Mary Somerville (1780-1872) on the Unity of Science

Archival research for a journal article and an encyclopedia entry on Scottish scientist Mary Somerville (1780-1872). My project will provide the first extended explication of Mary Somerville's (1780–1872) conception of the unity of science. I will contextualize how her ideas may have fit into and influenced 19th-century philosophical debates about this unity, thereby introducing her as a relevant figure in the history of philosophy of science. I aim to answer the following questions: What is the scope of her imperial metaphor for science? How might she be responding to anxieties about the fragmentation of knowledge and society in early Victorian Britain? Does 'unity' for Somerville mean, e.g., having common mathematical formulations, shared simple principles, similar subject matter, or a univocal method of investigation or experiment? All these options were considered in contemporaneous and later 19th-century debates about the unity of scientific knowledge and method, e.g., between polymaths William Whewell (1794–1866) and John Herschel (1792–1871) and philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873).