Towards a Critical Philosophy of Science: Continental Beginnings and Bugbears, Whigs, and Waterbears

Abstract

Continental philosophy of science has developed alongside mainstream analytic philosophy of science. But where continental approaches are inclusive, analytic philosophies of science are not–excluding not merely Nietzsche’s philosophy of science but Gödel’s philosophy of physics. As a radicalization of Kant, Nietzsche’s critical philosophy of science puts science in question and Nietzsche’s critique of the methodological foundations of classical philology bears on science, particularly evolution as well as style (in art and science). In addition to the critical (in Mach, Nietzsche, Heidegger but also Husserl just to the extent that continental philosophy of science tends to depart from a reflection on the crisis of foundations), other continental philosophies of science include phenomenology (Husserl, Bachelard, Merleau‐Ponty, etc.) and hermeneutics (Heidegger, Gadamer, Heelan, etc.), especially incorporating history of science (Nietzsche, Mach, Duhem, Butterfield, Feyerabend, etc.). Examples are drawn from the philosophy of sciences (chemistry, geology, and biology) other than physics.

Notes

[1] In the same way, what is called a continental breakfast can be served at any hotel in the world. Jean Grondin 2000 takes this example, not without some chagrin, as point de départ for his hermeneutic analysis of what he calls the ‘tragedy’ of understanding (and mis‐understanding) in professional philosophy. See too Boundas 2007.

[2] In addition to Preston 2007, Soames 2003, and Hacker 2006, see Giere and Richardson 1996 and Friedman 1999 as well as Friedman 2000. See too Cahan 2003, Daston and Galison 2007, and yet more intriguingly, Hands 2005.

[3] In a section entitled ‘The Scandal of “Continental Philosophy’’’ in a recent essay on the ‘non‐existence’ of Polish philosophy, Barry Smith details the complaint that what is called continental philosophy in North American universities is ‘centred above all around the person of Martin Heidegger’ (B. Smith 2006, 19), a sentiment also expressed contra Derrida, though Smith for his part would presumably be happy to include Deleuze, Nancy, and indeed any other ‘currently fashionable’ French thinker.

[4] See Mulligan 1998 as well Mulligan 1991 as well as the other contributions to the 1991 issue of Topoi: Continental Philosophy Analysed.

[5] See for a discussion of the difference this makes Babich 2003a and 2007a.

[6] Adorno and Horkheimer 2002 analyze this phenomenon, but see also Nietzsche’s discussion of Ressentiment in Nietzsche 1980, vol. 5, 270ff.

[7] In using this plural characterization, I follow Rom Harré’s usage in Harré 1989 [1972].

[8] See Feyerabend 1984 as well as Haller 1982. See too Wolters 1987 and 1989 as well as Banks 2003 and 2004 in addition to Brush 1968. See, too, the contributions to the collection edited by Cohen and Seeger 1970 and R. Cohen 1968 as well as, more broadly, Stöltzner 1999. On Becker, see the contributions to Gethmann‐Siefert and Mittelstrass 2002, and in relationship to Heidegger and Nietzsche, see Giugliano 2005.

[9] See Babich 1994. On Mach and Nietzsche, see Wright 1993, 55–56, and, similarly articulated via a reading of Musil, Pieper 2002. For a sketch of Nietzsche’s interaction with Mach (and Avenarius), see Brobjer 2008 in addition to Stack 2005 on Nietzsche and Mach with specific reference to the ‘economy of thought’. And in today’s tradition of source scholarship, see Gori 2009.

[10] I have to say ‘only slowly’ although the present author has been writing about this for going on a quarter of a century because that work has been as little engaged or as deadborn as anything Hume ever wrote. In addition to Babich 1994, forthcoming in an updated edition as Babich 2010a, see also 2010b. But see too the other contributions to Gentili and Nielsen 2010 as well as Babich 2010c. A selection of those who have written on Nietzsche and science include Milič Čapek, Rüdiger Grimm, Hans Seigfried, Reinhard Löw, Robin Small, Alwin Mittasch, Alistair Moles, Klaus Spiekermann, Walter Zimmerli, and indeed and in connection with Nietzsche’s critique of logic, Martin Heidegger. See also the contributions to Babich and Cohen 1999a and 1999b as well as Brobjer and Moore 2004. Intriguingly, July 2010 saw an extended international conference at the Technical University of Berlin dedicated to the topic of Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science/Nietzsches Wissenschaftsphilosophie with Nietzsche scholars as well as traditional philosophers of science. It makes a great hermeneutical difference to read Nietzsche’s thinking on science in German rather than in translation as the current author can now attest (Babich 2010a, 396).

[11] See for an explication of this concern in an explicitly epistemological context Babich 2010c.

[12] Thus analytically minded as it is, Gutting’s 2005 collection fails to include Nietzsche. Yet even continentally oriented Nietzsche experts can fail to note Nietzsche’s own thinking or advert to secondary work on Nietzsche’s philosophy of science, even in overviews dedicated to representing the scope of Nietzsche scholarship. See note 10 above for exceptions.

