Professor Dr Jutta Schickore

Research Priorities: History of science, philosophy of science, methods of empirical research

Jutta Schickore is a German philosopher whose research focuses on the history and philosophy of scientific methods.  She examines both the empirical sciences of the 18th and 19th centuries as well as contemporary research practices.

Some of the fundamental questions of the philosophy of science are also central to the organisation of scientific work: How does one best carry out and safeguard experiments? How does one recognise important empirical results? How do hypotheses arise and how are they tested? And can scientific knowledge ever be certain? Jutta Schickore calls the answers to such fundamental questions “working philosophies” as they combine everyday research practice with fundamental considerations of a scientific and theoretical nature. Such working philosophies and their history are at the heart of Jutta Schickore’s work.

Accordingly, she concerns herself less with the famous philosophers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries such as Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling, who, while very interested in science, contributed little to the discussion on practical questions relating to experiments or the testing of hypotheses. Instead, she concentrates more on texts that to date have received very little attention in the history of the philosophy of science. Such texts include chapters on methods in scientific manuals, and introductions to “applied” logic. These texts systematically deal with topics such as control experiments and other experimental strategies, causal relationships, hypotheses, reliability, and replicability. They form a bridge between the early modern view of science and modern scientific theory. 

In this regard, Jutta Schickore is particularly interested in scientific branches such as pharmacology, veterinary medicine, criminal psychology, and education, which are concerned with practical problems of every life. In her book “About Method”, published in 2017, she describes, for example, the history of snake poison research from 1660 up to the 20th century. Experiments with dangerous reptiles and their poisons had always been challenging and controversial. Researchers thus meticulously documented relevant experiments as far back as the 17th century. These very detailed notes provide particular insight into how ideas about scientific work have changed over the centuries.

Other key areas of Jutta Schickore’s research include the history of microscopy, the role of uncertainty, mistakes and errors in science, and the shifting relationship between the history of science and the philosophy of science from the 19th century to the present day.