The following list of archival material relating to the history of science acquired in 1996 and 1997 by British repositories is drawn from Accessions to Repositories, an annual publication compiled by the Historical Manuscripts Commission. It is important to note that these accessions may not have been catalogued and that access may therefore be restricted. Further inquiries should be addressed to the staff of the repositories concerned.

The Historical Manuscripts Commission seeks each year to collect information from over 250 repositories throughout the British Isles. This information is made available on the Internet via the Commission's website, http://www.hmc.gov.uk. The Commission will answer limited and specific postal and email inquiries. The information is also added to the indexes of the National Register of Archives, which are available for consultation in Quality House, Quality Court, Chancery Lane, London WC2A 1HP, or via the Internet on the address above. Alternatively, electronic users can gain access to the NRA via Telnet (telnet: public.hmc.gov.uk). Readers should be aware that the manuscript collections noted in the following digest represent only a very small part of the collected information available in the NRA.

These gems have life in them: their colours speak,

Say what words fail of.

In an ambitious treatise on the estimated wealth of the British Empire in the year of Waterloo, Patrick Colquhoun added to his calculations of the revenues produced by overseas property the potential profits created through exploiting natural resources. In his ‘political arithmetic’, Colquhoun recognized that an increasingly lucrative resource could be found in ‘mines and minerals’, where ‘various articles extracted from the bowels of the earth, which the new discoveries in chemistry have rendered valuable articles of commerce, have tended greatly to increase the value of the mines’. Such information, accumulated through travel, skilled techniques of identification and analysis, and collecting, proved central to regulating judgements about potential overseas investment by the government.

Practices in natural history intersected with the development of British commerce in a number of ways. Mineralogists specially trained to identify rare species of minerals scoured distant shores and collected sack-loads of specimens, seeking information about natural resources that might nourish a developing imperial economy. One such British mineralogist was John Mawe, who in 1804 received patronage from Portugal's Prince Regent to embark on ‘a voyage of commercial experiment’ to the Portuguese territory of Brazil and assess the value of the gold and diamond industries that might revitalize their ailing and isolated economy. National and individual economic interests were informed and served by the multiplication of such acts of commercial speculation, which focused on various kinds of natural resources. Mawe was very conscious that the mineral kingdom held much to be explored. Unlike botany, with Linnaean taxonomy rendering order to the kingdom, knowledge in mineralogy was far from comprehensive. Mawe lamented that ‘few have thought the knowledge of Minerals worthy of their attention, although to them we owe our national strength and riches’. Others also argued that because it addressed national interests, research and education in the earth sciences should be publicly patronized.

L. E. J. Brouwer and David Hubert, two titans of twentieth-century mathematics, clashed dramatically in the 1920s. Though they were both Kantian constructivists, their notorious Grundlagenstreit centered on sharp differences about the foundations of mathematics: Brouwer was prepared to revise the content and methods of mathematics (his “Intuitionism” did just that radically), while Hilbert's Program was designed to preserve and constructively secure all of classical mathematics.

Hilbert's interests and polemics at the time led to at least three misconstruals of intuitionism, misconstruals which last to our own time: Current literature often portrays popular views of intuitionism as the product of Brouwer's idiosyncratic subjectivism; modern logicians view intuitionism as simply applying a non-standard formal logic to mathematics; and contemporary philosophers see that logic as based upon a pure assertabilist theory of meaning. These pictures stem from the way Hilbert structured the controversy.

Even though Brouwer's own work and behavior occasionally reinforce these pictures, they are nevertheless inaccurate accounts of his approach to mathematics. However, the framework provided by the Brouwer-Hilbert debate itself does not supply an adequate correction of these inaccuracies. For, even if we eliminate these mistakes within that framework, Brouwer's position would still appear fragmented and internally inconsistent. I propose a Kantian framework — not from Kant's philosophy of mathematics but from his general metaphysics — which does show the coherence and consistency of Brouwer's views. I also suggest that expanding the context of the controversy in this way will illuminate Hilbert's views as well and will even shed light upon Kant's philosophy.

