Publisher's Synopsis
These studies investigate the concept of nature and science in early Enlightenment thinking on natural law and the contribution to its development made by Albrecht von Haller's scientific method. Relevant to this is Haller's response to the Newtonianism of Willem Jacob 'sGravesande, who proposed an experimentalist reinterpretation of Newton's mathematical approach to science and based his scientific epistemology on 'moral' evidence. This is the background to Haller's assessment of the hypotheses around 1750. The amalgamation of natural and human sciences, whose analogies had established the matrix of natural law, is thus a constitutive element in Haller's understanding of physiology and its significance for a social ethic that he championed against neo-Spinozian and materialistic interpretations of nature.
