Download or read book Protophysics of Time written by P. Janich and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For protophysics, the fascinating and impressive constructive re-establish ment of the foundations of science by Professor Paul Lorenzen, working with his colleagues and students of the Erlangen School, no task is more central than to.furmulate a theoretical understanding of the practical art of measurement of time. We are pleased, therefore, to have a new third edition of Peter Janich's masterful monograph on the protophysics of time, available in this English translation within the Boston Studies. We also look forward to the Boston University Symposium on protophysics in april of this year within which the full program of protophysics will be critically examined by German and American physicists and philosophers, supporters and critics. We are also grateful to Paul Lorenzen for contributing his powerful instructive essay on the 'axiomatic and constructive method' which intro duces this book. March 1985 ROBERT S. COHEN Center for the Philosophy and History of Science Boston University MARX W. WARTOFSKY Department of Philosophy Barnch College City University of New York vii PAUL LORENZEN CONSTRUCTIVE AND AXIOM A TIC METHOD Mathematics is like a big building with many apartments. We have at least Arithmetic and Analysis, Algebra and Topology - and we have Geometry and Probability-Theory. Very often the tenants of these different apartments seem not to understand each other. The Bourbaki movement promised a new unity of Mathematics by admit ting only the axiomatic method of Hilbert as genuine mathematical.
Download or read book Space Time and Mechanics written by D. Mayr and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In connection with the "Philosophy of Science" research program conducted by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft a colloquium was held in Munich from 18th to 20th May 1919. This covered basic structures of physical theories, the main emphasis being on the interrelation of space, time and mechanics. The present volume contains contributions and the results of the discussions. The papers are given here in the same order of presentation as at the meeting. The development of these "basic structures of physical theories" involved diverging trends arising from different starting points in philosophy and physics. In order to obtain a clear comparison between these schools of thought, it was appropriate to concentrate discussion on geometry and chronology as the common foundation of classical and quantum mechanics. As a rather simple and "Tell prepared field of study, geochronometry seemed suited to analysing these mutually exclusive positions. vii D. Mayr and G. Sussmann (eds.), Space, Time, and Mechanics, vii. Copyright © 1983 by D. Reidel Publishing Company. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The editors gratefully appreciate the sponsorship of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the cooperation of the authors and publisher. It is also a pleasure to thank Frau M.-L. Grohmann and Frau I. Thies for their organisational and especially Frau B. Grund for typing and clerical work. D. MAYR G. SUSSMANN 1982 University of Munich viii INTRODUCTION The distinct positions present at the symposium may be roughly divided into three schools that differ in their philosophical interpretation of physics and their meta- .. . ~ .
Download or read book Concepts of Mass in Contemporary Physics and Philosophy written by Max Jammer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-08 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of mass is one of the most fundamental notions in physics, comparable in importance only to those of space and time. But in contrast to the latter, which are the subject of innumerable physical and philosophical studies, the concept of mass has been but rarely investigated. Here Max Jammer, a leading philosopher and historian of physics, provides a concise but comprehensive, coherent, and self-contained study of the concept of mass as it is defined, interpreted, and applied in contemporary physics and as it is critically examined in the modern philosophy of science. With its focus on theories proposed after the mid-1950s, the book is the first of its kind, covering the most recent experimental and theoretical investigations into the nature of mass and its role in modern physics, from the realm of elementary particles to the cosmology of galaxies. The book begins with an analysis of the persistent difficulties of defining inertial mass in a noncircular manner and discusses the related question of whether mass is an observational or a theoretical concept. It then studies the notion of mass in special relativity and the delicate problem of whether the relativistic rest mass is the only legitimate notion of mass and whether it is identical with the classical (Newtonian) mass. This is followed by a critical analysis of the different derivations of the famous mass-energy relationship E = mc2 and its conflicting interpretations. Jammer then devotes a chapter to the distinction between inertial and gravitational mass and to the various versions of the so-called equivalence principle with which Newton initiated his Principia but which also became the starting point of Einstein's general relativity, which supersedes Newtonian physics. The book concludes with a presentation of recently proposed global and local dynamical theories of the origin and nature of mass. Destined to become a much-consulted reference for philosophers and physicists, this book is also written for the nonprofessional general reader interested in the foundations of physics.
