"You imagine where you cannot experiment"... John Tyndall is a 19th century Irish scientist and natural philosopher. For him, scientific imagination is thefaculty that enables scientists "to transcend the boundaries of the sense" and to connect the visible with the invisible - by forming mental images of phenomena, and tracing links among them. This article reconstructs his theory of scientific imagination, focusing on the central passages found in his works.

William Whewell is usually portraied as an anti-Hegelian. This article shows that, despite his criticism for Hegel’s philosophical system, Whewell was influenced by the Hegelian “historical” approach in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and by the conception of the progressive development of though (philosophy for Hegel, science for Whewell) as a dialectical unity.

Antonio Santucci, Filosofia e cultura nel settecento britannico II: Hume e Hutcheson. Reid e la scuola del senso comune, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2001. xxxviii + 526 pp. Paperback, €36.15. ISBN: 88-15-08098-8 Maurizio Maione, The Scotch Metaphysics: A Century of Enlightenment in Scotland, Rome, Carocci, 2001. 183 pp. Paperback, €14.98. ISBN: 88-430-1757-8.