William Whewell in the History of Philosophy of Science

The article is devoted to the biography and contribution to the development of scientific, historical and philosophical thought of William Whewell, an outstanding English researcher and thinker of the first half of the XIXth century. Here I turn to what I consider to be three of the most important strands of Whewell’s thought and work, which have given him a place of honor in the history of philosophical and scientific thought and continue to be relevant in the context of contemporary debates in the philosophy of science and epistemology. Firstly, Whewell was one of the first to attempt to systematically describe con- temporary scientific disciplines from their historical perspective. Secondly, based on the history of scientific disciplines he described, he proposed his original concept of the philosophy of science, which was an alternative to the positivist view of science. Thirdly, not limiting himself to theorizing, Whewell organized and successfully implemented one of the first social experiments in the history of science – a study of tides, which went down in the history of science as The Great Tide Experiment – the first case of «citizen science». In conclusion, I show that the ideas proposed by William Whewell not only formed the basis of the modern organization of scientific knowledge, but also remain important for contemporary discussions on distributed cognition and the role of philosophy of science in understanding the phenomenon of modern scientific thought.