Download or read book Physical Sciences and History of Physics written by Robert S. Cohen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays on the conceptual understanding of modern physics strike directly at some of the principal difficulties faced by contemporary philos ophers of physical science. Moreover, they reverberate to earlier and classical struggles with those difficulties. Each of these essays may be seen as both a commentary on our predecessors and an original analytic interpretation. They come from work of the past decade, most from meetings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science, and they demonstrate again how problematic the fundamentals of our understanding of nature still are. The themes will seem to be familiar but the variations are not only ingenious but also stimulating, in some ways counterpoint. And so once again we are confronted with issues of space and time, irreversibility and measurement, matter and process, hypothetical reality and verifiability, explanation and reduction, phenomenal base and sophisticated theory, unified science and the unity of nature, and the limits of conventionalism. We are grateful for the cooperation of our contributors, and in particular for the agreement of George Ellis and C. F. von Weizsiicker to allow us to use previously published papers.
Download or read book Philosophy of Chemistry written by Davis Baird and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-06-26 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive volume marks a new standard in scholarship in the emerging field of the philosophy of chemistry. Philosophers, chemists, and historians of science ask some fundamental questions about the relationship between philosophy and chemistry.
Download or read book Incommensurability and Related Matters written by Paul Hoyningen-Huene and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Incommensurability and Related Matters draws together some of the most distinguished contributors to the critical literature on the problem of the incommensurability of scientific theories. It addresses all the various problems raised by the problem of incommensurability, such as meaning change, reference of theoretical terms, scientific realism and anti-realism, rationality of theory choice, cognitive aspects of conceptual change, as well as exploring the broader implications of incommensurability for cultural difference. While it offers new work, and new directions of discussion, on the topic of incommensurability, the book also recapitulates the history of the discussion of the topic that has taken place within the literature on incommensurability.
Download or read book The Reception of Darwinism in the Iberian World written by T.F Glick and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I Twenty-five years ago, at the Conference on the Comparative Reception of Darwinism held at the University of Texas in 1972, only two countries of the Iberian world-Spain and Mexico-were represented.' At the time, it was apparent that the topic had attracted interest only as regarded the "mainstream" science countries of Western Europe, plus the United States. The Eurocentric bias of professional history of science was a fact. The sea change that subsequently occurred in the historiography of science makes 1972 appear something like the antediluvian era. Still, we would like to think that that meeting was prescient in looking beyond the mainstream science countries-as then perceived-in order to test the variation that ideas undergo as they pass from center to periphery. One thing that the comparative study of the reception of ideas makes abundantly clear, however, is the weakness of the center/periphery dichotomy from the perspective of the diffusion of scientific ideas. Catholics in mainstream countries, for example, did not handle evolution much better than did their corre1igionaries on the fringes. Conversely, Darwinians in Latin America were frequently better placed to advance Darwin's ideas in a social and political sense than were their fellow evolutionists on the Continent. The Texas meeting was also a marker in the comparative reception of scientific ideas, Darwinism aside. Although, by 1972, scientific institutions had been studied comparatively, there was no antecedent for the comparative history of scientific ideas.
Download or read book Analysis and Synthesis in Mathematics written by Michael Otte and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1997 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book discusses the main interpretations of the classical distinction between analysis and synthesis with respect to mathematics. In the first part, this is discussed from a historical point of view, by considering different examples from the history of mathematics. In the second part, the question is considered from a philosophical point of view, and some new interpretations are proposed. Finally, in the third part, one of the editors discusses some common aspects of the different interpretations.