[13] Gerald Holton 1978 invokes Nietzsche alluding to Albert Szent‐Gyorgyi’s own comparison of himself and Einstein, to distinguish between Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies in history and philosophy of science.

[14] I make this claim in Babich 1994, and develop it more explicitly elsewhere, most recently in 2010a, 2007b and 2010c.

[15] As we read in Nietzsche’s inaugural lecture: ‘The entire scientific and artistic movement of this peculiar centaur [i.e., philology qua science] is utterly dedicated, though with cyclopic slowness, to bridging the gulf between ideal antiquity—which is perhaps merely the most beautiful flowering of the Germanic passion for the south—and real antiquity; and therefore classical philology strives after nothing but the ultimate consummation of its own essence, the complete fusing together and unifying of initially hostile impulses that have only been brought together with force [Die gesamte wissenschaftlich‐künstlerische Bewegung dieses sonderbaren Centauren geht mit ungeheurer Wucht, aber cyklopischer Langsamkeit darauf aus, jene Kluft zwischen dem idealen Altertum—das vielleicht nur die schönste Blüthe germanischer Liebessehnsucht nach dem Süden ist—und dem realen zu überbrücken; und damit erstrebt die klassische Philologie nichts als die endliche Vollendung ihres eigensten Wesens, völliges Verwachsen und Einswerden der anfänglich feindseligen und nur gewaltsam zusammengebrachten Grundtriebe]’ (Nietzsche 1994, 289).

[16] ‘Nachdem die geschichtliche Kritik sich mit voller Sicherheit der Methode bemächtigt hat, scheinbar konkrete Persönlichkeiten verdampfen zu lassen, ist es erlaubt, das erste Experiment als ein wichtiges Ereignis in der Geschichte der Wissenschaft zu bezeichnen, ganz abgesehen davon, ob es in diesem Falle gelungen ist’ (Nietzsche 1994, 291).

[17] See for a discussion of this notion of method, the contributions to Schmied‐Kowarzik 1995, especially Hoenigswald 1995.

[18] See on Lachmann, Timpanaro 2004 [1981], translated into English as Timpanaro 2006. Although Timpanero argues that Lachmann’s method is based on Jacob Bernay’s method, Nietzsche argues that the method is in fact much older. In addition to Nietzsche, see Glucker 1996. For a discussion of the role of Lachmann’s method and the history of scientific classification, see Ginzburg 2004 and, on philology, stemmatics, and cladistics, Robins 2007, 90–91.

[19] Cf. Darwin 1867, 494. William Robins discusses this point, citing Darwin in Robins 2007, 90–91. Originally published in 1859, Darwin was first translated by the zoologist and paleontologist Heinrich G. Bronn in 1860 using the last years of life to do so, despite the fact that Darwin himself failed to acknowledge Bronn’s own contributions. See for a discussion Gliboff 2008. The German reception of Darwin has been complicated and many‐sided but the point about Bronn’s contributions is that it was far from a one‐way street. On language, Richards (2002) has reminded us that Darwin’s conjectures owed much to his cousin, Hensleigh Wedgwood 1866, and also responded to Alexander (not Wilhelm) von Humboldt’s remarks on language in the English translation of Humboldt’s Kosmos which, Richards tells us, Darwin read in the 1850s. See further Richards 2008.

[20] Robins refers to J. Porter 2000 on Nietzsche and philology and Moore 2002 on Nietzsche and evolution. See also and again, Richards 2002 and on Nietzsche’s science of philology and contributions to the same, Babich 2005.

[21] This ‘scientific’ style‐orientation still dominates contemporary art history. See Alois Riegl’s 1893 Stilfragen (translated into English as Riegl 1992) in addition to Riegl 2004 (see on Riegl here, Danto 2000). See too Max Dessoir 1927 along with Heinrich Wölfflin’s evolutionary schema of stylistic development in his 1915 Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (in English: Wöfflin 1932) among others who inaugurated the German tradition of Kunstwissenschaft, that is: the science of art. On Aby Warburg, see Woodfield 2001 and on Wölfflin, see Hart 1982. For a discipline‐specific discussion of German‐speaking approaches to art history, see Onians 1978.

[22] Otto Jahn was also the teacher of Nietzsche’s antagonist, Ulrich von Wilamowitz‐Möllendorff as well as of Theodore Mommsen. Jahn combined an expert interest in both physical artifacts and contemporary music. For a discussion of Jahn and archaeology, see Donohue 2006, including further references, and see for a general overview, Müller 2009, 160ff. Even if it is evident that the dispute between Ritschl and Jahn was more collegial (or all‐too‐human) than substantive, it was in any case decided in favor of a kind of positive classicism, as already implied above, the still‐ongoing philological legacy of Wilamowitz‐Möllendorff.

