The way we experience, investigate and interact with reality changes drastically in the course of history. Do such changes occur gradually, or can we pinpoint radical turns, besides periods of relative stability? Building on Oswald Spengler, we zoom in on three styles in particular, namely Apollonian, Magian and Faustian thinking, guided by grounding ideas which can be summarised as follows: “Act in accordance with nature”, “Prepare yourself for the imminent dawn and “Existence equals will to power”. Finally, we reach the (...) present. How to characterise the new era we entered round the year 2000? (shrink)

This undergraduate textbook introduces some fundamental issues in philosophy of science for students of philosophy and science students. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 deals with knowledge and values. Chap. 1 presents the classical conception of knowledge as initiated by the ancient Greeks and elaborated during the development of science, introducing the central concepts of truth, belief and justification. Aspects of the quest for objectivity are taken up in the following two chapters. Moral issues are broached in (...) Chap. 4, which discusses some aspects of the use and abuse of science, taking up the responsibilities of scientists in properly conducting their business and decision-makers in their concerns with the import of science for society. Part 2 contrasts the view of scientific progress as the rejecting of old hypotheses and theories and replacing them with new ones, represented by Karl Popper, with the conception of progress as accumulating knowledge, saving as much as possible from older theories, represented by Pierre Duhem. A concluding chapter defends the natural attitude of taking the theories of modern science to be literally true, i.e. realism, in the face of arguments drawn partly from the history of scientific progress in criticism of this stance. (shrink)

The past can be a stubborn subject: it is complex, heterogeneous and opaque. To understand it, one must decide which aspects of the past to emphasise and which to minimise. Enter frameworks. Frameworks foreground certain aspects of the historical record while backgrounding others. As such, they are both necessary for, and conducive to, good history as well as good philosophy. We examine the role of frameworks in the history and philosophy of science and argue that they are necessary for both (...) forms of enquiry. We then suggest that the right attitude towards frameworks is pluralism rather than monism: there is no single correct framework to be applied to a given scientific episode. Rather, a multitude of different frameworks are more or less appropriate given various contexts and aims. From this perspective, good frameworks generate and further, rather than frustrate, historical and philosophical enquiry. Our view sheds light on historical disagreement, and on the relationship between philosophy and history of science. (shrink)

Isaac Newton is best known as a mathematician and physicist. He invented the calculus, discovered universal gravitation and made significant advances in theoretical and experimental optics. His master-work on gravitation, the Principia, is often hailed as the crowning achievement of the scientific revolution. His significance for philosophers, however, extends beyond the philosophical implications of his scientific discoveries. Newton was an able and subtle philosopher, working at a time when science was not yet recognized as an activity distinct from philosophy. He (...) engaged with the work of Rene Descartes and G.W. Leibniz, and showed sensitivity to the work of John Locke, Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi and Henry More, to name just a few. In his time, Newton was not perceived as a scientific outsider, but as an active and knowledgeable participant in philosophical debates.... (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze Leibniz and Newton’s conception of space, and to point out where their agreements and disagreements lie with respect to its mode of existence. I shall offer a definite characterization of Leibniz and Newton’s conceptions of space. I will show that, according to their own concepts of substance, both Newtonian and Leibnizian spaces are not substantiva!. The reason of that consists in the fact that space is not capable of action. Moreover, there is (...) a sense in which space is relational, because their parts are individuated only by means of their mutual relations. (shrink)

For about the last thirty years Newton scholars have carried on a discussion on the meaning of Newton’s second law and its place in the stucture of his physics. E. J. Dijksterhuis, Brian D. Ellis, R. G. A. Dolby, I. Bernard Cohen, and R. S. Westfall in their treatments of these matters all quote a passage that Newton added to the third edition of the Principia. This passage, beginning “Corpore cadente” (“when a body is falling”), was inserted into the Scholium (...) following the Laws. The present article is an analysis of the literature that treats this passage and its relation to the second law. The conclusion is that they are right who see a deep duality in Newton’s mind regarding this law. (shrink)

