Scientific Methodology in Nineteenth Century Britain: Volume I: Building Philosophical Systems

This collection of primary sources examines scientific methodology in Britain during the long nineteenth century. Perhaps the most striking feature of nineteenth-century works on scientific method is the extent to which they were taken up by authors interested in writing large-scale, systemic works introducing, at one stroke, a philosophy of science, a view of what "good scientific practice" would look like, and investigations of logic, epistemology, and metaphysics. This volume presents the views laid out in the four largest and most important such treatises: Sir John F. W. Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on Natural Philosophy, William Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, and John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic, as well as other contributors to the philosophy of science in this period. This title will be of great interest to students of the history of philosophy and the history of science.