[23] Otto Ribeck discusses this in two volumes (1878–81). See for further references and on scientific philology in general, Bontempelli 2004, here in particular, 210–211. See for a discussion of this notion of method in philology, the several contributions to Schmied‐Kowarzik 1995. Note also in this connection, sheerly as a mention rather than a reference: the philologist Hans‐Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method.

[24] Christian Benne observes that the relationship between Nietzsche and Ritschl deserves further engagement but he overlooks Jaspers while, however, taking care to note Andler’s account as a result of what Benne calls contextualization or what one might also name hermeneutics (which to be sure Nietzsche himself would only call philology). See for this useful reference, Benne 2005, 46ff. See more broadly Brobjer 2007 and recall Robins’s observation that the genealogical method of textual criticism, the epitome of scholarship then and now, ‘depended on editorial judgment about which readings were ‘errors’ and which were not’ (Robins 2007, 92). For his part, Robins depends on a limited range of Nietzsche commentary.

[25] Significantly both Nietzsche and his nemesis, Ulrich von Wilamöwitz Möllendorff would ultimately share this sentiment. See Benne (2005, 296ff.) who offers claims for and against this position.

[26] See Duplouy 2006.

[27] See Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, pt 2, ch. 13.

[28] Also to be found in Hume 1965b. ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ was originally published in 1757 as the last of Hume’s Four Dissertations. See for a discussion of the particularities of its publication, Mossner 1950. Most English translations observe that the leather in question is cordovan/cordoban.

[29] See for a discussion of Hume’s essay, the late Patricia de Martelaere 1989, 125–126, MacLachlan 1986, and Friday 1998 among many others.

[30] For Nietzsche, the error, indeed the ‘Mittelpunkt’ of the errors in this context, is the precipitation of objective rather than subjective judgement on this same basis: see Nietzsche 1994, 299 and, again, 300.

[31] See however Babich 2005.

[32] This notion far exceeds the current context and is far from a pat or settled question. But see, just to begin with, the three volumes of Crombie 1994.

[33] Nietzsche speaks of his ‘Beängstigung und Scham’.

[34] Aber alles Leben ist Streit um Geschmack und Schmecken.

[35] See for example, Cooper 2010.

[36] See Venturelli and Richter 2003. I advert to the art historical context of this conception of style and its relevance for science apart from Nietzsche in Babich 2003b, see here, 76 and 81.

[37] See again Jaspers 1997, 176ff., and see, more broadly, Babich 2007b.

[38] See Babich 1994. See too the contributions to Babich and Cohen 1999a and 1999b.

[39] See in particular, my discussion of Alexandrian culture and science in Babich 2010a and 2007b.

[40] Avenarius 1888–89. See for a discussion, Arens 1988, 114ff.

[41] Although Thomas H. Brobjer calls for such an inquiry in Brobjer 2008, 94–95, and although Brobjer himself is a historian of ideas this author regrets that he contextualizes neither Avenarius’ nor Mach’s projects, which lack can lead to a presentist reading of Nietzsche. Brobjer’s study is nonetheless invaluable as a contribution to source scholarship. The difficulty for me is highlighted by Umberto Eco’s recent reading of the ongoing bugbear of relativity, as the lack of what Nietzsche called philology (or hermeneutics). Thus in his essay ‘Relativism?’, which first appeared in 2005 in L’Espresso, Eco on his way to identifying materialism and empirio‐criticism as non‐relativist, and the sole contenders for the distinction, includes Nietzsche amidst an incommensurable array of relativisms, noting however that ‘Nietzschean relativism has little in common with the relativism of social anthropology because the former doesn’t believe in facts and the latter takes them for granted’ (Eco 2007, 310). I discuss Nietzsche and relativism, emphasizing the absolutism of the latter and advocating Nietzsche’s perspectivalism (which I distinguish from perspectivism) in Babich 1994, 49ff., which I align with Alwin Mittasch’s account that places this perspectivalism in the lineage of Leibniz and Kant.

[42] On Nietzsche and Weber, in addition to the authors named in the text, see Fleischmann 1964, Ansell‐Pearson 1994, and Owen 1994.

[43] But see for a preliminary account, Solms‐Laubach 2006. See Anstee 2006. Flyvbjerg 2007 regrettably condenses Nietzsche to Foucault. With reference to law, see Constable 1994. Simmel’s reception of Nietzsche has recently received a certain amount of revived attention in economic theory. See Leck 2000. On Schumpeter, and Sombart, and Nietzsche, see Reinert and Reinert 2006.

[44] See on Nietzsche (in the context of a discussion of Wittgenstein and mathematics), Peters 2007.

[45] See for a discussion of Mittasch, Babich 1994, 65 and 74–75, and on the philosophy of chemistry in this connection including Mittasch, Babich 2010d, here 272–276. Martin Heidegger also read Nietzsche in connection with epistemology, science, and technology and Heidegger’s friend, the physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, who wrote of reading Nietzsche in his youth: see von Weizsäcker 1999.

