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History of methodology has become, in our age, an intensively studied subject which is hoped to make significant contributions to our understanding of both the history and the philosophy of science. Because of the repercussions to currently debated issues, the nineteenth-century methodology seems to be a particularly rewarding topic for a philosopher of science.¹; It is no accident that, at the same time when philosophers of science have been searching for new directions after the rejection of the central theses of logical empiricism, there has been a notable revival of interest in philosophers who in various ways were opposed to the influential traditions of French positivism (Comte) and British empiricism (Herschel, Mill, Jevons). Among these thinkers we find "Kantians' from Kant himself to J.F. Fries, William Whewell, and Ernst Apelt, "realists' like Bernard Bolzano and Charles Sanders Peirce, "hermeneutic" historians like Wilhelm Dilthey, and working scientists like Karl Marx.²

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-1978-0_3

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