Sexual division and the new mythology: Goethe and Schelling.

The new mythology for which the German Romantic period called was not envisioned as antithetical to empiricism or experiential/experimental knowledge, but rather as emerging in dialogue with it to form a cultural foundation for such inquiry. Central to the mytho-scientific project were problematic theories of sexual division and generativity that established cultural baselines. This article examines the mythological investments of two influential thinkers of the period-Goethe and Schelling. It then analyzes Goethe's unique merger of mythological approaches to sex and generation with empirical observation in The Metamorphosis of Plants. It next traces Schelling's expansion of Goethe's theories of nature beyond their empirical justifications to develop a metaphysics of sexual differentiation. Finally, the article illuminates Goethe's final reply to the sexual dynamics of Naturphilosophie at the end of his life, through the analysis of a single poem, "Finding Again," in the collection God and World. Ultimately and in spite of its empirical commitments, Goethe's more flexible view of sexual correlations would lose ground to the powerful metaphysical mythology of sexual opposition as both scientific and cultural bedrock.

Revisiting the Pouchet-Pasteur controversy over spontaneous generation: understanding experimental method.

Louis Pasteur's defeat of belief in spontaneous generation has been a classical rationalist example of how the experimental approach of modern science can reveal superstition. Farley and Geison (Bull Hist Med 48:161-198, 1974) told a counter-story of how Pasteur's success was due to political and ideological support rather than superior experimental science. They claimed that Pasteur violated proper norms of scientific method, and that the French Academy of Science did not see this, or did not want to. Farley and Geison argued that Pouchet's experiments were as valid as those of Pasteur. In this paper I argue that the core of the scientific debate was not general theories for or against spontaneous generation but the outcome of specific experiments. It was on the conduct of these experiments that the Academy made judgements favorable to Pasteur. Claude Bernard was a colleague of Pasteur, supportive and sometimes critical. I argue that Bernard's fact-oriented methodology of "experimental medicine" is a better guide to explaining the controversy than the hypothetic-deductive view of scientific method typical of logical empiricism.

Epigenesis by experience: Romantic empiricism and non-Kantian biology.

Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic "self-organization" as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the epistemological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant's heuristics of autonomous "self-organization" in the third Critique amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought's critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigenesis (still) marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of "self-organization," allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present.

Kahlbaum, Hecker, and Kraepelin and the Transition From Psychiatric Symptom Complexes to Empirical Disease Forms.

The nosology for major psychiatric disorders developed by Emil Kraepelin in the 1890s has substantially shaped psychiatry. His theories, however, did not arise de novo, being strongly influenced by Karl Kahlbaum and Ewald Hecker. From the 1860-1880s, they articulated a paradigm shift in the conceptualization of psychiatric diagnosis, from symptom-based syndromes, popular since the late 18th century, to proto-disease entities. This effort was influenced by parallel developments in general medicine, especially the rise of bacterial theories of disease where different syndromes had distinctive symptoms, courses, and etiologies. Their thinking was particularly shaped by the increasing understanding of general paresis of the insane. Indeed, this disorder, with its distinct course and characteristic symptoms, was paradigmatic for them. Their hope was that a similar progression of medical understanding would evolve for the other major psychiatric syndromes. Their thinking and its connection with Kraepelin's nosology are illustrated through a close reading of their essays on hebephrenia, catatonia, and cyclic insanity. Kahlbaum, Hecker, and Kraepelin shared both a commitment to a clinical research agenda for psychiatry (to utilize methods of clinical assessment and follow-up to help define disease forms) and a skepticism for the brain-based neuropathological paradigm of psychiatric research then dominant in most European centers. Understanding the historical origins of our key diagnostic concepts can help us to evaluate their strengths and limitations. It remains to be determined whether this "Kahlbaum-Hecker-Kraepelin paradigm"-defining disorders based on distinctive symptoms and course-will produce psychiatric syndromes of sufficient homogeneity to yield their etiologic secrets.

Analogical reflection as a source for the science of life: Kant and the possibility of the biological sciences.