The purpose of this article is twofold. Firstly, I propose to analyze controversies using a “dialectical” model, in the sense described in Aristotle's Topics. This approach presupposes that we temporarily disregard, for the sake of clarity, the concreteness of real life controversies in order to focus on their argumentative structure. From this point of view, the main advantage of controversies is that they allow the interlocutors to test each other's claims and therefore to arrive at relatively corroborated conclusions. This testing function in a dialectical context is implemented through the assent to commonly accepted premises, and the necessity which characterizes each step of the reasoning.

Secondly, I shall apply this dialectical framework to the study of the controversy concerning the motion of the Earth, or rather a small episode of it. I shall examine an exchange of letters, written in 1616 and in 1624 respectively, between Galileo Galilei and Francesco Ingoli, one of his Aristotelian opponents. I shall then compare this exchange with the first day of Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World (1632), a fictional debate, where Galileo discusses some of the same arguments. While the first exemplifies what I call “negative” testing, and yields a refutation of the opponent's theses, the second exemplifies “positive” testing and yields a dialectical demonstration of the motion of the Earth.

The main subject examined in this paper is Immanuel Kant's controversy with Philosophisches Magazin regarding Kant's new theory of judgments. J. A. Eberhard, editor of Philosophisches Magazin, and his colleagues wanted to vindicate the Wollfian traditional concept of judgments by undermining Kant's claims. As will be demonstrated, their arguments were effective mainly in exposing the ambiguity that was inherent in Kant's concept of the synthetic a priori; an ambiguity that resulted from Kant's desire—central to his critique of metaphysics—to present judgments pertaining to mathematics, (dogmatic) metaphysics, and pure natural science as judgments which shared a common form. Exposing this ambiguity was not the intended result, and it was insufficient for the purpose of vindicating the Wollfian tradition. The contributors to Philosophisches Magazin ignored the important properties shared by the class of judgments falling under Kant's concept of synthetic a priori judgments. They also ignored the fact that their position was unable to account for the logical phenomena that motivated Kant to present a new theory of judgments. On the other hand, Kant's theory of judgments was insensitive to the important differences that exist among the distinct types of judgments falling under his concept of a synthetic a priori judgment. This latter point is clearly shown in the controversy regarding the novelty of Kant's concept of a synthetic a priori judgment, and in the controversy regarding the function of intuitions within synthetic judgments.

A result of the controversy was that Kant's concept of the synthetic a priori, which he believed to be an exact concept, was revealed to be a metaphor: no more than an invitation to view certain intellectual fields in the light of others. On the other hand, Eberhard and his colleagues failed to come up with satisfactory answers to Kant's questions within their traditional concept of judgment. Both parties refused to acknowledge this result. Consequently, the search for a new logic, a new architectonic order, and a new unity within reason became a general problem for the new generation of philosophers.

Conflicts between scientists over credit for their discoveries are conflicts, not merely in, but of science because discovery is not a historical event, but a retrospective social judgment. There is no objective moment of discovery; rather, discovery is established by means of a hermeneutics, a way of reading scientific articles. The priority conflict between Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally over the discovery of the brain hormone, TRF, serves as an example. The work of Robert Merton, Thomas Kuhn, Augustine Brannigan, and Grygory Markus shows that scientists read scientific articles by means of the application of a set of pragmatic rules that subtend the normative requirements of what counts as a scientific discovery. In other words, there is a hermeneutics of science, but it is internal to that form of life. Recategorization of priority conflicts has an impact on our view of scientific controversy generally. The impact is the revision of the boundary lines of scientific controversy and the further specification of its fine-structure.

These introductory remarks are unorthodox in many respects. The deviance from usual practice is justified by the extreme importance I attach to the subject matter of this special issue. I want to convey to the reader a sense of why I think controversies, particularly in science, are so crucial, and to propose a different way of thinking about them. This mandates, in the limited space available, a compact presentation, omitting supporting arguments and necessary elaboration — for which the reader is referred to the bibliography.