Download or read book The Concept of Scientific Law in the Philosophy of Science and Epistemology written by Igor Hanzel and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author argues that a reconstruction of scientific laws should give an account of laws relating phenomena to underlying mechanisms generating them, as well as of laws relating this mechanism to its inherent capacities. While contemporary philosophy of science deals only with the former, the author provides the concept for the reconstruction of scientific laws, where the knowledge of the phenomena enables one to grasp the quantity of their cause. He then provides the concepts for scientific laws dealing with the relation of the quantity and quality of the cause underlying phenomena to the quality and quantity of its capacities. Finally, he provides concepts for scientific laws expressing how a certain cause, due to the quantity and quality of its capacities, generates the quantitative and qualitative determinations of its manifestations. The book is intended for philosophers of science and philosophers of social science, as well as for natural and social scientists.
Download or read book Hermeneutics and Science written by Márta Fehér and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hermeneutics was elaborated as a specific art of understanding in humanities. The discovered paradigmatic, historical characteristics of scientific knowledge, and the role of rhetoric, interpretation and contextuality enabled us to use similar arguments in natural sciences too. In this way a new research field, the hermeneutics of science emerged based upon the works of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Gadamer. A dialogue between philosophers and scientists begins in this volume on hermeneutic approaches to physics, biology, ethology, mathematics and cognitive science. Scientific principles, methodologies, discourse, language, and metaphors are analyzed, as well as the role of the lay public and the legitimation of science. Different hermeneutical-phenomenological approaches to perception, experiments, methods, discovery and justification and the genesis of science are presented. Hermeneutics shed a new light on the incommensurability of paradigms, the possibility of translation and the historical understanding of science.
Download or read book Issues and Images in the Philosophy of Science written by D. Ginev and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Azarya Polikarov was born in Sofia on October 9, 1921. Through the many stages of politics, economy, and culture in Bulgaria, he maintained his rational humanity and scientific curiosity. He has been a splendid teacher and an accomplished critical philosopher exploring the conceptual and historical vicis situdes of physics in modern times and also the science policies that favor or threaten human life in these decades. Equally and easily at home both within the Eastern and Central European countries and within the Western world. Polikarov is known as a collaborating genial colleague, a working scholar. not at all a visiting academic tourist. He understands the philosophy of science from within, in all its developments, from the classical beginnings through the great ages of Galilean, Newtonian. Maxwellian science. to the times of the stunning discoveries and imaginative theories of his beloved Einstein and Bohr of the twentieth century. Moreover, his understanding has come along with a deep knowledge of the scientific topics in themselves. Looking at our Appendix listing his principal publications, we see that Polikarov's public research career, after years of science teaching and popular science writing, began in the fifties in Bulgarian, Russian and German journals.
Download or read book Rethinking Explanation written by Johannes Persson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-05-16 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nature of scientific explanation has been an important topic in philosophy of science for many years. This book highlights some of the conceptual problems that still need to be solved and points out a number of fresh philosophical ideas to explore.
Download or read book The Historical Development of Energetics written by Georg Helm and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-12-01 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although produced in controversy, this book is not a controversial work. The calming effects of the years that have passed since the tumultuous days in Lubeck are enough to guarantee that these pages will accurately trace the coming and going of opinions, the battle for the truth and the recognition of error. In only a few passages, especially in Part Six, will one be able to tell from the tone of the book that it comes out of this struggle. For these I ask the indulgence of my reader, since they contain explanations the extent of which probably does not correspond either to the difficulty of the questions treated or to their influence. But in such passages the extent of treatment could not - as was otherwise the case - be made to depend solely on a judgment as to the value and significance of the investigations presented. There considerations of defense, more than concern for symmetry, had to determine the structure.
