The Republic of Letters in Transition: William Thomson and Natural Philosophy ca. 1850

The paper focuses on William Thomson‘s (later Lord Kelvin) endeavours as a “natural philosopher” around 1850, as illustrated in his published and unpublished writings, including the notes describing his daily experimental work and his visits to foreign laboratories. A metaphor that Thomas Nagel introduced some years ago into philosophical debate is adopted to convey the outcome of the historical reconstruction of Thomson’s work in those years. It is the metaphor of “the view from nowhere”. Nagel used the metaphor in an attempt to capture the rationale of our efforts aimed to reach a degree of objectivity in our knowledge. Nagel’s point was that there is no absolutely objective view of things, but it may be worth trying to reach “the view from nowhere”. The paper claims that the loose, imagined communities that scientists like Thomson conceived and temporarily joined in their endeavours across the Republic of Letters amounted to just as many attempts to reach the view from nowhere in the search for objectivity. After the “localist” turn in science studies, we know that no such view can possibly be attained. And yet, as argued in the paper, even pragmatic, locally oriented, engineering, “capitalist” scientists like Thomson occasionally indulged in that impossible exercise. It is suggested that historians of science themselves should, from time to time, be allowed to indulge in the search of the view from nowhere if they really want to understand how local and distant factors combine in scientific practice.