LOGIC FOUNDATION OF NATURAL HISTORY: FROM STENO TO EMPIRIC GEOLOGISTS SUCH AS LYELL, DARWIN AND WEGENER AND PRAGMATIC PHILOSOPHERS SUCH AS KANT, PEIRCE AND POPPER

Due to his two geological dissertations Niels Stensen (Steno, 1638-1686) is considered founder of paleontology (1667) and geology (1669) as disciplines of science, just as his many anatomical dissertations on the human glands, lymphatic system, muscles, heart and brain make Steno one of the great pioneers of anatomy.

However, it is practically unknown that Steno was also an important natural philosopher of his time, when he formulated many of the ontological principles for scientific cognition that lifted Renaissance sciences out of the late Medieval’s lack of principles. The new Stenonian principles in many ways contributed to the coming centuries’ higher credibility of natural science than of other scientific branches. Thus, Steno should be credited for being the first who stringently divided scientific from religious arguments, and the first scientist who is consequent in the demand for both theoretical considerations and empirical tests if a result should be considered ‘of demonstrative certainty’.

Most importantly Steno created significant parts of the ontological basis for the upcoming historical (diachronous) and systemic sciences of biology and geology. By this process biology and geology gained own existence and soon departed more and more from ahistoric (achronous) and mathematically founded disciplines such as physics and chemistry. From Newton’s time until far into the 20^th Century this led to many conflicts between on the one hand pragmatic ‘natural historians’ who on a retrospective and empirical basis search for scientific understanding of complex systems and their development, and on the other hand categorical ‘determinists’ who on a prospective and experimental basis search for mathematical order in nature’s more simple systems.