FROM METAPHYSICS TO LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY
323
Yet it appears that MacIntyre's ire is highly selective: essentially nor–
mative theses in scientistic garb had been advanced on all fronts, whether
socialist or liberal. However once the contemporary normative case for lib–
eralism is fully appreciated, it can be seen as a very promising, non-utopian
yet hopeful attempt to understand human community life, and not at all
inconsistent with proper science or reasonable moral sensibilities.
Richard Garner:
Thank you, Professor Machan. Next we will hear from
Gunther Stent, Professor Emeri tus of Neurobiology at the University of
California at Berkeley. His topic will be "The Master and his Atelier."
Gunther Stent:
The social structure of the workplaces of experimental
science and of painting-laboratory and atelier-changed towards the end
of the nineteenth century. Wi th the advent of professionalism in science,
the laboratory grew from the traditionallone-scientist's studio into a fac–
tory (where a team of researchers worked under the direction of a
master- cientist). Concurrently, upon the advent of modernism in art, the
atelier shrunk from a factory (where a team of painters worked under the
direction of a master-painter) to a lone-painter studio. Here, I will describe
these reciprocal structural transformations of the workplaces of experi–
mental science and painting at thefin
du dix-neuvieme siecie
and outline what
became of them by the
fin du vingtieme siecie.
The philosophical roots of the modern scientific laboratory can be
traced to Elizabethan England, where the courtier Francis Bacon called for
an experimental interrogation of Nature. This interrogation was to be
implemented by observations done, not
in
Nature, under natural condi–
tions, but out of Nature, in the laboratory under artificially contrived,
deliberately controlled condi tions.
One of the first Baconian laboratories was dedicated
to
physiological
research, set up by Bacon's doctor, William Harvey. He showed by surgical
manipulations of the vascular system of experimental animals that the
heart is a pump that drives blood circulation. Soon thereafter, Otto von
Guericke and Evangelista Toricelli set up laboratories for physical research,
in which they carried out experiments that proved the existence of the
vacuum. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Antoine Lavoisier
established a chemical laboratory in Paris, which he financed by money he
received as a partner of one of the notorious "tax farming" companies of
the
Ancien Regime.
Lavoisier, one of the founders of modem chemistry, dis–
covered the role of oxygen in combustion, and elucidated the general
importance of oxidation-reduction processes in chemistry and physiology.
All of these pre-nineteenth century experimentalists worked alone in their
laboratories, aided at most by one or two paid assistants, or, as in the case
of Lavoisier, by their spouse.