[46] Although tracing its impetus back to the start of his career, Wigner’s essay appeared only toward the end of his life: Wigner 1960. On Wigner, see Dijkgraaf 2008. Stack 2005, 210 refers to the conjunction between Nietzsche and Wigner (in the context of quantum mechanics and observability). Patrick Heelan, who worked with Wigner as well as Schrödinger, has also underlined the relevance of exploring the resonances between Nietzsche’s thought and Wigner’s paradoxical observation in personal conversation. See in general on consciousness and measurement, Heelan 2004.

[47] For a discussion, see Trudeau 2001. Andrea Nye raises a theoretical reflection on logic at the turn of the century in Nye 1990, 163–172, including a particular discussion of the ‘force’ metaphor inherent in such logical ‘compulsion’ in Frege’s philosophy in connection with his own fascist allegiances. Irigaray’s own reading depends upon a Lacanian discourse. See Irigaray 1985. For a discussion of Irigaray in the context of feminist epistemology, see Grosz 1994. More generally, see Schiebinger 1989 in addition to the contributions to feminist epistemology and philosophy of science in the work of scholars like Lorraine Code and Evelyn Fox Keller.

[48] Mongré 1897. See Scholz 2005 as well as Stegmaier 2002. See too, in the direction of a reflection on Nietzsche and empiricism, Epple 2006.

[49] See on the context common to both Poincaré and (only in passing) to Nietzsche as well, Brush 1978.

[50] Thus it is all too typical of authors to contend that the paradoxes of self‐reference in logic and set‐theory have no implications, affirming that anyone who draws out such implications has simply failed to understand the limitations of the same original context. Here it nearly goes without saying that Gödel himself would observe no such restrictions for his own part who hardly limited his incompleteness theorem to formal systems but took his own reasoning to bear on the formalizable or axiomatic system of physics itself and indeed, even beyond, if we are to trust the famous anecdote told about Gödel’s 1947 citizenship hearings and his dialogue with his citizenship judge, one Philip Forman, who asked him, plausibly enough, if Gödel believed that a dictatorship like the Nazi regime that had so tragically taken hold in Germany could ever be possible in the United States. Gödel’s reply was yes, on the basis of a formal inconsistency in the US constitution, an American dictatorship would have full constitutional blessings. Yourgrau 2005, 99ff.

[51] But, as if difficulties of translation were not enough, the historical referents to such scientific kinds as Nietzsche criticizes are of course not the same as those designated by the same terms today. See Small 2001 for a reading of Nietzsche and his contemporary scientific influences, including African Spir, Eugen Dühring, Gustav Teichmüller and Friedrich Lange, but also Ernst Haeckel, Richard Avenarius, and so on. The chemist Alwin Mittasch offers a sympathetic reading of Nietzsche’s relationship to natural science in Mittasch 1942a, 1942b, 1944. For an extensive (but by no means exhaustive) philosophically oriented bibliography on the question of Nietzsche and science, see my research bibliography in Babich and Cohen 1999b, 341–358.

[52] There are a number of readings of this relationship. For a critical overview, see my discussion of Nietzsche and Darwin (Babich forthcoming) first presented as a lecture as the first amidst a year‐long series of panels dedicated to Darwin in 2009–2010 at the Boston Center for the History and Philosophy of Science. I thank Fred Tauber for the initial invitation and for his friendly conversation as I also thank Bob Cohen for his friendship over many years. But I am also deeply grateful to Boston University’s Center for the History and Philosophy of Science. I was a frequent and passionate visitor to the Boston University colloquia on the History and Philosophy of Science during my graduate school years in Boston and I am the kind of philosopher that I am because of it.

[53] In an exactly provocative rhyme against a number of views on Darwin, Nietzsche writes: ‘An die deutschen Esel. Dieser braven Engeländer / Mittelmäßige Verständer / Nehmt ihr als ‘Philosophie’? / Darwin neben Goethe setzen / Heißt: die Majestät verletzen—/ majestatem Genii! aller mittelmäßigen Geister // Erster—das sei ein Meister, / und vor ihm auf die Knie!/ Höher ihn herauf zu setzen / Heißt—— —’ (Nietzsche 1980, vol. 11, 318) and Nietzsche varies the accusation later on the same page.

[54] In an unpublished note entitled ‘Anti‐Darwin’, Nietzsche writes: ‘Was mich beim Überblick über die großen Schicksale des Menschen am meisten überrascht ist, immer das Gegentheil vor Augen zu sehen von dem, was heute Darwin mit seiner Schule sieht oder sehen will: die Selektion zu Gunsten der Stärkeren, Besser‐Weggekommenen, den Fortschritt der Gattung. Gerade das Gegentheil greift sich mit Händen: das Durchstreichen der Glücksfälle, die Unnützlichkeit der höher gerathenen Typen, das unvermeidliche Herr‐werden der mittleren, selbst der untermittleren Typen’ (Nietzsche 1980, vol. 13, 313). For a representative ‘pro‐Darwinian’ interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought, see Podolsky and Tauber 1999. Note also Daniel Dennett’s casual gloss invoking Nietzsche: ‘Nietzsche’s idea of a will to power is one of the stranger incarnations of sky hook hunger’ (Dennett 1996, 466). Von Weizsäcker underscores Georg Picht’s claim that Nietzsche’s Darwinism was Lamarkian at best. See von Weizsäcker 1999, 223. See also Henke 1984 and Richardson 2004, etc. The present reader, by contrast, emphasizes Nietzsche’s anti‐Darwinism. See Babich 1994, 175–226, and forthcoming.

