Tyndall’s Philosophy of Science and Nature

Abstract

The philosophers who inspired Tyndall to pursue a scientific career were also the sources from which Tyndall extracted and shaped his own philosophy of science and his conception of what a scientist should be. In exploiting the philosophical ideas that he discovered as a young man, he changed them to fit with his own developing perspective as a scientific researcher and lecturer, and thus the men who acted as formative influences on his own philosophy also became tools, as it were, in his projection of himself and of his brand of science. In examining those early influences, one is in effect discovering the roots of Tyndall’s vision of the natural world, and in analyzing the ways in which he slanted their philosophies one can discover the nature of his own persona as a public scientist.KeywordsNatural WorldRoyal InstitutionFormative InfluenceScientific CuriosityFriday EveningThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.