'The arrow of time' refers to the curious asymmetry that distinguishes the future from the past. Reversing the Arrow of Time argues that there is an intimate link between the symmetries of 'time itself' and time reversal symmetry in physical theories, which has wide-ranging implications for both physics and its philosophy. This link helps to clarify how we can learn about the symmetries of our world, how to understand the relationship between symmetries and what is real, and how to overcome (...) pervasive illusions about the direction of time. Roberts explains the significance of time reversal in a way that intertwines physics and philosophy, to establish what the arrow of time means and how we can come to know it. This book is both mathematically and philosophically rigorous yet remains accessible to advanced undergraduates in physics and the philosophy of physics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

Why is gauge symmetry so important in modern physics, given that one must eliminate it when interpreting what the theory represents? In this paper we discuss the sense in which gauge symmetry can be fruitfully applied to constrain the space of possible dynamical models in such a way that forces and charges are appropriately coupled. We review the most well-known application of this kind, known as the 'gauge argument' or 'gauge principle', discuss its difficulties, and then reconstruct the gauge argument (...) as a valid theorem in quantum theory. We then present what we take to be a better and more general gauge argument, based on Noether's second theorem in classical Lagrangian field theory, and argue that this provides a more appropriate framework for understanding how gauge symmetry helps to constrain the dynamics of physical theories. (shrink)

This paper explores the scientific sources behind Kant’s early dynamic theory of matter in 1755, with a focus on two main Kant’s writings: Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens and On Fire. The year 1755 has often been portrayed by Kantian scholars as a turning point in the intellectual career of the young Kant, with his much debated conversion to Newton. Via a careful analysis of some salient themes in the two aforementioned works, and a reconstruction of the (...) scientific sources behind them, this paper shows Kant’s debt to an often overlooked scientific tradition, i.e. speculative Newtonian experimentalism. The paper argues that more than the Principia, it was the speculative experimentalism that goes from Newton’s Opticks to Herman Boerhaave’s Elementa chemiae via Stephen Hales’ Vegetable Staticks that played a central role in the elaboration of Kant’s early dynamic theory of matter in 1755. (shrink)

Attention is drawn to a clear statement of the concept of an absolute zero of temperature by John Locke some time between 1698 and 1704. From the writings of Boyle and Newton it seems unlikely that either of them was responsible for providing their friend with this insight.

Recent ‘revisionist’ studies of the Scientific Revolution have utilized Robert Hooke as an example of a mechanical philosopher who incorporated active principles in his world system. This paper carefully examines Hooke's natural philosophy in order to determine the extent to which he employed active agents in his work. Thorough investigation reveals that although Hooke sometimes refrained from offering causal explanations of the phenomena he studied, there is no solid evidence that he believed active principles were at work in nature. Rather, (...) his major tool for interpreting nature—his theory of congruity—follows wholly mechanical principles, as do his explanations of the essences of the fundamental constituents of the universe. Hooke emerges from this analysis as a purely mechanical philosopher. (shrink)

Summary Robert Boyle is remembered largely for his integration of experiment and the ?mechanical philosophy?. Although Boyle is occasionally elusive as to what he means precisely by the ?mechanical philosophy?, it is clear that a major portion of it concerned his corpuscular theory of matter. Historians of science have traditionally viewed Boyle's corpuscular philosophy as the grafting of a physical theory onto a previously incoherent body of alchemy and iatrochemistry. As this essay shows, however, Boyle owed a heavy debt to (...) a longstanding alchemical theory that postulated the corpuscular make-up of metals and various reagents. I have elsewhere argued in a general way for Boyle's debt to alchemical corpuscular theory, but in the present essay I show one of his precise sources?namely the Wittenberg medical professor Daniel Sennert (1572?1637). In his youth Boyle wrote a treatise on corpuscularianism, Of the Atomicall Philosophy, that borrowed heavily from Sennert without acknowledgement. Later works, such as The Sceptical Chymist, elaborate on these borrowings. This discovery shows that we cannot view Boyle's corpuscular philosophy as an imposition of physics on chemistry: instead, it appears that it originally grew out of chemistry itself. The discovery also throws an interesting light on Boyle's attitude toward sources. (shrink)

I explore Locke’s complex attitude toward the natural philosophy of his day by focusing on Locke’s own treatment of Newton’s theory of gravity and the presence of Lockean themes in defenses of Newtonian attraction/gravity by Maupertuis and other early Newtonians. In doing so, I highlight the inadequacy of an unqualified labeling of Locke as “mechanist” or “Newtonian.”.