In contrast to the previously widespread view that Kant's work was largely in dialogue with the physical sciences, recent scholarship has highlighted Kant's interest in and contributions to the life sciences. Scholars are now investigating the extent to which Kant appealed to and incorporated insights from the life sciences and considering the ways he may have contributed to a new conception of living beings. The scholarship remains, however, divided in its interest: historians of science are concerned with the content of Kant's claims, and the ways in which they may or may not have contributed to the emerging science of life, while historians of philosophy focus on the systematic justifications for Kant's claims, e.g., the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of Kant's statement that living beings are mechanically inexplicable. My aim in this paper is to bring together these two strands of scholarship into dialogue by showing how Kant's methodological concerns (specifically, his notion of reflective judgment) contributed to his conception of living beings and to the ontological concern with life as a distinctive object of study. I argue that although Kant's explicit statement was that biology could not be a science, his implicit and more fundamental claim was that the study of living beings necessitates a distinctive mode of thought, a mode that is essentially analogical. I consider the implications of this view, and argue that it is by developing a new methodology for grasping organized beings that Kant makes his most important contribution to the new science of life.

Reichenbach on causality in 1923: Scientific inference, coordination, and confirmation.

In The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge (1920b), Reichenbach developed an original account of cognition as coordination of formal structures to empirical ones. One of the most salient features of this account is that it is explicitly not a top-down type of coordination, and in fact it is crucially "directed" by the empirical side. Reichenbach called this feature "the mutuality of coordination" but, in that work, did not elaborate sufficiently on how this is supposed to work. In a paper that he wrote less than two years afterwards (but that he published only in 1932), "The Principle of Causality and the Possibility of its Empirical Confirmation" (1923/1932), he described what seems to be a model for this idea, now within an analysis of causality that results in an account of scientific inference. Recent reassessments of his early proposal do not seem to capture the extent of Reichenbach's original worries. The present paper analyses Reichenbach's early account and suggests a new way to look at his early work. According to it, we perform measurements, individuate parameters, collect and analyse data, by using a "constructive" approach, such as the one with which we formulate and test hypotheses, which paradigmatically requires some simplicity assumptions. Reichenbach's attempt to account for all these aspects in 1923 was obviously limited and naive in many ways, but it shows that, in his view, there were multiple ways in which the idea of "constitution" is embodied in scientific practice.

Three challenges to the complementarity of the logic and the pragmatics of science.

The bipartite metatheory thesis attributes to Rudolf Carnap, Philipp Frank and Otto Neurath a conception of the nature of post-metaphysical philosophy of science that sees the purely formal-logical analyses of the logic of science as complemented by empirical inquiries into the psychology, sociology and history of science. Three challenges to this thesis are considered in this paper: that Carnap did not share this conception of the nature of philosophy of science even on a programmatic level, that Carnap's detailed analysis of the language of science is incompatible with one developed by Neurath for the pursuit of empirical studies of science, and, finally, that Neurath himself was confused about the programme of which the bipartite metatheory thesis makes him a representative. I argue that all three challenges can be met and refuted.

Explicating formal epistemology: Carnap's legacy as Jeffrey's radical probabilism.

Quine's "naturalized epistemology" presents a challenge to Carnapian explication: why try to rationally reconstruct probabilistic concepts instead of just doing psychology? This paper tracks the historical development of Richard C. Jeffrey who, on the one hand, voiced worries similar to Quine's about Carnapian explication but, on the other hand, claims that his own work in formal epistemology­what he calls "radical probabilism"­is somehow continuous with both Carnap's method of explication and logical empiricism. By examining how Jeffrey's claim could possibly be accurate, the paper suggests that Jeffrey's radical probabilism can be seen as a sort of alternative explication project to Carnap's own inductive logic. In so doing, it deflates both Quine's worries about Carnapian explication and so also, by extension, similar worries about formal epistemology.

Nagel on reduction.

This paper attempts a critical reappraisal of Nagel's (1961, 1970) model of reduction taking into account both traditional criticisms and recent defenses. This model treats reduction as a type of explanation in which a reduced theory is explained by a reducing theory after their relevant representational items have been suitably connected. In accordance with the deductive-nomological model, the explanation is supposed to consist of a logical deduction. Nagel was a pluralist about both the logical form of the connections between the reduced and reducing theories (which could be conditionals or biconditionals) and their epistemological status (as analytic connections, conventions, or synthetic claims). This paper defends Nagel's pluralism on both counts and, in the process, argues that the multiple realizability objection to reductionism is misplaced. It also argues that the Nagel model correctly characterizes reduction as a type of explanation. However, it notes that logical deduction must be replaced by a broader class of inferential techniques that allow for different types of approximation. Whereas Nagel (1970), in contrast to his earlier position (1961), recognized the relevance of approximation, he did not realize its full import for the model. Throughout the paper two case studies are used to illustrate the arguments: the putative reduction of classical thermodynamics to the kinetic theory of matter and that of classical genetics to molecular biology.

