The multiple agendas of a physiologist. Sigmund Exner's reading of John Stuart Mill

Veronika Hofer
Department of History, University of Vienna

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     Last modified: June 15, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/14/2005 4:00 PM in MACK 238
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Abstract
title of session: Franz Unger-Sigmund Exner- Eugen Steinach: natures flexibility and physiologys agenda for humanity
my abstract: This paper wants to show in which ways the philosophy of John Stuart Mill has been of extraordinary significance for Sigmund Exner. Sigmund Exner, one of the leading physiologists of his time, not only made important contributions in the anatomical and functional analyses of the brain, but holds an eminent place in the history of instruments and communication. He was a most ingenious man in planning apparatuses as models as well as tests for perception theories. He organized or helped organizing important research laboratories in Vienna like the Vivarium, run by Hans Przibam, or the Phonogrammarchiv, the worlds first of this kind. He was praised for his seminal and creative design of experiments and also as a role model for an empiricist disciplined in drawing theoretical conclusions. He was a man of strong opinions concerning morals and felt obliged to involve himself in important public debates.
As in other local intellectual formations, in Vienna the reception of J.St.Mills epistemology and utilitarianism tended to form a bulwark against religious and methodological dogmatism. But in Vienna, as the basis of Anti-Kantianism was traditionally a broad one, the reception of Mills pragmatist philosophy opened up the intellectual disputes for vivid and multiple interpretations of the material or immaterial basis of human culture, of the meaning of tradition, of the material products of habituation and of various hypothesis about the mixed nature of conventions as a product of evolution. In Vienna, Mills philosophy gained fervent admirers. Here was the fertile laboratory for the debates, how best to put culture, traditions and history to the test and what scientific and cultural strategy is in need for a better future. In Vienna there existed two different schools of modernized empiricism as a new basis for psychology, one in line with the philosopher Brentano, the other formed the basis for the physiologists like Sigmund Exner or the phycisist-philosopher Ernst Mach. While restraint with respect to theoretical hypothesis for Exner was an attitude, Mach developed it into a genuine methodology.
In a closer reading of some of his papers, I want to demonstrate how his position in the debates over Darwinism and Lamarckism, was also influenced by his reception of Mills philosophy.
(363 words)

Multiple Paper Session:
Other papers in this session:
Resources of Useful Plants and Patterns of Their Worldwide Distribution. Franz Unger's Bromatorische Linie (1857) between Humboldt's Plant Geography and the Vavilovian Gene Centres
The Double Gonad, die Umwelt des Keimplasmas, and the Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics