This article engages with the philosophical reflections of the French historian of science Hélène Metzger (1886–1944) in order to develop a vocabulary for understanding the rise of non-reductive Continental naturalism in the contemporary humanities. The bibliography of current naturalist approaches in the arts and the human sciences is still in the making, but it is altogether clear that the trend is not scientist or historicist or relativist. This epistemological diagnosis refers us to Metzger, who found herself surrounded with the logical (...) positivism of the Wiener Kreis, on the one hand, and the historicism of her French colleagues, on the other, as well as with the infiltration of the history of science by a chronological empiricism. In this article I will take the most recent book of Vicki Kirby – Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large from 2011 – as an exemplary case of non-reductive Continental naturalist scholarship in the humanities today and by reading it through the concepts of Metzger, I will demonstrate how this type of research leads to refreshing insights in what constitutes positive humanities knowledge and what is the role of the a priori in the field. (shrink)

In the early decades of the 20th century, women's access to the historical discipline followed fundamentally two paths. For the first time, some (a small minority) entered the profession as academic historians; others worked outside or on the margins of academia, pursuing their research interests as independent scholars. What did being an independent scholar mean for these women? Was it always a form of externally imposed marginalization? My paper argues that this is not the case. First of all, being an (...) independent scholar did not necessarily mean marginality. Some of these women scholars exerted a deep influence on 20th century historiography, and their work is still influential today. Quite apart from posthumous fame, moreover, it should be noted that the lack of academic affiliation did not necessarily preclude for some of these women the possibility of recognition and influence during their lives. Secondly, we should be careful not to assume that being an independent scholar was invariably an externally imposed marginalization. Some of these women scholars can be defined as ‘obligatory amateurs,’ because they were frustrated in their attempt to pursue an academic career. But others, in contrast, deliberately chose independent scholarship over an academic job, and can thus be defined ‘amateurs by choice.’ What was the motivation behind this choice? I argue that an important factor was the resilience of the amateur tradition in historical writing. The amateur tradition offered a strong counterbalance to women's marginality in academia and a source of positive values and models for their participation in the intellectual life. (shrink)

To many contemporary scholars, Émile Meyerson is a footnote in an obscure history: early twentieth-century French philosophy of science. While the traditions of épistémologie are beginning to enjoy the scrutiny they deserve, Meyerson’s role remains overlooked. This article provides an overview of Meyerson’s philosophical project to help sow the seeds for a more systematic recuperation of its legacy. By orienting his work historically, I elucidate the nature of Meyerson’s critique of positivism, his distinctive method, and the implications these have for (...) the relation between science and philosophy. In particular, I show that for Meyerson positivisme refers not only to the doctrine of Auguste Comte but to a general philosophical tendency. Inseparable from Meyerson’s critique of this tendency is his implementation of a new methodology—épistémologie—according to which reason must be understood through the historical development of science. Épistémologie reveals that positivism not only is an incomplete account of science but is detrimental to its progress. Accordingly, Meyerson hopes to secure science’s right to function according to its own immanent principles, thereby providing prolegomena to all future metaphysics through a historical determination of the nature and limits of human reason. (shrink)

Slovenian epistemology is characterised by an idiosyncratic canon, based on three fundamental authors: Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre Koyré, and Thomas Kuhn. What binds this canon together is the attitude that the history of science should be viewed as a history of radical breaks or revolutions in scientific thought. The drawback of such an anthology of authors is not only that it is outdated, but that, from the position of this canon, it is difficult to discern the problems stemming from the approach (...) to history of science it endorses. In order to highlight the blind spots of Slovenian epistemology, I examine a different interpretative trajectory of the notion of scientific revolution in the United Kingdom and the United States. The methodological program, which focuses on revolutionary breakthroughs in scientific ideas, is thus re-evaluated by considering its strategic role in the institutionalisation of the history of science as a discipline. The event that marked the translation of French epistemology into English history of science were the lectures of the delegates from the Soviet Union at the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in 1931. In post-war Anglo-American history of science, the concept of scientific revolution was adopted as a means of excluding Marxist studies of science – which had spread under the influence of the Soviet delegation – from the realm of acceptable discourse. I demonstrate how the Cold War historiography of science introduced a divide between the “internal” and “external” factors of scientific development, and their supposed synthesis in the work of Thomas Kuhn. Finally, I review the critiques that the sociology of scientific knowledge levelled at the story of the Scientific Revolution and point out the importance of these controversies for current epistemological research. (shrink)

