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Author: Katherine Brading
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197678955
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
From pebbles to planets, tigers to tables, pine trees to people; animate and inanimate, natural and artificial; bodies are everywhere. Bodies populate the world, acting and interacting with one another, and they are the subject-matter of Newton's laws of motion. But what is a body? And how can we know how they behave? In Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason, Katherine Brading and Marius Stan examine the struggle for a theory of bodies. At the beginning of the 18th century, physics was the branch of philosophy that studied bodies in general. Its primary task was to provide a qualitative account of the nature of bodies, including their essential properties, causal powers, and generic behaviors. Pursued by a variety of figures both canonical (from Leibniz to Kant) and less familiar (from Du Châtelet and Euler to d'Alembert and Lagrange), this proved a difficult task. At stake were the appropriate epistemologies and methods for theorizing about the natural world. Solutions demanded the combined resources of philosophy, physics, and mechanics: what Brading and Stan call a "philosophical mechanics." Brading and Stan analyze a century of widespread, concerted efforts to solve "the problem of bodies," they examine the consequences of the many failures, both for the problem itself and for philosophy more generally. They reveal relationships among disparate themes of 18th century physics and philosophy, from the nature of matter to the motion of a vibrating string; causation to the principle of least action; and the role of subtle matter in collision theory to analytic mechanics. All of these, Brading and Stan argue, are related to the eventual emergence of physics as an independent discipline, autonomous from philosophy, more than a century after Newton's Principia. This book provides a new framing of natural philosophy and its transformations in the Enlightenment; and it proposes an account of how physics and philosophy evolved into distinct fields of inquiry.
Author: Katherine Brading
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197678955
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 449
Get Book Here
Book Description
From pebbles to planets, tigers to tables, pine trees to people; animate and inanimate, natural and artificial; bodies are everywhere. Bodies populate the world, acting and interacting with one another, and they are the subject-matter of Newton's laws of motion. But what is a body? And how can we know how they behave? In Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason, Katherine Brading and Marius Stan examine the struggle for a theory of bodies. At the beginning of the 18th century, physics was the branch of philosophy that studied bodies in general. Its primary task was to provide a qualitative account of the nature of bodies, including their essential properties, causal powers, and generic behaviors. Pursued by a variety of figures both canonical (from Leibniz to Kant) and less familiar (from Du Châtelet and Euler to d'Alembert and Lagrange), this proved a difficult task. At stake were the appropriate epistemologies and methods for theorizing about the natural world. Solutions demanded the combined resources of philosophy, physics, and mechanics: what Brading and Stan call a "philosophical mechanics." Brading and Stan analyze a century of widespread, concerted efforts to solve "the problem of bodies," they examine the consequences of the many failures, both for the problem itself and for philosophy more generally. They reveal relationships among disparate themes of 18th century physics and philosophy, from the nature of matter to the motion of a vibrating string; causation to the principle of least action; and the role of subtle matter in collision theory to analytic mechanics. All of these, Brading and Stan argue, are related to the eventual emergence of physics as an independent discipline, autonomous from philosophy, more than a century after Newton's Principia. This book provides a new framing of natural philosophy and its transformations in the Enlightenment; and it proposes an account of how physics and philosophy evolved into distinct fields of inquiry.
Author: G. Freudenthal
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400945000
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
In this stimulating investigation, Gideon Freudenthal has linked social history with the history of science by formulating an interesting proposal: that the supposed influence of social theory may be seen as actual through its co herence with the process of formation of physical concepts. The reinterpre tation of the development of science in the seventeenth century, now widely influential, receives at Freudenthal's hand its most persuasive statement, most significantly because of his attention to the theoretical form which is charac teristic. of classical Newtonian mechanics. He pursues the sources of the parallels that may be noted between that mechanics and the dominant philosophical systems and social theories of the time; and in a fascinating development Freudenthal shows how a quite precise method - as he descriptively labels it, the 'analytic-synthetic method' - which underlay the Newtonian form of theoretical argument, was due to certain interpretive premisses concerning particle mechanics. If he is right, these depend upon a particular stage of con ceptual achievement in the theories of both society and nature; further, that the conceptual was generalized philosophically; but, strikingly, Freudenthal shows that this concept-formation itself was linked to the specific social relations of the times of Newton and Hobbes.
Author: Thomas Parkinson
Publisher: Gale Ecco, Print Editions
ISBN: 9781379498957
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 498
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Book Description
The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars. The Age of Enlightenment profoundly enriched religious and philosophical understanding and continues to influence present-day thinking. Works collected here include masterpieces by David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as religious sermons and moral debates on the issues of the day, such as the slave trade. The Age of Reason saw conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism transformed into one between faith and logic -- a debate that continues in the twenty-first century. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library T080577 In two parts: the first is a reissue of Parkinson's 'A system of mechanics, .. ' Cambridge, 1785. Cambridge: printed by J. Archdeacon; for J.& J. Merrill, in Cambridge; T. Cadell, and P. Elmsly, B. White, G. Wilkie, and J. Deighton, London, 1789. [8],255, [1];192p., fold.plates.; 4°
Author: Clifford Ambrose Truesdell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 36
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Book Description
Author: American Association for the Advancement of Science. Section on History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 506
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Book Description
This collection of six symposia, with 24 prominent philosophers and scientists participating, concentrates on many of the most significant issues and controversies at the frontiers of philosophical and scientific enlightenment. The discussions clarify basic issues and problems and go on to suggest new avenues for their resolution. Each contribution is original; none has been published before. These fascinating give-and-take sessions among eminent thinkers simulate the reader to do his own thinking about fundamental problems in the logic and methodology of science. Among the problems discussed are the epistemological foundations of science, the logic of quantum theory, philosophy of space and time, and methodology of psychology. -- from dust jacket.
