ABSTRACT
In a series of influential papers David Knight has argued that, in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, the physical sciences had a ‘Romantic’ aspect. Aristotle’s conception requires that metaphysics, far from being idle speculation or instrumental presupposition, makes powerful claims about the world, including those aspects of the world science investigates. It differs from the view of those who take metaphysics to be just the unconscious presuppositions of a thinker or an age. Some of the bewilderment we feel when we read Davy or Oken is indeed dispelled when we understand what they wrote not as any kind of science, but as imaginative literature rooted in a specific social and cultural setting. The Romantic scientists inherited a way of thinking about how science can provide understanding of our world; it had, and has deep roots and is a key part of their, and our, cultural inheritance.
