Listing of Sessions and Abstracts of Papers - History of Science ...

gence from his colleagues' strategy. The paper poses the question, Why? As the distinction between
political and scientific argument was shattered in the Soviet Union, as political intervention in scientific
practice based on philosophical sanction came to be understood as a duty, rather than an evil, and as
science itself metamorphosed as a direct consequence of its use in war, scientists in the West were forced
to ask themselves difficult questions about the social and political role, legitimacy, and meaning of their
profession. United scientifically, but deeply divided politically, they fought over the principles of scientific
freedom, and planning, just as their profession was achieving previously unknown social, political,
and economic prominence. As will be shown, there are good reasons to use the highly singular, and
controversial case of Darlington as an aid to understanding these complex relationships.
Harrison, Peter
E-mail Address: peter_harrison@bond.edu.au
Voluntarism and Early Modern Science
The idea that divine voluntarism played an important role in the development of an empirical approach
to the study of nature is now commonplace amongst historians of the early-modern period. The
standard view links the voluntary activity of God, the contingency of the created order, and the requirement
that nature be investigated empirically. In this paper I will suggest that the 'voluntarism and
science' thesis is attended with numerous difficulties. First, there were significant early modern voluntarists
who were not empiricists. Second, the central categories 'voluntarism', 'necessity', and 'contingency'
are used with such imprecision and ambiguity as to render many versions of the thesis virtually
meaningless. Third, the familiar story about the impact of various forms of medieval voluntarism on the
thought of the early modern period is in much of its detail simply wrong. Fourth, close examination of
the expressed positions of a number of those early -modern empiricists thought to exemplify the thesis
shows that they were not voluntarists in any significant sense of word. Finally, voluntarism is inconsistent
with the physico-theological motivations of most early modern natural philosophers, for whom
evidence of God's wisdom and goodness can be discerned in the order of creation. The voluntarism and
science thesis is fatally flawed and its major contentions should be abandoned.
Harvey,Joy
E-mail Address: jharvey368@aol.com
Dr Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Forbidden Experiment
"Among the experiments that may be tried on man, those that can only harm are forbidden, those that
are innocent are permissible, and those that may do good are obligatory", wrote Claude Bernard in 1865.
Three years later, when Dr Mary Putnam Jacobi was studying in Paris, she quoted Bernard in a short
story that dealt with the ethics of human experimentation. This paper will explore Putnam Jacobi's
interest in medical research, her experimental research on animal subjects, her non-invasive human
experiments, and her physiological demonstrations at the Woman's Medical College of New York. The
material is used to provide a context for her later controversy with her mentor Elizabeth Blackwell over
the ethics of animal experimentation and its usefulness in training women physicians.
Hawkins,Michael
E-mail Address: m.hawkins@kingston.ac.uk
Evolutionary Ethics and the Dilemmas of Darwinism in British Thought
Although attempts to ground ethics in the supposed imperatives of evolution preceded Darwin
(Positivsm offering a prime example), Darwinism opened up the possibility of basing ethics upon not
only evolutionary but also genuinely scientific foundations. Several writers sought to understand human
development in Darwinian terms of competition, adaptation, selection, struggle and change, and to