Author: Geoffrey V. Sutton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429977042
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Traditional accounts of the scientific revolution focus on such thinkers as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, and usually portray it as a process of steady, rational progress. There is another side to this story, and its protagonists are more likely to be women than men, dilettante aristocrats than highly educated natural philosophers. The setting is not the laboratory, but rather the literary salons of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, and the action takes place sometime between Europe's last great witch hunts and the emergence of the modern world.Science for a Polite Society is an intriguing reexamination of the social, cultural, and intellectual context of the origins of modern science. The elite of French society accepted science largely because of their personal involvement and fascination with the emerging philosophy of nature. Members of salon society, especially women, were avid readers of works of natural philosophy and active participants in experiments for the edification of their peers. Some of these women went on to champion the new science and played a significant role in securing its acceptance by polite society.As Geoffrey Sutton points out, the sheer entertainment value of startling displays of electricity and chemical explosions would have played an important role in persuading the skeptical. We can only imagine the effects of such drawing-room experiments on an audience that lived in a world illuminated by tallow candles. For many, leaping electrical arcs and window-rattling detonations must have been as convincing as Newton's mathematically elegant description of the motions of the planets.With the acceptance and triumph of the new science came a prestige that made it a model of what rationality should be. The Enlightenment adopted the methods of scientific thought as the model for human progress. To be an ?enlightened? thinker meant believing that the application of scientific methods could reform political and economic life, to the lasting benefit of humanity. We live with the ambiguous results of that legacy even today, although in our own century we are perhaps more impressed by the ability of science to frighten, rather than to awe and entertain.
Author: J.C. Boudri
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401736723
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
The Age of Reason is left the Dark Ages of the history of mechanics. Clifford A. Truesdell) 1. 1 THE INVISIBLE TRUTH OF CLASSICAL PHYSICS There are some questions that physics since the days of Newton simply cannot an swer. Perhaps the most important of these can be categorized as 'questions of eth ics', and 'questions of ultimate meaning'. The question of humanity's place in the cosmos and in nature is pre-eminently a philosophical and religious one, and physics seems to have little to contribute to answering it. Although physics claims to have made very fundamental discoveries about the cosmos and nature, its concern is with the coherence and order of material phenomena rather than with questions of mean ing. Now and then thinkers such as Stephen Hawking or Fritjof Capra emerge, who appear to claim that a total world-view can be derived from physics. Generally, however, such authors do not actually make any great effort to make good on their claim to completeness: their answers to questions of meaning often pale in compari 2 son with their answers to conventional questions in physics. Moreover, to the extent that they do attempt to answer questions of meaning, it is easy to show that they 3 draw on assumptions from outside physics.
Author: F. F. Centore
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9401750742
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 147
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Book Description
In the history of science and philosophy and the philosophy of nature the name Robert Hooke has been largely ignored. H he is occasionally men tioned. it is usually in one of two ways: either he is briefly referred to in passing. or. he is viewed through the eyes of some later giant in the history of science and philosophy such as Sir Isaac Newton. Both approaches. however, do Hooke an injustice. In the academic world of today. there is no scholarly study available of Hooke's actual place in the history of science and philosophy with respect to his doctrines and accomplishments within the area of mechanics. Such a situation constitutes an unfortunate lacuna in the academic life of the world in our time. It is the more unfortunate because. in his time. Robert Hooke played an important role in the intellectual life of his world. Hooke. a contemporary of Boyle and Newton. lived from 1635 to 1703. For most of his active intellectual life he held the position of Curator of Experiments to the Royal Society of London. As a result of his own initi ative and of directives given him by other members of the Society. Hooke performed hundreds of experiments designed to explore the secrets of na ture so that men might better understand God's creation. In this treatise I will disengage from the large disorganized welter of monographs and trea tises left by Hooke all the material pertinent to the science of mechanics.
Author: Paul Collins Hayner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
Author: Stephen Gaukroger
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019161646X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 520
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Book Description
Understanding the emergence of a scientific culture - one in which cognitive values generally are modelled on, or subordinated to, scientific ones - is one of the foremost historical and philosophical problems with which we are now confronted. The significance of the emergence of such scientific values lies above all in their ability to provide the criteria by which we come to appraise cognitive enquiry, and which shape our understanding of what it can achieve. The period between the 1680s and the middle of the eighteenth century is a very distinctive one in this development. It is then that we witness the emergence of the idea that scientific values form a model for all cognitive claims. It is also at this time that science explicitly goes beyond technical expertise and begins to articulate a world-view designed to displace others, whether humanist or Christian. But what occurred took place in a peculiar and overdetermined fashion, and the outcome in the mid-eighteenth century was not the triumph of 'reason', as has commonly been supposed, but rather a simultaneous elevation of the standing of science and the beginnings of a serious questioning of whether science offers a comprehensive form of understanding. The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility is the sequel to Stephen Gaukroger's acclaimed 2006 book The Emergence of a Scientific Culture. It offers a rich and fascinating picture of the development of intellectual culture in a period where understandings of the natural realm began to fragment.