We examine the most famous controversy between economists — the one between Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo — as a means of shedding fresh light on the current debate about economic methodology. By focusing on this controversy as the primary unit of analysis, we show how methodological considerations are but one of a whole set of stratagems employed by each opponent. We argue that each opponent's preference for a particular kind of stratagem expresses his own specific scientific style (within the general scientific and cultural style of an age). We also describe a dynamic dimension of the controversy, independent of the participants' intentions. Such a dimension is analyzed in one of the “cycles” of the controversy, which begins with a well-defined issue and expands to additional topics, without reaching a “solution” of the initial issue. The Controversy, thus, does not yield a solution of a given problem nor persuasion of the adversary — its presumable aims. Rather, its “benefit” seems to lie in an unintended result — the clarification and deepening of contrasting approaches to the discipline. Insofar as the history of a discipline requires a reconstruction of such contrasts, it is indispensable that it take into account the controversies where they emerge, and view both the positive doctrines and the methodological postures of the contenders as parts of a wider framework, within which the notion of a scientific style — which this paper attempts to clarify — looms large.

Controversies are pervasive in the history of science. History is thus here also at odds with science's images. According to both traditional and contemporary views of science, there are no scientific controversies sui generis. In traditional images of science controversies are external to science proper; in some contemporary views nothing about controversies in science specifically distinguishes them from controversies in other domains. According to one traditional image, science progresses from common ground to conclusions according to secure procedures such that there is no place for disagreement nor, therefore, for controversy. According to another traditional image of science, there are no such secure procedures. On the contrary: one does and even should jump to conclusions. Whereas here subsequent criticism is called for, it seems that controversy is not. This image is built on the assumption that refutations are clear cut, so that producing a valid refutation does not require a lengthy exchange of arguments.

Like many controversies in science, the one between Freud and Jung is overloaded with ad hominem arguments despite the incompatibility of such arguments with the pretensions of both sides to attain scientific ad rem validity. Unlike natural scientists, Freud and Jung regarded their own ad hominem arguments as relevant to general and impersonal truths. They practically legitimized such a use claiming to have a clinical basis for the rejection of the opponent's objections by a de-validating analysis of the opponent's personality as a whole. The argument of this paper is that the de-validating strategy was neither an inevitable psychological outcome of the intricate interpersonal relationships in analytic situations nor the logical consequence of any clinical or scientific psycho-analytical discovery. It followed from the epistemological invalid pretension to have a general theory of mind which could explain by mental analysis the existence of “unreasonable opinions,” and the application of the same principles to the opinion that the theory itself is unreasonable. Such a pretension, apparently specific to mystical traditions in theology and metaphysics, was deeply rooted in the modern epistemological tradition. The paper examines the impact of the different branches of that tradition on Freud and Jung's respective ideologies, theories, and practice, including the ad hominem malpractice.

One of the educational by-products of German botanical scholarship was the publication of sets of large ‘wall diagrams’ (Wandtafeln) for use in the lecture-room. Most British University Departments of Botany dating from the period before the first world war probably had at least one of these sets. In my own department I have used these excellent diagrams occasionally, realizing that they combined clarity, size and accuracy to an unrivalled extent.

This passage from a recent essay by S. M. Walters forms an appropriate introduction to the topic of this paper. From the start, it should be noticed that the use of such diagrams (referred to as ‘wallcharts’ in the rest of the paper) was by no means limited to botany nor to university studies. As will become clear, they were one of the most important media for the teaching and learning at different levels of education and within different fields.

Art and science are both terms whose meanings have been subject to change over time. At the end of the twentieth century, the terms tend to be used antithetically. Current views of the relationship between the spheres of activity that they connote range from a sweeping dismissal of any connection to an opposing but less extreme conviction that scientists and artists have something in common. The latter belief apparently at least partly stems from an underlying feeling that at any one time both activities are, after all, products of a single culture. The woolly shade of C. P. Snow's idea of there being ‘two cultures’ in the Britain of the 1950s at once rises to view if one attempts to pursue analysis along these lines.

