The great war that never was — 1871–1914
Abstract I.F. Clarke concludes his two-part study of the forecasts of future warfare in the half-century before the outbreak of World War I. He argues that the experts failed to foresee trench warfare and the long stalemate on the Western Front, precisely because they were experts, and that the devastating effects of the new military technologies ended the old-style belief in the uninterrupted forward march of mankind.
Almanac of anticipations: The age of affluence—of anticipation—of anxiety—of automation—of discontinuity—of longing—of overkill—of space exploration
Abstract With this survey of developments in the futures field since 1945, I.F. Clarke completes his present series for Futures. He makes two major points: that forecasting techniques have become essential tools in the management of change; and that nuclear weapons and ecological problems have added a moral dimension to the study of the future. In the next issue of Futures he will start a new series on the range of future-thinking in the USA, from the expectations of the first settlers to the Star Wars programme.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.