[55] But it is significant here to note Bruno Latour’s seeming recantation (1999) of his prior reading of science studies. For a discussion of the relevant context, see Babich 2003b and 2002.

[56] See, especially for further references, Babich 1996, Crombie 1950 and 1994 in addition to Martin 1991, Stoffel 2002, and Schäfer 2006.

[57] Writing that ‘all the scientific methods were already there’ (Nietzsche 1980, vol. 6, 247), Nietzsche argues that the Greeks had already developed every ‘prerequisite for a cultural tradition, for a uniform science; natural science, in concern with mathematics and mechanics, was on the best possible road—the sense for facts, the last‐developed and most valuable of all the senses had its schools and its traditions already centuries old! Is this understood?’ (ibid., 247–248). See too Babich 2010b. Cf. Nietzsche 1980, vol. 1, 804, 813 as well as vol. 8, 405, etc.

[58] On Greek science, see Charles Kahn on Anaximander along with newer scholars, such as Couprie, Hahn, and Naddaf 2003. See too Drachmann 1963 in addition to Oleson 2008 as well as Russo 2004.

[59] Thus Feyerabend 1978, 59 repudiates ‘the historical illiteracy of most contemporary philosophers and of their low standards of hero worship’. Feyerabend also notes that Popper only repeats Boltzmann, who ‘often quoted Goethe’s dictum that experience is only half experience … and then there is, of course, Mach’s observation that already the name ‘sensations’ entails a one‐sided theory’ (Ibid.).

[60] See on this, among many others, Wallace 1990.

[61] With respect to Galileo, Feyerabend invokes Duhem by name (in express contrast to others, like Stillman Drake, who repeat Duhem’s conclusion without mentioning his name), in order to argue that ‘logic was on the side of … Bellarmine … not Galileo’. See Feyerabend 1989, 134.

[62] See H. Cohen 1994 and Boyer 1992. This critique to be sure is matched with a (rather less than influential) Catholic revival of his work: see the late Stanley L. Jaki 1988 and 1991 and, again, Martin 1991.

[63] This is also part of Feyerabend’s argument in his 1989.

[64] I discuss this in Babich 2009b.

[65] A key example of the value of the secondary literature for Duhem’s own scholarship was Uzielli 1894. Uzielli, who also wrote on Leonardo da Vinci and the cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, was a geologist and one of the founding members of the Italian Società Geografica in 1867. See Boime 1993 for a discussion of Uzielli’s involvement with the theoretical, scientific, and artistic movments in Italy prior to and at the turn of the twentieth century.

[66] See too for its exemplification of the proximity to a different culture of historical scholarship, Thorndike 1941.

[67] See Veltman 2008 but see also Crombie 1970. Following Duhem, Crombie underlines the historical continuity between the work of Galileo, as well as Mersenne and Descartes, and thirteenth‐century Oxford. In addition to Drake 1989 see Dear 1995 and 2001.

[68] See Yates 1991, Dobbs 1991 and 1975, and Principe 1998.

[69] But see for the relationship between alchemy and chemistry, the latter part of Paneth 2003. See Babich 2010d for a discussion with further references.

[70] See on the difference between history and philosophy of science, Wetterstein 1982. See too and again, Feyerabend 1978, 33ff., for an articulation of the contrast which is both wry and unparalleled. See further Hentschel 2003.

[71] Like bugbears, waterbears are bears only metaphorically. Waterbears, or tardigrades, are microscopically sized aquatic invertebrates, first discovered (and named ‘kleiner Wasserbär’) by the eighteenth‐century zoologist and theologian, Johann Goeze. They are fascinating, even fun, but little understood to this day. I think it may help to imagine such bugbears on the model of tardigrades or waterbears: alien‐seeming, fascinating, and intriguingly intractable as the only species we know that can survive nearly anything in a state of cryptobiosis. See, for fun (and for scientific illumination, biologically speaking): Mach 2009.

[72] See in addition to Jardine 2003, Alder 2002 as well as Cunningham 1988 and, to my reading, Vivanathan’s plea for yet more historical and cultural sensitivity remains as yet still insufficiently received. See Visvanathan 1988 and 2006.

[73] Yourgrau (2005, 24) uses this expression to characterize the exclusion of Gödel from philosophy of physics. See too Jaki 2006.

[74] See for a conceptualization and overview with reference to both Planck and Schrödinger as well as others in the‐then contemporary context, Stöltzner 2009.

