Antithetical Knowledge

Abstract As we have seen, Whewell’s Philosophy of 1840 was the culmination of a process of intense philosophical deliberation that spanned the best part of the two decades prior to its publication. In its finished form the Philosophy did not recapitulate the process of its formation, but rather (and typical of the outcome of a Whewellian investigation) argued back down, in semi-deductive fashion, from what one might term axioms of the Fundamental Idea of antithetical knowledge, to a detailed account of the emergence, the structure, and the nature of truth of a well-formed inductive science. In the Philosophy Whewell had accomplished what he had initially set out to achieve, namely, an empirically grounded and unitary theory of the emergence of antithetically structured science. He had attempted to put the theory to test, in part at least, in the History (neglecting, however, to update the work in the light of subsequent philosophical findings) and seems to have been largely satisfied with the results. No doubt the Philosophy was put together all too hastily, and, as Todhunter complained,2 its overall set-up left much to be desired. Nevertheless, the two subsequent editions of the work and the long and varied list of Whewell’s successive philosophical writings left the basic system of the Philosophy virtually intact. Whewell evidently felt no need to further schematize or modify the Philosophy after 1840. In the third edition of 1858-60 the work was taken apart at its natural seams and was republished in the form of three separate works; a conceptual history of the sciences entitled The History of Scientific Ideas (1858); a critical history of the philosophy of science entitled On the Philosophy of Discovery (1860); and Whewell’s own philosophical system tellingly dubbed Novum OrganumRenovatum (1858). However, nothing of importance was changed or added to the original philosophical system.