In setting up a conference called ‘The Visual Culture of Art and Science from the Renaissance to the Present’ the organizing committee was not attempting to resolve any kind of debate that may be perceived to exist in regard to the separation or otherwise of the domains of art and science. Rather, we wished to bring together historians of science working on areas that are of interest to historians of art, and historians of art working on areas that are of interest to historians of science, as well as practising artists and scientists of the present time who show an interest in each others' fields. We were, of course, aware that this agenda raised questions in regard to present-day relationships between art and science, but we hoped that, as we were dealing with a range of historical periods, any light that was shed would be moderately illuminating rather than blindingly lurid. The meeting, which took place on 12–14 July 1995, mainly at the Royal Society in London, was organized jointly by the British Society for the History of Science, the Association of Art Historians and the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS) – a joint committee of the Royal Institution, British Association and the Royal Society. The historical examples presented at the conference showed a wide variety of interactions between art and science. The success of the conference (it attracted an audience of about 200) suggested very strongly that art, which has a large public following, can be used to encourage an interest in science, whose public following, according to scientists, could be better.

The medium of visual representation played a crucial role in the Enlightenment project of taking intellectual possession of nature, and of dominating it. Pictures helped to categorize the various natural phenomena, to disseminate knowledge about their appearance and, so to speak, to capture them on paper or canvas. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, natural historians treating extreme and threatening natural phenomena, such as volcanoes, earthquakes, waterspouts or geysers, increasingly supplemented their written accounts with engraved illustrations. In this paper, I concentrate on the visual treatment of earthquakes in learned publications. I discuss two different types of graphic representation of this natural phenomenon, which had always been considered as virtually ‘undepictable’.

After the great earthquake of Lisbon in 1755, research into the subject was greatly stimulated. Two scholars, the British natural philosopher John Michell and the Dutchman Johan Drijfhout, published earthquake treatises in learned journals, and each complemented his text with a diagrammatic illustration. By translating their theoretical considerations into the abstract form of geological sections, these natural philosophers moulded a new visual language for seismology and earth history. An entirely different example of visual representation as a tool in research into earthquakes can be seen in the approach to the earthquake in Calabria in 1783. The Neapolitan Academy of Science and Letters sent some of its members to investigate the devastating effects of this earthquake on the landscape and the nature of the country. The topographical changes were recorded on the spot by trained draughtsmen, with the aim of providing accurate and comprehensive visual documentation. The pictures are remarkable in the way they reveal a conflict between the new demands of modern empirical science and the established ‘picturesque’ conventions of landscape painting.

For the artist, mathematics does not consist of the various branches of mathematics. It is not necessarily a matter of calculation but rather of the presence of a sovereign power; a law of infinite resonance, consonance, organisation. Rigour is nothing other than that which truly results in a work of art, whether it be a Leonardo drawing, or the fearsome exactness of the Parthenon (comparable in the cutting of its marble even with that of machine-tools), or the implacable and impeccable play of construction in the cathedral, or the unity in a Cézanne, or the law which determines a tree, the unitary splendour of roots, trunk, branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit. Chance has no place in nature. Once one has understood what mathematics is – in the philosophical sense – thereafter one can discern it in all its works. Rigour, and exactness, are the means behind achieving solutions, the cause behind character, the rationale behind harmony.

Le Corbusier, 1948

Probably everyone reading this article has heard of Le Corbusier, no doubt the most famous architect this century, but the images he will arouse in their minds may vary greatly. Some will blame him for those theories promoting standardized high rise construction, which have dominated town planning policy in post-war Europe. Others will admire his highly individual, sculptural buildings such as the church at Ronchamp (1950–55) (see Figure 1), the revolutionary public housing scheme of the Unité d'Habitation at Marseilles (1946–52) (Figure 2), its ground-level pillars (pilotis) and roof-level service stacks alike transformed into enigmatic statues, or his pre-war Purist villas in the Paris suburbs (1920s). His work displayed a wide variety of forms and spaces at any one time, and his career spanned almost sixty years, during which he was constantly questioning, and reformulating theories, and in consequence changing his formal language.