[75] See Heelan 1965 and 1975. See too with reference to Heidegger, Hempel 1990.

[76] Heelan 1965 offers an initial and comprehensive elaboration including a study of perception and a specific context logic. Camilleri 2009 offers an overview of the intervening literature. More work remains to be done.

[77] Albeit without including the influences on Bachelard’s work, names often forgotten today but essential to the philosophy of technology. Basso 1925 was influential, given its focus on the industrial arts and the relation between practical application and science, for Bachelard’s dissertation, Essai de la connaissance approchée. Although the contextual reference to industry and science was essential for Bachelard and for later thinkers in the French tradition of the philosophy of science, there is no mention of Basso in Tiles 2005. See in addition, the section on Bachelard in Babich 1993.

[78] See for example, in addition to her contribution to Gutting, Tiles 1984 and Chimisso 2001 in addition to Gutting’s earlier study. Indeed Bachelard’s Marxist epistemology, where tolerated at all, is less and less received in departments of philosophy than it is in departments of geography along with the reception of Louis Althusser and Henri Lefebvre. On Althusser and Bachelard, see Jay 1986, 399ff.

[79] See, in the biological sciences, Levins and Lewontin 1985 as well as Sheehan 1985 and Woods and Grant 2002 and on Engels in particular, Thomas 2008.

[80] See for further references, the works cited in the foregoing notes.

[81] This point can be difficult to explore because and in the same way that analytic philosophy in general increasingly appropriates continental themes, a recent and largely analytically minded collection, Gutting’s Continental Philosophy of Science, omits not just some but the majority of contemporary continental philosophers like Joseph Bochenski, Azarya Polikarov as well as like Patrick A. Heelan, Joseph Kockelmans, Theodor Kisiel and Dmitri Ginev in addition to authors in the German tradition of constructivism (following Hugo Dingler) like Paul Lorenzen, Franz Wuketis, and Peter Janich, etc. Janich although usually quite neutral has recently complained of the Anglophone analytic tendency to completely disregard the German tradition of constructivism even where it contributes to debates in analytic philosophy. See the conclusion to Babich 2007a for a discussion of the extension of the same phenomenon of exclusion to critical Indian scholarship on the sciences which is often regarded as irrelevant to the philosophy of science per se from Ashis Nandy to Shiv Visvanathan. For further discussion, see Rajan 2005.

[82] The debate may seem puerile and contentious and that is the good reason that many scholars from Bob Cohen to Ruth Barcan Marcus (personal communication, in both cases), can be angered by such discussions, but one must speak truth to power, even as one seeks to be gentle with one’s friends and very real and academic lives have depended on this very distinctive divide and many have suffered from it.

[83] See Ryckman 2005 and Tieszen 2005.

[84] Simons 2004 also offers an insightful reading of Husserl’s own entanglement in the broader nineteenth‐century context.

[85] W. Richardson 1968 refuses this appellation to Heidegger and then qualifies this refusal. See Seigfried’s reply 1978 as well as Heelan 1995.

[86] See Glazebrook 2000 in addition to Dastur 2006 and others. Heidegger’s interest in logic and mathematics is well known but it has taken a great deal to get scholars to take this seriously. But see for mainstream contributions Roubach 2008 as well as Käufer 2001 and Dahlstrom 2001 as well as Kisiel 1993 in addition to the contributions to Denker and Zaborowski 2006 in addition to earlier studies by Jean Ladrière and Wilhelm Szilasi as well and as more generally, Rainer Bast, etc.

[87] Speaking from a logical point of view, with an eye to the tenor of philosophical argumentation, informal fallacies—of course or else they would not function as such—largely have comparably informal justifications or fitting motivations, etc. See Hintikka 1987 and for an overview, pro and con, Boone 1999 and Wreen 1988.

[88] For his own part, Fort spent his life linking the politics and the practices of the two establishments. See for example, Fort 1919. For a contemporary discussion without Fort’s prose, see the contemporary journalist, Greenberg 2001.

[89] It is important to note the continuing force of this chemical ‘challenge’ yet it is the distinction between physics and chemistry, and thereby the political order of rank between these two sciences that seems to have made all the political, theoretical difference for the scientific estimation and investigation of the first reports of cold fusion inasmuch as these reports were made by scientists who happened to be not physicists but chemists. Significantly, mainstream philosophy of science continues to regard cold fusion as an example either of pseudo‐science or else as straightforward fraud. But see Biberian 2007 for an overview of the state of ongoing contemporary research.

[90] For criticism of the viral etiology of AIDS, see Bucchi 2004, 39ff., as well as, more broadly Proctor 1995, Harden 1992, Gallo 1991 and see especially Duesberg 1995 and Duesberg, Koehnlein, and Rasnick 2003.

