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Helmholtz (lecture of 1869): *
Helmholtz was involved in numerous disputes in the scientific community between what he called the Hegelians & the scientists (moral versus natural scientists): in the late 40s & 50s disputes over the universality of his conservation of energy theory, the 1860s major arguments over vision & perception & in the 1870s disputes over electrodynamics. For Helmholtz the issue was too many of his opponents based their arguments on foundations inaccessible to critical investigation. Helmholtz believed this latter approach needed to end. By the late 1860s he was a spokesman for the sciences, with a prominent role in the German scientific establishment. His numerous papers & discoveries in the 1850s & 1860s (human hearing & vision) put him squarely in the public's eye as the pre-eminent scientist of Germany.
In his lecture “On the aim & progress of physical science” Helmholtz presents epistemological & methodological principles central to the creation of an objective form of knowledge, which would also lead to unity in the sciences. He stressed the need to discover natural laws, the laws regulating nature. This speech is often seen as his move away from a Kantian a priori paradigm towards an empirical approach. He looked to break the link between science as an empirical study, and ontology or metaphysics seeking transcendent ultimate essences. He suggested graphical methods (detailed imagery) were well suited for this especially in life sciences, and preferable to objective abstractions. He follows JS Mills closely regarding induction (from the detailed to the general). He is clearly a reductionist, seeking mechanical explanations using empirical induction, as against Idealism, intuitive hypothesis.