Faraday as a Natural Philosopher (review)

Abstract

488 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY this fragment, however, affirms its Hegelian authorship" (p. 61). This most recent scholarship is P6ggeler's, and it is uncertain within the context of Cook's study whether Cook agrees or disagrees with P/Sggeler. The passage, I think, needs rewriting, We know that Hegel's views and Schelling's diverge rather significantly. I do not want to end this review on a negative note, however. Taken as a whole, Cook's work offers us much in the way of help toward investigating Hegel on language. It is a definite contribution to the literature and should rekindle interest in the conceptual relevance of Hegel's thought. STEPHENA. ERICKSON Pomona College Faraday as a Natural Philosopher. By Joseph Agassi. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Pp. xiv + 359. $12.50) The history of science can be studied philosophically in at least three ways: by emphasizing the philosophical content of scientific thought as Koyr6 did in much of his work; by exploring the philosophical significance of past science, an example being Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations o[ Modern Science; or by giving a philosophical interpretation of scientific history, e.g., A. I. Sabra's Theories o[ Light from Descartes to Newton. Agassi's book is philosophical in these three ways as it studies the work of Michael Faraday (1791-1867), the English scientist best known for his discovery in 1831 of electro-magnetic induction, which is the phenomenon of generating an electric current in a wire by moving it relative to a magnet. As such the book deserves the attention of every historian of philosophy whose interest is not limited to his scholarly specialty but includes a willingness to explore broader conceptions of philosophy and/or history. This is not to say that one will be always satisfied with the clarity, cogency, or scholarliness of the book; but it is to say that the historian of philosophy will find the book certainly challenging, and probably inspiring, both historiographically and philosophically. The three above mentioned philosophical strands of the book are not at all easy to detect or extract; in fact it can easily give the impression of being primarily an account of Faraday's life from the point of view of the interplay between his personal, private life and his public, scientific one; this is an impression obtainable even from Agassi's explicit words (xii-xiii) to the effect that he is writing a somewhat unorthodox biography, of a type which aims to discuss many of the complexities of the life of men of science, which are usually neglected, or at least streamlined. However, I will concentrate on the philosophical-historiographical content of the book, though I do not deny that it is in part such a biography. The philosophical content of Faraday's work falls in two areas, philosophy of nature and philosophy of science. Agassi himself is not very explicit in distinguishing these two elements, but he does so implicitly; hence it is useful to make the distinction. The discussion emphasizes the philosophy of nature (chapters 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, and 9), so much so that the one chapter on Faraday's philosophy of science may be easily lost sight of, an oversight encouraged by the book's title as well. Faraday's philosophy of nature is portrayed as being a reaction against the Newtonianism prevailing at the time, as falling in the tradition of Boscovich and Kant, and as being the field-theoretic conception of the world: that lines of force are the fundamental entities in nature, and in particular that they pervade the so-called "empty" space, which is therefore not empty; that matter is simply a concentration of lines of forces, and hence is not material in the usual sense; and that force is conserved and different forces can be converted into one another. This world view is the one that eventually triumphed in some sense, at least in the work of BOOK REVIEWS 489 Clerk-Maxwell and Einstein. Agassi explicitly refrains from arguing that because of this subsequent triumph, one can see the merit of Faraday's philosophy of nature; yet I personally cannot deny that I get the impression that Agassi...