[91] Paneth known for his work on isotopes, collaborated in 1921 on the use of radium D as a tracer with the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy who later won the Nobel Prize in 1943 for this work. We have already cited several chemists, notably Bachelard but also Duhem and Berthelot. To these names, Bensaud‐Vincent 2005, 634–665 adds Émile Meyerson and Hélène Metzger. For Bensaud‐Vincent, the further considerations of feminist philosophy and history of science are essential because philosophers and historians of science tend to overlook otherwise significant scientific work owing to a double prejudice against women extending to those like Metzger who lack the ‘prestigious diplomas’ and to those even with diplomas who lack the crucial academic appointments that make all the difference for scholarly recognition (ibid., 644). The case of Mileva Marič or Marity, Albert Einstein’s first wife and his mathematical and scientific collaborator, controversially listed as the co‐author of his 1905 ‘Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper’, received by the journal, Annalen der Physik on 30 June 1905 signed Einstein‐Marity, is a case in point. Inasmuch as the original manuscript in question has vanished, no resolution is possible, one way or the other, which does not stop historians from arguing otherwise.

[92] See further Liegener and Del Re 1987 as well as Scerri 2005 and van Brakel 2002. And see Dingle and Martin 1984.

[93] For a discussion of Von Hayek’s and Polányi’s philosophies of science, see Mirowski 2004.

[94] In a related but ultimately different point, some philosophers of science have argued that the difference between chemists and physicists can be found in the central role of the ‘thought experiment’ in physics just where it is conspicuously absent in chemistry.

[95] Bensaud‐Vincent cites Duhem’s discussion of the new chemical compound and revival of the Aristotelian term ‘mixt’ and other related concepts contra the atomistic and mechanistic paradigm. Thus Duhem, in Le mixte et la combinaison chimique, argues that in ‘this mixt, the elements no longer have any actual existence. They exist there only potentially because on destruction the mixt can regenerate them’ (cited in Bensaud‐Vincent 2005, 637).

[96] The distinction between physics and chemistry, a political order of rank, seems to have made all the political, theoretical difference for the scientific estimation and investigation of the first reports of cold fusion inasmuch as these reports were made by scientists who happened to be not physicists but chemists. Mainstream philosophy of science continues to regard cold fusion as an example either of pseudo‐science or fraud or something in‐between.

[97] Leonardo, of course, likewise wrote on geology. See on Uzielli and Leonardo in addition to the texts cited above, Veltman l986. On Lyell in geology see R. Porter 1976.

[98] Jobert also published a French and English version of Jobert 1846. See too Gillispie 1951, as well as Harré 2000. And see too Frodeman 1995.

[99] The name suggests the uniformitarian theory of geology assumes the constancy of the earth’s relative position in the solar system and the stability of the geological features of the earth itself over long periods of time.

[100] The dependency of geologists on approaches to the philosophy of science deriving from analytic philosophy, as Frodeman notes is evident in Baker 1998.

[101] It is worth emphasizing that both Poincaré and Nietzsche’s theories of recurrence (and the direction of Nietzsche’s affirmation of fate emphasize not future possibility but an already consummate past.

[102] Of course such an acceptance was more reclamation than vindication. See Hallam 1973 as well as, for an insightful assessment, Harré 2000.

[103] Herbert 1983, Secord 1991, as well as more generally, Secord 1986.

[104] See for example Rudwick 1985. This hardly means that historians of science are happy about any sort of sociological turn regarded as strong (Edinburgh is a synonym). See Bowler 1988 for a review of Laudan 1987. And see Greene 1982 as well as his 1992.

[105] See Cloud 2001 and Forman 1987 and 1984. But also see Barth 2003 as well as Hacker 2005.

[106] See Dennis 2003. See for continental philosophies of geology, Frodeman 2003, Raab and Frodeman 2002, Foltz and Frodeman 2004.

[107] A listing of literature in this field is instructive. For geography between 1890 and 1920, see S. Harrison 2005 and Rhoads 1999 and Rhoads and Thorn 1994 as well as Livingstone 2003. On phenomenology and geography, see Relph 2005 and Buttimer 1976; on hermeneutics and it is worth noting Livingstone’s title change in the space of a year, see Livingstone 2002 and Mayhew 2007.

[108] See in addition to Forman’s classic 1971 essay, his other work. The ‘Forman thesis’ has been applied beyond physics in Harwood 1996.

[109] A recent meeting of a society dedicated to the history of science centres on this project. But see, more conventionally, Kraft and Kroes 1984 as well as Schirrmacher 2002 and vom Bruch and Kaderas 2002.

[110] Some thirty years ago, Harrison could already point to an establishment and pro‐presentist resistance to Buttterfield’s contextualizing interpretation. See E. Harrison 1987. Resistance to Butterfield continues even in very sophisticated ways. See again, for example, Jardine 2003.

[111] See for a discussion and further references, Babich 2003b. Van den Belt and Gremmen 1990 invoke Fleck’s own language of the ‘serological’ style of philosophic analysis: see in particular their discussion of the ‘unity of style’ (ibid., 467ff.).

