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

1931) faith and his Jesuit philosophical training intersected to reconcile evolution and Catholicism by
delineating the philosophical limits of science: Wasmann demarcated a material and historical world,
which science can describe, and the realm of subjective experience and the soul, which it cannot.
Wasmann’s evolution contrasted (and conflicted) strongly with contemporary German atheistic and
anticlerical monistic evolutionary biology, and I will discuss Wasmann’s very public debates with
monism’s prophet, Ernst Haeckel. Finally, I will briefly contrast Wasmann’s Catholic evolutionism with
Teilhard de Chardin’s, and conclude with some remarks on the diverse influences of religious faith in
evolutionary biology.
Lynch, William
E-mail Address: ae8917@wayne.edu
Seeing, Doing, and Uncovering: Interpreting Bacon's Method in the Early Royal Society of London
Rejecting the view that methodology acts more as window dressing than a program that can help
direct research practice, I argue that Francis Bacon's program for methodological reform shaped the
Royal Society's earliest work in important, if often contradictory, ways. The Royal Society developed
Bacon's programs in different directions, building upon a richer understanding of Bacon's methodological
program than the undirected empiricism often associated with his name. Bacon's call for a focus on
"things themselves" built upon three distinct images of objects of knowledge. Identifying a threefold
metaphorical ontology of objects of knowledge and corresponding objectivities at the core of Bacon's
method, I argue that the Royal Society was more sophisticated and unified in their methodological
approach than is commonly accepted. At the same time, development of their interpretations of Bacon's
legacy ultimately pulled in different directions. Specular objects of knowledge privileged passive
observation and justified an empiricist objectivity. Pulling in a different direction, manipulated objects of
art or manual objects emphasized an engaged, constructivist objectivity, where knowing is doing. Finally,
a vision of underlying forms as generative objects of knowledge, combinable like letters of the
alphabet to produce phenomena at will, defined a theoretical concept of objectivity. These components
of Bacon's method inform in different ways the early publications of the Royal Society by John Evelyn,
Robert Hooke, John Wilkins, Thomas Sprat, and John Graunt. The Royal Society developed an ambitious
inductive program employing hypotheses, active powers, and the disciplined use of analogy.
Maas, Harro
E-mail Address: harro@fee.uva.nl
Mimetic Experiments: Stanley Jevons's Construction of Evidence for Theories
William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) is commonly considered one of the great 19th century innovators
in economics. Until to date, however, his empirical work in economics is considered quite apart from his
theoretical innovations. My argument in this paper is that Jevons’s empirical and theoretical work are
much more interwoven than such an account suggests. Jevons’s experimental practices in meteorology
(on cloud formation) are illuminating here. As many experimental scientists, Jevons was fully aware that
empirical data do not speak for themselves: the experimental scientist is not a passive observer, perceiving
reality and only then arriving at an explanation. Rather, he uses experimental practices to reveal the
phenomena from the data, the actual observations are loaded with error. One might think of these phenomena
in terms of essential characteristics or mean values. Phenomena could then be further analysed
to reveal the natural laws they obeyed. For Jevons, these laws were stable functional relationships. The
step from phenomena to laws depended critically upon the role of analogy, given the many possible
mathematical relations consistent with the phenomena. In a nutshell, this procedure can be seen in
Jevons' experiments on cloud formation, in his Principles of Science, and also in his statistical studies in