Much recent work in virtue epistemology has focused on the analysis of such intellectual virtues as responsibility, conscientiousness, honesty, courage, open-mindedness, firmness, humility, charity, and wisdom. Absent from the literature is an extended examination of perseverance as an intellectual virtue. The present paper aims to fill this void. In Sect. 1, I clarify the concept of an intellectual virtue, and distinguish intellectual virtues from other personal characters and properties. In Sect. 2, I provide a conceptual analysis of intellectually virtuous perseverance (...) that places perseverance in opposition to its vice -counterparts, intransigence and irresolution. The virtue is a matter of continuing in one’s intellectual activities for an appropriate amount of time, in the pursuit of intellectual goods, despite obstacles to one’s attainment of those goods. In Sect. 3, I explore relations between intellectually virtuous perseverance and other intellectual virtues. I argue that such perseverance is necessary for the possession and exercise of several other intellectual virtues, including courage. These connections highlight the importance of perseverance in a comprehensive account of such virtues. (shrink)

The ArgumentIt is not easy to point to the place of knowledge in our culture. More precisely, it is difficult to locate the production of our most valued forms of knowledge, including those of religion, literature and science. A pervasive topos in Western culture, from the Greeks onward, stipulates that the most authentic intellectual agents are the most solitary. The place of knowledge is nowhere in particular and anywhere at all. I sketch some uses of the theme of the solitary (...) philosopher across a broad sweep of history, giving particular attention to its deployment in and around the scientific culture of seventeenth-century England. I argue that the rhetoric of solitude is strongly implicated in individualistic views of society and empiricist portrayals of scientific knowledge. Solitude is a state that symbolically expresses direct engagement with the sources of knowledge – divine and transcendent or natural and empirical. At the same time, solitude publicly expresses disengagement from society, identified as a set of conventions and concerns which act to corrupt knowledge. Hence, the study of the social uses of solitude adds further support to the notion that problems of knowledge and problems of social order are solved together. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that there is neither valid deductive support nor strong inductive support for Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis. There is no valid deductive support for Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis because, from the fact that the reference of the same kind terms changes or discontinues from one theoretical framework to another, it does not necessarily follow that these two theoretical frameworks are taxonomically incommensurable. There is no strong inductive support for Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis, since there are rebutting defeaters against it (...) in the form of episodes from the history of science that do not exhibit discontinuity and replacement, as Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis predicts, but rather continuity and supplementation. If this is correct, then there are no compelling epistemic reasons to believe that Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis is true or probable. (shrink)

How does Newton approach the challenge of mechanizing gravity and, more broadly, natural philosophy? By adopting the simple machine tradition’s mathematical approach to a system’s co-varying parameters of change, he retains natural philosophy’s traditional goal while specifying it in a novel way as the search for impressed forces. He accordingly understands the physical world as a divinely created machine possessing intrinsically mathematical features, and mathematical methods as capable of identifying its real features. The gravitational force’s physical cause remains an outstanding (...) problem, however, as evidenced by Newton’s onetime reference to active principles as the “genuine principles of the mechanical philosophy”. (shrink)

Although Newton carefully eschews questions about gravity’s causal basis in the published Principia, the original version of his masterwork’s third book contains some intriguing causal language. “These forces,” he writes, “arise from the universal nature of matter.” Such remarks seem to assert knowledge of gravity’s cause, even that matter is capable of robust and distant action. Some commentators defend that interpretation of the text—a text whose proper interpretation is important since Newton’s reasons for suppressing it strongly suggest that he continued (...) to endorse its ideas. This article argues that the surface appearance of Newton’s causal language is deceptive. What does New- ton intend with his causal language if not a full causal hypothesis? His remarks actually indicate a way of considering the force mathematically, something he contrasts to the structure of the force as it really is in nature. In explaining that, he identifies a significant disjunction between the physical force itself and mathematical ways of considering it, and the text’s significance lies in its view of the force’s structure and in the questions raised about the relationship between mathematical representations and the physical world. (shrink)

Methodological naturalism is the assumption or working hypothesis that understanding nature (the physical world including humans and their thoughts and actions) can be understood in terms of unguided laws. There is no need to Suppose interventions (miracles) from outside. It does not commit one to metaphysical naturalism, the belief that there is nothing other than nature as we can see and observe it (in other words, that atheism is the right theology for the sound thinker). Recently the Intelligent Design movement (...) has been arguing against methodological naturalism, and in this project they have been joined by the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga. In this paper I examine Plantinga’s arguments and conclude not only that they are not well taken, but that he does no good service to his religion either. (shrink)