The Prehistory of Serendipity, from Bacon to Walpole.

During the past four decades there has developed a burgeoning literature on the concept of serendipity, the name for sudden insights or conceptual breakthroughs that occur by chance or accident. Studies repeatedly note that it was Horace Walpole, the eighteenth-century man of letters, who coined the word. None of them, however, notice that Walpole's term is itself indebted to a much older tradition, invoking a formula developed by Francis Bacon. Recovering the prehistory of the term suggests that "serendipity," rather than being a name for a special mode of discovery invented by Walpole, has all along accompanied empiricism as the name for an essential gap in its epistemology. Serendipity bears directly on the "induction problem," or what has more recently been called the "conceptual leap." Though Walpole gave it its current name, versions of the concept have all along isolated a critical gap in the method of the sciences inaugurated by Bacon.

Reading Communities and Hippocratism in Hellenistic Medicine.

The sect of ancient Greek physicians who believed that medical knowledge came from personal experience also read the Hippocratic Corpus intensively. While previous scholarship has concentrated on the contributions of individual physicians to ancient scholarship on Hippocrates, this article seeks to identify those characteristics of Empiricist reading methodology that drove an entire medical community to credit Hippocrates with medical authority. To explain why these physicians appealed to Hippocrates' authority, I deploy surviving testimonia and fragments to describe the skills, practices, and ideologies of the reading community of ancient Empiricist physicians over the one-hundred year period 175 to 75 BCE. The Empiricist conception of testimony taken on trust operative within that reading community elided the modern distinction between personal and institutional targets of trust by treating Hippocratic writings as revelatory of the moral character of Hippocrates as an author. Hippocrates' moral character as an honest witness who accurately observed empirical phenomena aligned with the epistemic virtues of an empirical medical community who believed that medical knowledge came from personal experience. So I argue that Empiricist reading culture constructed a moral authority of honesty and accuracy from Hippocratic writings, enlarged the personal authority of Hippocrates among medical readers, and contributed to the development of Hippocratism.

[Investigation of Empiricism. On Ernst Mach's Conception of the Thought Experiment]. / Ermittlung der Empirie. Zu Ernst Machs Methode des Gedankenexperiments.

Investigation of Empiricism. On Ernst Mach's Conception of the Thought Experiment. The paper argues that Ernst Mach's conception of the thought experiment from 1897/1905 holds a singular position in the lively discussions and repeated theorizations that have continued up to the present in relation to this procedure. Mach derives the thought experiment from scientific practice, and does not oppose it to the physical experiment, but, on the contrary, endows it with a robust relation to the facts. For Mach, the thought experiment is a reliable means of determining empiricism, and at the same time a real, because open and unbiased, experimenting. To shed light on this approach, the paper carries out a close reading of the relevant texts in Mach's body of writings (in their different stages of revision) and proceeds in three steps: first, Mach's processual understanding of science will be presented, which also characterizes his research and publication practice (I. 'Aperçu' and 'Sketch'. Science as Process and Projection); then in a second step the physiological and biological justification and valorization of memory and association will be examined with which Mach limits the relevance of categories such as consciousness and will (II. The Biology of Consciousness. Or The Polyp Colony); against this background, thirdly, the specific empiricism can be revealed that Mach inscribes into the thought experiment by on the one hand founding it in the memory and association, and on the other by tracing it back to geometry, which he deploys as an experimenting oriented to experience (III. Thinking and Experience. The Thought Experiment).

Toward a Pragmatist Epistemology: Arthur O. Lovejoy's and H. S. Jennings's Biophilosophical Responses to Neovitalism, 1909-1914.