[112] In addition to the calculative advantage of mathematical analyses, the rhetoric and language of a code is key: crack the enemy code and win the battle. Change the genetic code and gain eternal life.

[113] See Babich 1994, especially on eco‐physiology, 77–134 and on evolutionary psychology, Small 2005 and on physiology in Nietzsche’s thought in general, see Moore 2002.

[114] In addition to many texts such as Richards 2005 discussing the conceptual influences on Darwin, see Gliboff 2008. It should go without saying that there is also a strong opposition but the historian Donald Worster (1994) underlines a case for such influences. See Sloan 2003 and, for a recent discussion, Costa 2009.

[115] See Reynolds 2008 for a discussion of Virchow’s ‘cell‐state’ in Haeckel’s thinking; cf. Kleeberg 2005.

[116] See also Schweber 1977 and Conry 1983, and see too Lewontin 1991. Cf. with specific reference to Haeckel, Richards 2008.

[117] See J. Richardson 2004 as well as Moore 2002.

[118] See for a specific discussion of Nietzsche and Roux, Müller‐Lauter 1999 but more influential on this topic, albeit via Bergson and Deleuze, has been Ansell‐Pearson 1997. Those scholars who weigh the influences on Nietzsche (be it Roux or Haeckel), much as in another context one might emphasize Darwin’s influence over Nietzsche’s reading of Malthus, almost uniformly overlook the larger framework of the nineteenth‐century scientific context in the process, a context we began by noting in its relevance in the specific context of the second law of thermodynamics for Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence.

[119] For many reasons, Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, originally published in 1898, has never been out of print. For a discussion see Breidbach 2006 as well as, again, Richards 2008.

[120] There are a number of discussions of such imaging techniques in science if it is also true that most of these take a very received view, e.g., Daston and Galison 2007. See too McAllister 1996.

[121] See Richards 2008, ch. 8.

[122] We have already cited Biberian 2007. Homeopathy continues to be rejected even when it is included among so‐called alternative medicines such as acupuncture and Visvanathan 2006 has argued the very notion of an ‘alternative’ presupposes a dominant tradition. In addition to Luc Montagnier’s argument on behalf of homeopathy, ‘DNA Between Physics and Biology’ at the July 2010 meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau, Germany see also Montagnier et al. 2009, see too Geckeler and Samal 2001 as well as Pearce and Rey 2007, both on the chemistry of ‘ultra‐high dilutions’, which an older nomenclature named ‘signatures’. For a classic essay (and a classic case of received opposition), see Benveniste 1988.

[123] Pinch points out that failure ‘to replicate Moewus’s findings could be put down to many factors, including whether other experimenters used the same strain of alga (part of the controversy concerned the very classification of Chlamydomonas), whether others cultivated the alga in the same way, and whether others followed Moewus’s protocols exactly. Even when, near the end of the controversy, Moewus was unable to repeat his own findings, such results were not definitive, because by this stage Moewus’s stocks were in poor condition, and he was having to produce results on the spot for sceptical scientists in a matter of months in a strange environment (Moewus by this time had no permanent academic position). By contrast, his previous results had been slowly built up in his laboratory in Germany over many years’ (Pinch 1993, 365).

[124] Ernst Chladni, regarded as the father of meteoritics also explored visual acoustic patterns in sound, today called cymatics. See Chladni 2004 [1802]. On Chladni, see Ullmann 1996.

[125] In addition to the complex demands of pictorial hermeneutics in the biological tradition, see Kleeberg 2007 and Brannigan 1979.

[126] See Mach 2009 for a discussion, with reference to Haeckel, of the advantage of the pencil, and pen and ink imaging techniques, over computer graphics. See, further, Daston and Galison 2007.

[127] Although Gödel and Hilbert himself never did meet (nor is this surprising given the difference in age and indeed prestige), they were not unconnected given Gödel’s friendship with Hilbert’s assistant, Paul Bernays.

[128] Apart from its (undermining) relevance to Hilbert’s program, there is some speculation concerning the relevance of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem for Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and the most promising discussions look to John von Neumann and his quantum measurement theory. Gödel and von Neumann, who had independently come to similar insights, first met in 1930, and thereafter enjoyed a long correspondence and intellectual friendship. See to begin with the contributions to Rédei and Stöltzner 2001.

[129] The one unifying characteristic of both popular and more recondite books on Gödel seems to be impatience with other treatments of Gödel both in philosophical literature, cultural studies, and indeed other books on Gödel.

[130] See for general context including a specific discussion of Cavaillès, Schrift 2006, 36ff.

[131] See Yourgrau 2005, 111ff., for a discussion, with reference to Schilpp, Einstein, and Putnam.

[132] It is worth noting that the Asian philosopher and sociologist of science, Shiv Visvanathan, describes these general debates as concerning ‘the politics of the axiomatization of knowledge itself’. See Visvanathan 2006, 164.

[133] See Sandbothe 1994 and, for further reading, the selections in Zimmerli and Sandbothe 1993.