This thesis develops a hermeneutic philosophy of science to provide insights into physics education. -/- Modernity cloaks the authentic character of modern physics whenever discoveries entertain us or we judge theory by its use. Those who justify physics education through an appeal to its utility, or who reject truth as an aspect of physics, relativists and constructivists, misunderstand the nature of physics. Demonstrations, not experiments, reveal the essence of physics as two characteristic engagements with truth. First, truth in its guise (...) as correspondence enables a human being to prepare for the distinctive event of physics. -/- Second, the event of physics occurs in human perception when someone forces a hidden reality to disclose an aspect of itself. Thus, the ground of physics is our human involvement with reality achieved by way of truth. -/- To support this account of physics, the thesis reports phenomenological investigations into Isaac Newton’s involvement with optics and a secondary school physics laboratory. These involve interpretations of Heidegger’s theory of beings, schema and signification. The project draws upon, and contributes to, the hermeneutic phenomenology of modern physics, a tradition in continental philosophy that begins with Immanuel Kant, and advances particularly from Martin Heidegger to Patrick Heelan. -/- The thesis advocates an ontological pedagogy for modern physics which has as its purpose each individual student’s engagement with reality and truth. Students may achieve this through demonstrations of phenomena that will enable them to dwell with physics, an experience that contrasts with their embroilment in modernity, and which perpetuates nature’s own science. (shrink)

Jean Fernel and William Harvey were leading medical practitioners of their respective generations, but they also worked in natural philosophy, and, in particular, were well known for their works on...

In recent years, researchers within science education have started to consider the impact of narrative upon teaching and learning in science. This article investigates the possibilities of interactive fiction as a means by which students can be provided with feedback on their understanding in science, and explores the mechanisms which might allow learning from this. Through a review of literature around the use of narrative in science education, we have produced a list of recommendations that might guide the development of (...) interactive fiction within science education. These recommendations are tested through a small-scale study in which an interactive fiction book was written around Newton’s laws, and then tested with 27, 16- and 17-year-old chemistry students, eight of whom also study post-compulsory physics. The interactive fiction developed is based upon the well-established Force Concept Inventory and this allowed the analysis of the progression of student understanding. We found that, upon reading the book, there was a significant positive effect size on the understanding of students who do not study advanced physics. The gains for those who do study post-compulsory physics were not statistically significant. The participants’ report of enjoyment is also discussed. (shrink)

There are many possible definitions of “technology” and I will discuss some of these in this book. However, in this introduction let me use a definition of Svante Lindqvist who defines technology very intuitively as “those activities, directed towards the satisfaction of human wants, which produce change in the material world.” He says also “the distinction between human “wants” and more limited human “needs” is crucial, for we do not use technology only to satisfy our essential material requirements.” Consequently, from (...) this perspective, a technology that is “broken” could be defined as those activities, directed towards the satisfaction of human wants that are intended to produce changes in the material world that either do not manage to satisfy these wants or do not produce changes in the material world, or both. This is the third edition, updated October 2015. (shrink)

(2005). Wonder in the face of scientific revolutions: Adam Smith on Newton's ‘Proof’ of Copernicanism. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 697-732. doi: 10.1080/09608780500293042.

This essay examines one of the cornerstones of Leibniz's defense of teleology within the order of nature. The first section explores Leibniz's contributions to the study of geometrical optics, and argues that his "Most Determined Path Principle" or "MDPP" allows him to bring to the fore philosophical issues concerning the legitimacy of teleological explanations by addressing two technical objections raised by Cartesians to non-mechanistic derivations of the laws of optics. The second section argues that, by drawing on laws such as (...) the MDPP, Leibniz is able to introduce a thin notion of teleology that gives him the resources to respond to the most pressing charges of his day against teleological explanations within natural philosophy. Finally, the third section argues that contemporary philosophers have been overly hasty in their dismissal of Leibniz's account of natural teleology, and indeed that their own generally thin conceptions of teleology have left them with few well-motivated resources for resisting his elegant position. (shrink)

ResumoNo início do século xviii, Isaac Newton publicou seu principal trabalho sobre óptica, o Opticks. Impregnado por uma perspectiva indutiva, o livro logo se tornou a principal referência para os estudos sobre a luz e as cores, sendo amplamente popularizado pelos seguidores de Newton. Neste artigo, analisamos como dois importantes livros contribuíram para essa popularização e também qual era a imagem de ciência que tencionavam propagar, o Élements de la philosophie de Newton de Voltaire e o Newtonianismo per le dame (...) de Algarotti. Será possível perceber que ambos os autores distorceram o conteúdo do livro de Newton, no intuito de propagar uma imagem idealizada das ideias newtonianas e da própria filosofia natural.In the beginning of 18th century, Newton published his main work about light and colors, the Opticks. Impregnated by an inductive perspective, the book became the major reference for the studies about light and colors, being widely popularized by Newton's followers. In this article, we analyze how two important works contributed to this process of popularization and also what image of science they intended to propagate: Voltaire's Elements of Newton's philosophie and Algarotti's Sir Isaac Newton's philosophy explain'd for the use of the ladies. We will be notice that both authors distorted the content of the Opticks, in order to propagate an idealized image of Newtonian ideas and natural philosophy itself. (shrink)