Gerald Holton has famously described Einstein’s career as a philosophical “pilgrimage”. Starting on “the historic ground” of Machian positivism and phenomenalism, following the completion of general relativity in late 1915, Einstein’s philosophy endured (a) a speculative turn: physical theorizing appears as ultimately a “pure mathematical construction” guided by faith in the simplicity of nature and (b) a realistic turn: science is “nothing more than a refinement ”of the everyday belief in the existence of mind-independent physical reality. Nevertheless, Einstein’s mathematical constructivism (...) that supports his unified field theory program appears to be, at first sight, hardly compatible with the common sense realism with which he countered quantum theory. Thus, literature on Einstein’s philosophy of science has often struggled in finding the thread between ostensibly conflicting philosophical pronouncements. This paper supports the claim that Einstein’s dialog with Émile Meyerson from the mid 1920s till the early 1930s might be a neglected source to solve this riddle. According to Einstein, Meyerson shared (a) his belief in the independent existence of an external world and (b) his conviction that the latter can be grasped only by speculative means. Einstein could present his search for a unified field theory as a metaphysical-realistic program opposed to the positivistic-operationalist spirit of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Efforts to include women in the canon have long been beset by reactionary gatekeeping, typified by the charge “That's not philosophy.” That charge doesn't apply to early and mid‐analytic female philosophers—Welby, Ladd‐Franklin, Bryant, Jones, de Laguna, Stebbing, Ambrose, MacDonald—with job titles like lecturer in logic and professor of philosophy and publications in Mind, the Journal of Philosophy, and Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. It's hopeless to dismiss their work as “not philosophy.” But comparable reactionary gatekeeping affects them, this paper argues, (...) typified by the labels “bad philosophy” and “derivative philosophy.” Virtue and vice epistemology help explain why these women have been neglected and why their own approaches are epistemically virtuous. Their contemporaries and historians are deficient in scholarly virtues in labelling these women's work “bad” or derived from male mentors with no or specious justification. Their disparaged qualities—intellectual humility, modesty, critical self‐reflection, disclosing biases—are often epistemic virtues. (shrink)

At first glance twentieth-century philosophy of science seems virtually to ignore chemistry. However this paper argues that a focus on chemistry helped shape the French philosophical reflections about the aims and foundations of scientific methods. Despite patent philosophical disagreements between Duhem, Meyerson, Metzger and Bachelard it is possible to identify the continuity of a tradition that is rooted in their common interest for chemistry. Two distinctive features of the French tradition originated in the attention to what was going on in (...) chemistry.French philosophers of science, in stark contrast with analytic philosophers, considered history of science as the necessary basis for understanding how the human intellect or the scientific spirit tries to grasp the world. This constant reference to historical data was prompted by a fierce controversy about the chemical revolution, which brought the issue of the nature of scientific changes centre stage.A second striking—albeit largely unnoticed—feature of the French tradition is that matter theories are a favourite subject with which to characterize the ways of science. Duhem, Meyerson, Metzger and Bachelard developed most of their views about the methods and aims of science through a discussion of matter theories. Just as the concern with history was prompted by a controversy between chemists, the focus on matter was triggered by a scientific controversy about atomism in the late nineteenth-century.Keywords: France; Epistemology; Chemistry; Revolution; Atomism; Realism. (shrink)