This paper offers a non-traditional account of what was really at stake in debates over the legitimacy of teleology and teleological explanations in the later medieval and early modern periods. It is divided into four main sections. The first section highlights two defining features of ancient and early medieval views on teleology, namely, that teleological explanations are on a par (or better) with efficient causal explanations, and that the objective goodness of outcomes may explain their coming about. The second section (...) argues that it was the first thesis – the thesis of explanatory parity –that came under attack by mainstream philosophers in the later medieval and early modern traditions, rather than teleology per se. The third section argues similarly that it was the second thesis – the thesis of explanatory goodness – that was the object of Spinoza’s critique of final causes, rather than teleology itself. Finally, the fourth section argues that Leibniz’s claim to be a champion of traditional teleology rests on his willingness to defend both the theses of explanatory parity and goodness against the very charges that led to their demise. The essay concludes by contrasting the narrative offered here with Don Garrett’s recent account according to which “it is not Leibniz but Spinoza who holds the position on teleology and teleological explanation nearest to that of Aristotle” (312). (shrink)

Philosophers today have largely given up on the project of categorizing being. Aristotle’s ten categories now strike us as quaint, and no attempt to improve on that effort meets with much interest. Still, no one supposes that reality is smoothly distributed over space. The world at large comes in chunks, and there remains a widespread intuition, even among philosophers, that some of these chunks have a special sort of unity and persistence. These, we tend to suppose, are most truly agents (...) and subjects, and are what exist in the most proper sense of the term. We believe, in other words, in substances. (shrink)

In this paper I look at two connections between natural philosophy and theology in the late 17th century. In the last quarter of the century there was an interesting development of an argument, earlier but sketchier versions of which can be found in classical philosophers and in Descartes. The manoeuvre in question goes like this: first, prove that there must, necessarily, be a being which is, in some sense of "greater", greater than humans. Second, sketch a proof that such a (...) being is necessary. Move from the fact that there must be at least one such being to the conclusion that there is precisely one such being. Raise the question: could this necessary being be matter, the entire material universe, or must it be God? Produce an argument from natural philosophy to show that matter cannot be the required necessary being. Either explicitly or implicitly run the obvious disjunctive syllogism and conclude with a few remarks about the foolishness of atheism. The argument, which has classical roots, found a number of 17th-century exponents. Cudworth provided the most important version, and Locke, Bentley and Clarke adapted Cudworth's version with varying success. The argument touches on natural philosophy in two ways. First, the basis of the argument invites consideration of a problem in the philosophy of science - the relation between micro properties and macro properties - which was seen clearly enough in some contexts but which was overlooked in others, particularly when the theological aspect was uppermost. The second point of contact involves a direct application of a scientific result - the existence of a vacuum - to the theological issue. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMaterialism is the view that everything that is real is material or is the product of material processes. It tends to take either a ‘cosmological’ form, as a claim about the ultimate nature of the world, or a more specific ‘psychological’ form, detailing how mental processes are brain processes. I focus on the second, psychological or cerebral form of materialism. In the mid-to-late eighteenth century, the French materialist philosopher Denis Diderot was one of the first to notice that any self-respecting (...) materialist had to address the question of the status and functional role of the brain, and its relation to our mental life. After this the topic grew stale, with knee-jerk reiterations of ‘psychophysical identity’ in the nineteenth-century, and equally rigid assertions of anti-materialism. In 1960s philosophy of mind, brain–mind materialism reemerged as ‘identity theory’, focusing on the identity between mental processes and cerebral processes. In contrast, Diderot’s cerebral materialism allows for a more culturally sedimented sense of the brain, which he described in his late Elements of Physiology as a ‘book – except it is a book which reads itself’. Diderot thus provides a lesson for materialism as it reflects on the status of the brain, science and culture. (shrink)

