William Whewell’s Philosophy of Knowledge and its Reception

Abstract During Whewell’s lifetime references to his polymathic aspirations coloured most assessments of his achievements. Like Sydney Smith’s well-known aphorism, these characterizations often carried negative judgements concerning Whewell’s metascientific deliberations. Even before embarking on his vast history and philosophy of the inductive sciences Whewell himself anticipated the opinions of ‘people [who] bid us beware of the Demon of universal knowledge’, although he freely confessed to George Morland in 1815 about ‘certain yearnings after the whole circle of the sciences, certain ecstatic aspirations after universal knowledge, certain indefinite desires to approximate to something like omniscience’. Thirty years later he referred to the Greek philosopher Erastosthenes whose activites embraced philosophy, geometry, astronomy, and poetry and, clearly with his own case in mind, observed that: ‘It is seldom that one person attempts to master so many subjects without incurring the charge, and perhaps the danger of being superficial. ‘