher, J. The Hermeneutic Imagination: Outline of a Positive Critique of
Scientism and Sociology, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
6.131 Bubner, R. Dialektik und Wissenschaft, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973.
6.132 Bubner, R. ‘On the Role of Hermeneutics in the Philosophy of Science’, in Essays
in Hermeneutics and Critical Theory, trans. E.Mathews, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1988.
6.133 Connolly, J. and Keutner, T. Hermeneutics versus Science: Three German Views,
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988.
6.134 Connolly, J. and Keutner, T. ‘Interpretation, Decidability, and Meaning’, in
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6.135 Gadamer, H.-G. Reason in Science, trans. F.Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1981.
6.136 Gadamer, H.-G. ‘On the Circle of Understanding’, in [6.133], 68–78.
6.137 Gadamer, H.-G. and Böhme G. (eds) Seminar: Die Hermeneutik und Die
Wissenschaften, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978.
6.138 Gebhard, W. Nietzsches Totalismus: Philosophie der Natur zwischen Verklärung
und Verhängnis, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1983.
6.139 Heelan, P.A. ‘Hermeneutics of Experimental Science in the Context of the Life-
World’, in D.Ihde and R.Zaner (eds) Interdisciplinary Phenomenology, The Hague:
Nijhoff, 1975, pp. 7–50.
6.140 Heelan, P.A. ‘Hermeneutical Phenomenology and the History of Science’, in
D.Dahlstrom (ed.) Nature and Scientific Method: William A.Wallace Festschrift,
Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1991, pp. 23–36.
6.141 Hempel, H.-P. Natur und Geschichte: Der Jahrhundertdialog zwischen Heidegger
und Heisenberg, Frankfurt: Anton Hain, 1990.
6.142 Hendley, S. Reason and Relativism: A Sartrean Investigation, Albany: State
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6.143 Juranville, A. Physique de Nietzsche, Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1973.
6.144 Kirchhoff, J. ‘Zum Problem der Erkenntnis bei Nietzsche’, Nietzsche-Studien, 6
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6.145 Kisiel, T. ‘Hermeneutic Models for Natural Science’, in [6.120], 180–91.
6.146 Kockelmans, J.J. Heidegger and Science, Washington, DC: University Press of
America, 1985.
6.147 Kockelmans, J.J. ‘Toward a Hermeneutic Theory of the History of the Natural
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6.148 Kolb, D. ‘Heidegger on the Limits of Science’, Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology, 14:1 (1983):50–64.
6.149 Major-Poetal, P. Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Western Culture: Toward a
New Science of History, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983,
chapters 1, 2, 3.
6.150 Mauer, R. ‘The Origins of Modern Technology in Millenarianism’, in P.T. Durbin
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6.151 Mittasch, A. Friedrich Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph, Stuttgart: A.Kroner, 1952.
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Science and Technology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
6.153 Richardson, W.J. ‘Heidegger’s Critique of Science’, The New Scholasticism, 42
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6.154 Ricoeur, P. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans. J.B.Thompson,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
6.155 Schirmacher, W. Technik und Gelassenheit: Zeitkritik nach Heidegger, Freiburg im
München: Alber, 1985.
6.156 Schmidt, A. ‘Zur Frage der Dialektik in Nietzsches Erkenntnistheorie’, in
M.Horkheimer (ed.) Zeugnisse: Theodore W. Adorno zum sechszigsten Geburtstag,
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969, pp. 15–132.
6.157 Serrs, M. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, trans. J.V.Harari and D. F.Bell,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
6.158 Stegmüller, W. ‘Walther von der Vogelweide’s Lyric of Dream-Love and Qasar
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6.159 Vaihinger, H. Nietzsche als Philosoph, Berlin, 1902.
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1935.
6.161 Wolff, J. Hermeneutic Philosophy and the Sociology of Art, London and Boston:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, chapters 1–3.
Social, communicative and materialist (Marxist) continental approaches to the
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6.162 Alford, C. Science and the Revenge of Nature: Marcuse and Habermas,
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6.163 Aronowitz, S. Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society,
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6.164 Bhaskar, R. Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction, London: Verso, 1989.
6.165 Bubner, R. ‘Dialectical Elements of a Logic of Discovery’ in [6.132].
6.166 Foucault, M. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New
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6.167 Gutting, G. Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason, Cambridge:
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6.168 Hacking, I. ‘Michel Foucault’s Immature Science’, Nous, 13 (1979):39–51.
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6.170 Lyotard, J.-F. The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
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6.171 Marcuse, H. One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial
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6.172 Radder, H. The Material Realization of Science: A Philosophical View on the
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6.173 Rouse, J. Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science, Ithaca:
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6.174 Whitebook, J. ‘The Problem of Nature in Habermas’, Telos, 40 (1979): 41–69.
Continental philosophy of technology
6.175 Beck, H. Kulturphilosophie der Technik: Perspektiven zu technikMenschheit-
Zukunft, Trier: Spec Verlag, 1979.
6.176 Guzzoni, U. ‘Überlegungen zum Subjekt-Objekt-Modell Kritisches Denken und
das Verhältnis von Technik und Natur’, Dialektik 14. Humanität, Venunft, und Moral
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6.177 Ihde, D. Instrumental Reason: The Interface Between Philosophy of Science and
Philosophy of Technology, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991.
6.178 Loscerbo, J. Being and Technology: A Study in the Philosophy of Martin
Heidegger, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981.
6.179 Winner, L. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High
Technology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Related sociological studies of science and experimental epistemology
6.180 Anderson, G. ‘Anglo-Saxon and Continental Schools of Meta-Science’,
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6.181 Ashmore, M. The Reflexive Thesis: Wrighting (sic) the Sociology of Scientific
Knowledge, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
6.182 Barnes, B. Interests and the Growth of Knowledge, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1977.
6.183 Barnes, B. The Nature of Power, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
6.184 Bloor, D. Knowledge and Social Imagery, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1976; 2nd edn, 1991.
6.185 Brannigan, A. The Social Basis of Scientific Discoveries, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981.
6.186 Brown, J. The Rational and the Social, New York: Routledge, 1989.
6.187 Collins, H. Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice,
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.
6.188 Collins, H. and Pinch, T. Frames of Meaning: The Social Construction of
Extraordinary Science, London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.
6.189 Crane, D. ‘The Gatekeepers of Science: Some Factors Affecting the Selection of
Articles for Scientific Journals’, American Sociologist, 2 (1967): 195–201.
6.190 Crane, D. Invisible Colleges: The Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific
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6.191 Gallison, P. How Experiments End, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
6.192 Haraway, D.J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New
York: Routledge, 1991.
6.193 Heelan, P.A. ‘The Quantum Theory and the Phenomenology of Social-Historical
Phenomena’, in P.Blosser, L.Embree and S.Kojima (eds), Japanese and American
Phenomenology, Washington, DC: University Press of America.
6.194 Krige, J. Science, Revolution and Discontinuity, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities
Press and Brighton: Harvester, 1980.
6.195 Knorr-Cetina, K. The Manufacture of Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1980.
6.196 Knorr-Cetina, K. and Mulkey, M. (eds) Science Observed: Perspectives on the
Social Study of Science, London and Beverly Hills: Sage, 1983.
6.197 Kutschmann, W. Der Naturwissenschaftler und sein Körper: Die Rolle der
‘inneren Natur’ in der Experimentellen Naturwissenschaft der frühen Neuzeit,
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986.
6.198 Latour, B. Science in Action, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.
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