Powers ontologies are currently enjoying a resurgence. This would be dispiriting news for the moderns; in their eyes, to imbue bodies with powers is to slide back into the scholastic slime from which they helped philosophy crawl. I focus on Descartes’s ‘little souls’ argument, which points to a genuine and, I think persisting, defect in powers theories. The problem is that an Aristotelian power is intrinsic to whatever has it. Once this move is accepted, it becomes very hard to see (...) how humble matter could have such a thing. It is as if each empowered object were possessed of a little soul that directs it and governs its behavior. Instead of attempting to resurrect the Aristotelian power theory, contemporary philosophers would be best served by taking their inspiration from its early modern replacement, devised by John Locke and Robert Boyle. On this view, powers are internal relations, not monadic properties intrinsic to their bearers. This move at once drains away the mysterious directedness of Aristotelian powers and solves the contemporary version of the little souls argument, Neil Williams’s ‘problem of fit.’. (shrink)

According to naïve realist (or primitivist) theories of colour, colours are sui generis mind-independent properties. The question that I consider in this paper is the relationship of naïve realism to what Mark Johnston calls Revelation, the thesis that the essential nature of colour is fully revealed in a standard visual experience. In the first part of the paper, I argue that if naïve realism is true, then Revelation is false. In the second part of the paper, I defend naïve realism (...) against a number of objections. (shrink)

SummaryIn this essay I offer a set of characteristic scientific activities, accompanied by principles to be used as guides in performing these activities, and dispositions that are desirable for the person performing these activities to have. This set is intended to provide a rough and ready elaboration of scientific thinking as a goal for our schools and colleges.Although they are here labeled scientific, they are intended to apply to other activities than doing what is standardly called science. This wider application (...) is part of the justification for offering science in our schools and colleges. We want people to think scientifically about many other aspects of their lives, as well as about science content.There is no suggestion that science content is not important, nor that scientific thinking should be taught apart from science content. In fact I think that a very good way to teach scientific thinking is by infusing such instruction in the instruction of science content. See Swartz for a discussion of infusion, and Ennis, for treatments of the subject‐specificity issue that is generally raised when thinking and content are discussed.This essay contains one brief case study that exemplifies most of the activities, principles, and dispositions suggested as goals for the schools. I realize that the validity and comprehensiveness of these goals has not been here demonstrated. The scientists, science educators, philosophers of science, and critical thinking specialists to whom1 have shown them are in general agreement about them, but the ultimate test will be in whether the goals are widely adopted and successfully serve as guidance in the promotion of scientific thinking.I hope that this elaboration of scientific thinking and its formulation in terms of a suggested set of goals are “dear and precise as is needed in the situation”. (shrink)

Abstract Boyle distinguished clearly between the areas which we would call scientific and theological. However, he felt that they overlapped seamlessly, and that the truths we discovered (or which were revealed to us) in one of these areas would be relevant to us in the other. In this paper I outline and discuss Boyle's views on the limitations of human knowing, Boyle's arguments in favour of accepting the revelations of the Christian faith, and his views on the kind of epistomological (...) standing that scientific knowledge claims have. Given this background I then consider the relation between hypotheses, theories and facts in Boyle's work, and consider a particular case, that of Boyle's Law, as an exemplification of the claims made in the rest of the paper. (shrink)

Reid offers an under-appreciated account of the primary/secondary quality distinction. He gives sound reasons for rejecting the views of Locke, Boyle, Galileo and others, and presents a better alternative, according to which the distinction is epistemic rather than metaphysical. Primary qualities, for Reid, are qualities whose intrinsic natures can be known through sensation. Secondary qualities, on the other hand, are unknown causes of sensations. Some may object that Reid's view is internally inconsistent, or unacceptably relativistic. However, a deeper understanding shows (...) that it is consistent, and relative only to normal humans. To acquire this deeper understanding, one must also explore the nature of dispositions, Reid's rejection of the theory of ideas, his distinction between sensation and perception, and his distinction between natural and acquired perceptions. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the remarkable popularity of William Paley’s argument from design among contemporary naturalists in biology and the philosophy of science. In philosophy of science Elliott Sober has argued that creationism should be excluded from the schools not because it is not science but because it is ‘less likely’ than evolution according to fairly standard confirmation theory. Creationism is said to have been a plausible scientific option as presented by Paley but no longer to be acceptable according to the (...) same standards that once approved it. In biology C. G. Williams and Richard Dawkins have seen in Paley a proto-adaptationist. This paper shows that the historical assumptions of Sober’s arguments are wrong and that the philosophical arguments themselves take alternatives to science to be alternatives in science and conflate the null hypothesis, chance, with a competing explanatory hypothesis. It is also shown that the similarity of Paley’s adaptationism to that of contemporary biology is not what it is made out to be. (shrink)