Science teaching always engages a philosophy of science. This article introduces a modern philosophy of science and indicates its implications for science education. The hermeneutic philosophy of science is the tradition of Kant, Heidegger, and Heelan. Essential to this tradition are two concepts of truth, truth as correspondence and truth as disclosure. It is these concepts that enable access to science in and of itself. Modern science forces aspects of reality to reveal themselves to human beings in events of disclosure. (...) The achievement of each event of disclosure requires the precise manipulation of equipment, which is an activity that depends on truth as correspondence. The implications of the hermeneutic philosophy of science for science education are profound. The article refers to Newton’s early work on optics to explore what the theory implies for teaching. Modern science—as the event of truth—is a relationship between an individual student, equipment, and reality. Science teachers provide for their students’ access to truth and they may show how their discipline holds a special relationship to reality. If the aim of science teaching is to enable students to disclose reality, the science curriculum will challenge some of the current practices of schooling. If teachers base science teaching upon the hermeneutic philosophy of science, science will assert itself as the intellectual discipline that derives from nature, and not from the inclinations of human beings. Science teachers teach nature’s own science. (shrink)

One influential interpretation of Newton's formulation of his calculus has regarded his work as an organized, cohesive presentation, shaped primarily by technical issues and implicitly motivated by a knowledge of the form which a "finished" calculus should take. Offered as an alternative to this view is a less systematic and more realistic picture, in which both philosophical and technical considerations played a part in influencing the structure and interpretation of the calculus throughout Newton's mathematical career. This analysis sees the development (...) of Newton's calculus not principally as a calculated movement toward "rigorous" justification (in the sense of Cauchy, Weierstrass, and their 19th century contemporaries) and refinement of techniques, but as an evolution in the light of his involvement in debates over philosophical and scientific issues central to the rise of modern philosophy and science in the 17th and early 18th centuries. (shrink)

In French mechanical treatises of the nineteenth century, Newton’s second law of motion was frequently derived from a relativity principle. The origin of this trend is found in ingenious arguments by Huygens and Laplace, with intermediate contributions by Euler and d’Alembert. The derivations initially relied on Galilean relativity and impulsive forces. After Bélanger’s Cours de mécanique of 1847, they employed continuous forces and a stronger relativity with respect to any commonly impressed motion. The name “principle of relative motions” and the (...) very idea of using this principle as a constructive tool were born in this context. The consequences of Poincaré’s and Einstein’s awareness of this approach are analyzed. Lastly, the legitimacy and significance of a relativity-based derivation of Newton’s second law are briefly discussed in a more philosophical vein. (shrink)

Review of The “Jesuit Edition” of Isaac Newton’s Principia.

The ArgumentFocusing on the celebrations of Newton and his work, this article investigates the use of the concept of genius and its connection with debates on the methodology of science and the morality of great discoverers. During the period studied, two areas of tension developed. Firstly, eighteenth-century ideas about the relationship between genius and method were challenged by the notion of scientific genius as transcending specifiable rules of method. Secondly, assumptions about the nexus between intellectual and moral virtue were threatened (...) by the emerging conception of genius as marked by an extraordinary personality – on the one hand capable of breaking with established methods to achieve great discoveries, on the other, likely to transgress moral and social conventions. The assesments of Newton by nineteenth-century scientists such as Brewster, Whewell, and De Morgan were informed by these tensions. (shrink)

The ArgumentIt has long been apparent that in the nineteenth century, mathematics in France and England developed along different lines. The differences, which might well be labelled stylistic, are most easy to see on the foundational level. At first this may seem surprising because it is such a fundamental area, but, upon reflection, it is to be expected. Ultimately discussions about the foundations of mathematics turn on views about what mathematics is, and this is a question which is answered by (...) a variety of different groups including mathematicians, students, curricular planners, parents, etc. Mathematical practice rests on some kind of mixture of the answers to this fundamental question which come from these diverse groups. Comparing the cultural matrices which supported mathematics in France and Britain in the first decades of the nineteenth century sheds light on the real though often subtle differences in the ways the subject was pursued in the two countries. (shrink)

