Mary Brenda Hesse
*October 15, 1924 (Reigate, Sussex, UK)
†October 02, 2016 (Cambridge, UK)
Mary Brenda Hesse was a pioneer in history and philosophy of science, challenging the dominant ideas of her time and building bridges across history of science and philosophy of science, as well as across Anglo-Saxon philosophy of science and of language and French and German historical epistemology, critical theory, and hermeneutics. She is often framed as a post-empiricist in her views on science and a post-wittgenstinian in her views on language, and scholars in the Anglo-Saxon community have found her engagement with Habermas particularly noticeable (sometimes commented on in a somewhat derogatory fashion). She herself expressed an identification with post-modernism. During her scholarly life she touched on several topics which remain relevant today, not least the role of metaphors and models in scientific reasoning, artificial intelligence and reasoning, and the relation between natural and social sciences and religion. Amongst her most significant contributions are the claim that history of science relies on philosophy of science and vice versa, notions such as hesse-net and finitism, and an early engagement with social sciences which developed into social epistemology and sociology of scientific knowledge. Her schematisation of analogical reasoning with scientific models while disputed for its philosophical content remains the standard way of representation in current day philosophy of science.
Hesse’s first interest in scholarly work was in science, evoked when – during the Second World War – she joined a course in electronics. From there she advanced into laboratory work and in 1945 received a Bachelor of Science in Special Mathematics from Imperial College. In 1948 she completed a PhD on electron microscopy from UCL (University College London), and in 1951 she took a lectureship in mathematics at the University of Leeds. However, in the interim period between her PhD and her post at Leeds, Hesse taught at a women’s’ college while she studied for a Master in History and Philosophy of Science which she finished in 1950 under the supervision of Herbert Dingle at UCL. When Dingle retired from his post in 1955, Hesse returned to UCL to become a lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science. Contrary to Hesse’s conviction, several colleagues at UCL saw history and philosophy of science as opposing traditions, and in 1955, she thus applied for a newly created post as a lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge, joining Gert Buchdahl and Michael Hoskin in what was then only a small group within the science tripos, overseen by the faculty of philosophy. Two candidates were short-listed for the position, Mary Hesse and Majorie Green, and although Hesse was never someone to emphasize gender, she has remarked that this was exceptional and likely an expression that the new post was not particularly sought after. Hesse remained in Cambridge – advancing to Reader (1968) and later to Professor (1975) – for the rest of her life, intermitted by visits to several universities abroad, including Yale, Minnesota, Chicago, and Notre Dame. In 1965, Hesse became a member of the newly founded Wolfson College (then ‘University College’) which admitted both men and women. This became an important place for her, and she was an active presence there until shortly before her death. In 1985 Hesse took early retirement from her professorship, and re-verted to student status, studying Landscape history. She eventually published several articles in this field as well, including her final publication on ‘East Fields of Cambridge’ published in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society in 2007.
In her time, Hesse was an important although perhaps somewhat isolated figure – in part because she was an unmarried woman who did not fit into the social schemas of Cambridge life, in part because she had conflicting claims on her time with a strong sense of responsibility towards caring duties for her mother and towards her religious community in the Anglican Church. She was the interlocutor of scholars such as Rorty, Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Ricoeur, and an early discussant of sociology of scientific knowledge – supervising David Bloor for his PhD and engaging with established sociological scholars such as Mary Douglas. She also took on a number of prestigious roles for the academic community, including acting as vice-president for the British Society for the History of Science (1965-69), as the editor of the British Journal for Philosophy of Science (1965-69), as a fellow of the British Academy (from 1979) and as the first female president of the Philosophy of Science Association (1979-80 – followed by the second women, Nancy Cartwright, only in 2009).
by Helene Scott-Fordsmand
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