Cambridge mineralogist, moral philosopher, mystic, educator and polymath. As one contemporary put it, "science is his forte, omniscience is his foible". Although a close friend of the English historicist Richard Jones, William Whewell nonetheless set himself the task of translating a lot of given economic theory into mathematics (1829, 1830, 1850) -- an endeavor that was not warmly welcomed by many contemporaries. However, he did support Jones's inductive methodology in principle. His attempts to fit mathematical demand curves to data and his derivation of an equilibrium in trade in a 1850 article have led some to consider him a proto-Marginalist.
Whewell is also widely regarded as the father of modern philosophy of science. He was the most renowned of the writers of the Bridgewater Treatises in the 1830s, a Royal Society-organized collection of essays connecting religion/mysticism and science -- what was then known as "natural theology". Loosely, Whewell's basic argument was that knowledge of the world is acquired because there are "fundamental" and uniform laws of science which we are able to discover. Whewell took this as evidence of the existence of a divinity to provide such uniformity. These underlying scientific laws of the world are precisely the "Ideas" that God used in his creation of it. Taking it a step further, Whewell went on to argue that science, by "discovering" these laws, was itself a providential task as it brought men closer to understanding the majesty of God's design.
In less religious moments, Whewell is best known for his theory of induction (which led up to a sharp debate with the more empirically-minded John Stuart Mill). The "sharing" of human mind and physical phenomena was used by Whewell to argue that a priori ideas were necessarily "true" in an empirical sense. Because mind and world are synchronized by the same principle, human intuition and empirical evidence tend to achieve the same results. To use a famous example, Whewell did not accept that 2 + 1 = 3 on the grounds that it was a tautology (i.e. "2 + 1 is the definition of 3", as argued by Condillac and James Mill) nor because it was an empirical fact ("experience shows that a triple of things can be divided into a double and a single", as argued by John Stuart Mill). Instead, Whewell argued that because it is inconceivable to think that 2 + 1 is not equal to 3, therefore 2 + 1 = 3. Empirical evidence merely confirms this natural intuition, but it is not the cause of it.
Whewell was also an able pedagogue with an important role in reorganizing Trinity College, Cambridge. Whewell was critical in introducing the "moral sciences" and "natural sciences" examinations at Cambridge in 1848. He was also notable wordsmith, e.g. the positive/negative charge language for electochemistry used since Faraday and even the terms "scientist" and "physicist" in their modern meaning are originally due to Whewell.
Major works of William Whewell
Resources on William Whewell