This article is a contribution to the critical sociology of science perspective introduced and developed by Pierre Bourdieu. The paper proposes a transversalist theory of science and technology production and diffusion. It is here argued that science and technology are comprised of multiple regimes where each regime is historically grounded, possesses its own division of labour, modes of cognitive and artifact production and has specific audiences. The major regimes include the disciplinary regime, utilitarian regime, transitory regime and research-technology regime. Though (...) each regime is autonomous, they are simultaneously closely interlaced. In science and technology, autonomy is not antithetical to interdependence and reciprocity. This study demonstrates for the four specified regimes of production and diffusion that differentiation is not contrary to interaction. In science, differentiation and interaction comprise two sides of the same coin. All regimes exhibit a measure of transversality. (shrink)

There is substantial evidence that traditional instructional methods have not been successful in helping students to restructure their commonsense conceptions and learn the conceptual structures of scientific theories. This paper argues that the nature of the changes and the kinds of reasoning required in a major conceptual restructuring of a representation of a domain are fundamentally the same in the discovery and in the learning processes. Understanding conceptual change as it occurs in science and in learning science will require the (...) development of a common cognitive model of conceptual change. The historical construction of an inertial representation of motion is examined and the potential instructional implications of the case are explored. (shrink)

William Lynch has provided an informed and probing critique of my embrace of the post-truth condition, which he understands correctly as an extension of the normative project of social epistemology. This article roughly tracks the order of Lynch’s paper, beginning with the vexed role of the ‘normative’ in Science and Technology Studies, which originally triggered my version of social epistemology 35 years ago and has been guided by the field’s ‘symmetry principle’. Here the pejorative use of ‘populism’ to mean democracy (...) is highlighted as a failure of symmetry. Finally, after rejecting Lynch’s appeal to a hybrid Marxian–Darwinism, Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes are contrasted en route to what I have called ‘quantum epistemology’. (shrink)

The concept of electrical conductivity, or, as initially coined by Stephen Gray , ‘electrical communication’, has always been assigned an important role in the history of electrical research. Some thirty-five years after Gray's ‘electrical communication’ acquired wide attention, Priestley employed the concept of conductivity to define physical reality, thus giving a privileged position to the science he himself endeavoured to cultivate. As he argued in the introduction to The History and Present State of Electricity , ‘the electrical fluid is no (...) local, or occasional agent in the theatre of the world. Late discoveries show that its presence and effects are every where … It is not, like magnetism, confined to one kind of bodies, but every thing we know is a conductor or nonconductor of electricity’. Contemporary historians, for example, Heilbron, Home and Hackmann, link the concept of conductivity to a radical transformation of electrical research which pertained to its mode of organization and the definition of its subject-matter, and which culminated in its emergence as a distinctive branch of eighteenth-century ‘experimental philosophy’. (shrink)

Increasing the “truth per dollar” of money spent on science is one legitimate long-run goal of the economics of science. But before this goal can be achieved, we need to increase our knowledge of the successes and failures of past and current reward structures of science. This essay reviews what economists have learned about the behavior of scientists and the reward structure of science. One important use of such knowledge will be to help policy-makers create a reward structure that is (...) more efficient in the future. (shrink)

The concept of natural kind is center stage in the debates about scientific realism. Champions of scientific realism such as Richard Boyd hold that our most developed scientific theories allow us to “cut the world at its joints” (Boyd, 1981, 1984, 1991). In the long run we can disclose natural kinds as nature made them, though as science progresses improvements in theory allow us to revise the extension of natural kind terms.

As críticas de Newton e Voltaire endereçadas à negação do vazio por parte de Descartes compartilham uma estrutura básica: ambos parecem concordar que tal tese cartesiana conduz a implicações indesejáveis tanto no campo da mecânica, quanto no que diz respeito à teologia. Entretanto, embora Newton admita as implicações teológicas da negação do vazio, elas não constituem o fim último de sua crítica, o que parece ocorrer na crítica de Voltaire. Ao contrário, os argumentos newtonianos para assumir o vazioencontram na mecânica (...) não apenas um campo de prova; eles constituem uma parte importante da fundamentação de um dos pilares do newtonianismo: o espaço absoluto. (shrink)

