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It is argued that the core of Maxwell’s unification strategy was formed by Kantian epistemology looked through the prism of William Whewell and such representatives of Scottish Enlightenment as Thomas Reid and William Hamilton. All these enabled Maxwell to start to unify not only optics and electromagnetism, but British and continental research traditions as well. Maxwell’s programme did supersede the Ampere-Weber one because Maxwell did put forward as a synthetic principle the idea, that differed from that of Ampere-Weber by its flexible and contraontological, strictly epistemological, Kantian character. For Maxwell, ether was not the last building block of physical reality, from which fields and charges should be constructed. «Action at a distance», «incompressible fluid», «molecular vortices» were only models for Maxwell, capable only to direct the researcher on the «right» mathematical relations. From the «representational» point of view all this hydrodynamical models were doomed to failure efforts to describe what can not be described in principle – things in themselves, the «nature» of electrical and magnetic phenomena. On the contrary, Maxwell aimed his programme to find empirically meaningful mathematical relations between the electrodynamics basic objects, i.e. the creation of inter – coordinated electromagnetic field equations system.

Namely the application of this epistemology enabled Hermann von Helmholtz and his pupil Heinrich Hertz to arrive at such a version of Maxwell’s theory that served a heuristical basis for the radiowaves discovery.

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в кавычках даны оценки самого Дж. Максвелла