The 2022 article “The lady vanishes” by Ann-Sophie Barwich, published on the online magazine AEON, is devoted to Mary Hesse. It is an interesting peice where Barwich argues that “the overwhelming absence of women in intellectual history is constructed. And we won’t prevent the fading of women from future history simply with an occasional reminder about the existence of a few remarkable individuals throughout the ages. What really causes our collective forgetting is the stepwise removal of their names from ongoing conversation.” For Barwich, “the story of Mary Hesse shows how quickly even well-known women from our recent past can vanish from the collective memory of their peers.”
Hesse was different. Her ideas present a refreshing departure from her contemporaries’ single-minded infatuation with the logic and justification of scientific knowledge and the idea that the rationality of philosophers ruled the foundation of science.
Mary Hesse at the Ninth Symposium of the Colston Research Society in Bristol (1957)
The next session of our research seminar will be in charge of Francesco Nappo, from the Politecnico of Milan.
On October 24th, starting at 11:00, he will deliver a paper titled “Mary Hesse on Materiality and Induction“. Aim of this paper is to discuss one of the most widespread misinterpretations of Hesse’s works, which concerns the distinction between “formal” and “material” analogies in science, provide an interpretation of Hesse’s material condition that does justice to its epistemological significance, and bring out connections to some of Hesse’s other works on the topic of induction and scientific reasoning.
The session will take place at Colégio Almada Negreiros of the NOVA University of Lisbon , Room SE1.