Download or read book Japanese Studies in the Philosophy of Science written by F.G. Nagasaka and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The splendid achievements of Japanese mathematics and natural sciences during the second half of our 20th century have been a revival, a Renaissance, of the practical sciences developed along with the turn toward Western thinking in the late 19th century. The equally admirable results of Japanese philosophers (and historians) of science in our time followed upon a period less congenial to Western interests in the philosophical questions linked to modern science; and this reluctance to confront the epistemology, not even the humane significance, of the sciences went along with devotion to other Western trends. Thus, with the 'new' Japan of the Meiji restoration of 1868, and the early introduction of Western philosophy in the subsequent decade by Nishi Amane, a period of intellectual attraction to utilitarian, positivist, evolutionary, even materialist outlooks was soon replaced by devotion to scholarly work on Kant and Hegel, on ethical and general philosophical idealism. These studies often could emulate the critical spirit (the philosopher Onishe Hajime, praised for his own critical independence, was known as the Japanese Kant) but the neo Kantian and neo-Hegelian developments were not much affected by either empirical sciences or theoretical speculations about Nature. The pre-eminent philosopher of Japan ofthe first half of our century was Nishida Kitaro, with a pioneering treatise A Study of the Good, who, with his leading student Tanabe Hajime, formed the 'Kyoto School' of pre-war philosophy.
Download or read book The Reception of the Galilean Science of Motion in Seventeenth Century Europe written by Carla Rita Palmerino and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-20 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collects contributions by some of the leading scholars working on seventeenth-century mechanics and the mechanical philosophy. Together, the articles provide a broad and accurate picture of the fortune of Galileo's theory of motion in Europe and of the various physical, mathematical, and ontological arguments that were used in favour and against it. Were Galileo's contemporaries really aware of what Westfall has described as "the incompatibility between the demands of mathematical mechanics and the needs of mechanical philosophy"? To what extent did Galileo's silence concerning the cause of free fall impede the acceptance of his theory of motion? Which methods were used, before the invention of the infinitesimal calculus, to check the validity of Galileo's laws of free fall and of parabolic motion? And what sort of experiments were invoked in favour or against these laws? These and related questions are addressed in this volume.
Download or read book Rescuing Reason written by R. Nola and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do knowledge and science arise from the application of canons of rationality and scientific method? Or is all our scientific knowledge caused by socio-political factors, or by our interests in the socio-political - the view of sociologists of "knowledge"? Or does it result from interplay of relations of power - the view of Michel Foucault? Or does our knowledge arise from "the will to power" - the view of Nietzsche? This volume sets out to critically examine the theses of those who would debunk the idea of rational explanation. The book is wide-ranging. The theories of method of Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend (amongst others) are discussed and related to the views of Marx, Foucault, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche as well as sociologists of science such as Mannheim and Bloor. The author provides a wide interpretative framework which links the doctrines espoused by many of these authors; it is argued that they inherit many of the difficulties in the Strong Programme in the sociology of "knowledge", and that they fail to reconcile the normativity of knowledge with their naturalism. It is argued that neither relativists, sceptics, nihilists, sociologists of "knowledge" nor the postmodernists successfully debunk the claims of rational explanation, far from it: these theorists presuppose much of the theory of methodology they deny.
Download or read book Science and the Pacific War written by Roy M. MacLeod and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1999-12-31 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War occasioned many reflections on the place of science and technology in the conflict. That the war ended with Allied victory in the Pacific theatre, inevitably focussed attention upon the Pacific region, and particularly upon the Manhattan project and its outcome. It was in the Pacific that Western physics and engineering gave birth to the Atomic Age. However, the Pacific war had also proved a testing time, and a testing space, for other disciplines and institutions. Extreme environments and opemtional distances, and the fundamental demands of logistics, required the Allies and the Japanese to innovate many scientific and technological practices. Just as medicine and botany were called upon to fight tropical diseases and insect pests, so engineers, anthropol ogists and geographers were called upon to understand local conditions and cli mates, and to work with local peoples whose traditional lives were changed forever by the experience. At the same time, the war played midwife to a host of new de velopments, not least in scientific intelligence and in chemical and biological weapons, which were to acquire far greater importance after 1945.
