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Few scholars would deny that William Whewell ranks among the major figures in 19th-century philosophy of science. His Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences and his later Philosophy of Discovery remain among the classics of scientific methodology. The bulk of the scholarship devoted to Whewell has tended to stress the idealistic, anti-empirical temper of Whewell's philosophy. For instance, the only two monograph-length studies on Whewell, Blanche's Le Rationalisme de Whewell (1935) and Marcucci's L"Idealismo" Scientifico di William Whewell (1963), are, as their titles suggest, concerned primarily with Whewell's departures from empiricism. Other studies, especially those of Robert Butts, have given prominence to neo-Kantian elements in Whewell. Particularly in recounting Whewell's famous dispute with Mill, it has proved tempting to parody Whewell's position in the debate by treating the con­troversy as a straightforward encounter between an arch-empiricist and an arch-rationalist. There is, however, a danger that an emphasis on the ratio­nalist and a priori elements in Whewell's philosophy may well obscure the unmistakable empirical emphasis in Whewell's theory of science. I think it is time to begin to redress the balance, by focussing attention on the significant "empiricist" strains in Whewell's theory of science. One of the most important of those strains is connected with the operation which Whewell calls "the consilience of inductions".

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-7288-0_10

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