The sustained interdisciplinary debate about neovitalism between two Johns Hopkins University colleagues, philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy and experimental geneticist H. S. Jennings, in the period 1911-1914, was the basis for their theoretical reconceptualization of scientific knowledge as contingent and necessarily incomplete in its account of nature. Their response to Hans Driesch's neovitalist concept of entelechy, and his challenge to the continuity between biology and the inorganic sciences, resulted in a historically significant articulation of genetics and philosophy. This study traces the debate's shift of problem-focus away from neovitalism's threat to the unity of science - "organic autonomy," as Lovejoy put it - and toward the potential for development of a nonmechanististic, nonrationalist theory of scientific knowledge. The result was a new pragmatist epistemology, based on Lovejoy's and Jennings's critiques of the inadequacy of pragmatism's account of scientific knowledge. The first intellectual move, drawing on naturalism and pragmatism, was based on a reinterpretation of science as organized experience. The second, sparked by Henri Bergson's theory of creative evolution, and drawing together elements of Dewey's and James's pragmatisms, produced a new account of the contingency and necessary incompleteness of scientific knowledge. Prompted by the neovitalists' mix of a priori concepts and, in Driesch's case, and adherence to empiricism, Lovejoy's and Jennings's developing pragmatist epistemologies of science explored the interrelation between rationalism and empiricism.

Red, White and Black: Colors of Beauty, Tints of Health and Cosmetic Materials in Early Modern English Art Writing.

Alongside Richard Haydocke's translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo's treatise on painting (1598), the article examines concepts of color concerning cosmetics, painting and complexion as they relate to aesthetics, artistic and medical practice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Beginning with white and red as ideal colors of beauty in Agnolo Firenzuola's Discourse on the beauty of women (1541), the essay places color in relation to major issues in art, medicine and empiricism by discussing beauty as a quality of humoral theory and its colors as visual results of physiological processes. Challenging the relation of art and nature, gender and production, Lomazzo's account of complexion and Haydocke's additions on cosmetic practices and face-painting provide key passages that shed light on the relation of cosmetics colors, art writing and artistic practices at the convergence of the body, art and medicine in the context of the emerging English virtuosi around 1600.

Hermann von Helmholtz's empirico-transcendentalism reconsidered: construction and constitution in Helmholtz's psychology of the object.

This paper aims at contributing to the ongoing efforts to get a firmer grasp of the systematic significance of the entanglement of idealism and empiricism in Helmholtz's work. Contrary to existing analyses, however, the focal point of the present exposition is Helmholtz's attempt to articulate a psychological account of objectification. Helmholtz's motive, as well as his solution to the problem of the object are outlined, and interpreted against the background of his scientific practice on the one hand, and that of empiricist and (transcendental) idealist analyses of experience on the other. The specifically psychological angle taken, not only prompts us to consider figures who have hitherto been treated as having only minor import for Helmholtz interpretation (most importantly J.S. Mill and J.G. Fichte), it furthermore sheds new light on some central tenets of the latter's psychological stance that have hitherto remained underappreciated. For one thing, this analysis reveals an explicit voluntarist tendency in Helmholtz's psychological theory. In conclusion, it is argued that the systematic significance of Helmholtz's empirico-transcendentalism with respect to questions of the mind is best understood as an attempt to found his empirical theory of perception in a second order, normative account of epistemic subjectivity.

[Medical empiricism from one myth to another. A critical reading of Foucault's Birth of Clinic]. / L'empirisme médical, d'un mythe à l'autre. Une lecture critique de Naissance de la clinique de Michel Foucault.

The new history of the clinic, developed mainly after the publication of Othmar Keel's L'avènement de la médecine clinique moderne en Europe, 1750-1815 in 2001, invites the scholars to turn upside down the chronology adopted by Michel Foucault in his classic Birth of the Clinic. This paper investigates the philosophical consequences of this chronological displacement, showing that the medical empiricism of the clinic cannot have the characteristics attributed by Foucault. If the myth of the purity of such empiricism cannot be taken seriously anymore thanks to Foucault, is has been substituted by the myth of the creation of the clinic on the basis of enlightened empiricism. The clinic is, however, older than empiricism à la Condillac. It refers to an earlier medical empiricism developed in the 17th century which in its turn allowed for Condillac's philosophy. The clinic had in fact to choose between an elder medical empiricism and a new chemical empirism that appeared in the late 17th century. But the clinic was not a creation of the Enlightenment.