Analogies between hearing and seeing already existed in ancient Greek theories of perception. The present paper follows the evolution of such analogies until the rise of 17th century optics, with due regard to the diversity of their origins and nature but with particular emphasis on their bearing on the physical concepts of light and sound. Whereas the old Greek analogies were only side effects of the unifying concepts of perception, the analogies of the 17th century played an important role in (...) constructing optical theories by imitation of acoustic theories, or vice versa. This transition depended on several factors including the changing relations between optics, music, mathematics, and physics, the diversity of early modern concepts of sound, and the rise of a new physics based on experimentation and mechanical explanation. (shrink)

Much recent work in virtue epistemology has focused on the analysis of such intellectual virtues as responsibility, conscientiousness, honesty, courage, open-mindedness, firmness, humility, charity, and wisdom. Absent from the literature is an extended examination of perseverance as an intellectual virtue. The present paper aims to fill this void. In Sect. 1, I clarify the concept of an intellectual virtue, and distinguish intellectual virtues from other personal traits and properties. In Sect. 2, I provide a conceptual analysis of intellectually virtuous perseverance (...) that places perseverance in opposition to its vice-counterparts, intransigence and irresolution. The virtue is a matter of continuing in one’s intellectual activities for an appropriate amount of time, in the pursuit of intellectual goods, despite obstacles to one’s attainment of those goods. In Sect. 3, I explore relations between intellectually virtuous perseverance and other intellectual virtues. I argue that such perseverance is necessary for the possession and exercise of several other intellectual virtues, including courage. These connections highlight the importance of perseverance in a comprehensive account of such virtues. (shrink)

Abstract During 1745-1755 Bošković explicitly used the concept of scientific theory in three cases: the theory of forces existing in nature, the theory of transformations of geometric loci, and the theory of infinitesimals. The theory first mentioned became the famous theory of natural philosophy in 1758, the second was published in the third volume of his mathematical textbook Elementorum Universae Matheseos (1754), and the third theory was never completed, though Bošković repeatedly announced it from 1741 on. The treatment of continuity (...) and infinity in natural philosophy, geometry and infinitesimal analysis brought about inter?theory relations in Bošković's work during his Roman period. The two constructed theories of Bošković, the theory of forces and the theory of geometric transformations, directly influenced the idea for the construction of his third theory. These written theories refer to understanding and effective application of continuity and infinity in natural philosophy and geometry, and this task, according to Bošković, requires methodological support from the theory of infinitesimals. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to show the principal aspects of the way in which Newton conceived his mathematical concepts and methods and applied them to rational mechanics in his Principia; (2) to explain how the editors of the Geneva Edition interpreted, clarified, and made accessible to a broader public Newton’s perfect but often elliptic proofs. Following this line of inquiry, we will explain the successes of Newton’s mechanics, but also the problematic aspects of his perfect geometrical (...) methods, more elegant, but less malleable than analytical procedures, of which Newton himself was one of the inventors. Furthermore, we will also consider the way in which Newtonianism was spread before in England and afterwards on continental Europe. In this respect the Geneva Edition plays a fundamental role because of its complete apparatus of notes, and because it appeared only thirteen years after the publication of the third edition of the Principia (1726). Finally, we will also confront some problems connected to the metaphysics of calculus. Therefore, the case of Newton is one of those in which, starting from mathematics applied to physics, it is possible to connect an impressive series of fundamental arguments such as the role of mathematics in science; the comparison between Newton’s geometrical methods and analytical methods; the way in which Newtonianism was spread as well as the philosophical implications of Newton’s mathematical concepts. (shrink)

The first principle of chemical composition is that elements are actually present in their compounds. It is a golden thread running through the history of compositional thinking in chemistry since before the chemical revolution. Opposed to this principle, which I call Actually Present Elements (APE), is the idea that elements are merely potentially present in their compounds: although not actually present, it is possible to recover them. In this paper I follow that golden thread, and then discuss the status of (...) APE itself: is it true? What arguments were there for it, and when? I argue that APE is a metaphysical principle, albeit at a lower level of generality and abstraction than the term ‘metaphysical’ usually suggests. I critically examine a range of different views on how metaphysical principles might be involved in research programmes in empirical science, and conclude by endorsing Elie Zahar’s view that metaphysical principles such as APE are to be found at the very heart of science. Moreover, they can be recipients of empirical support just like other parts of scientific theory. (shrink)

The widely accepted supposition that Newton’s De gravitatione was written in 1684/5 just before composing the Principia is examined. The basis for this determination has serious difficulties starting with the failure to examine the numerical estimates for the resistance of aether. The estimated range is not nearly nil as claimed but comparable with air at or near the earth’s surface. Moreover, the evidence provided most likely stems from experiments by Boyle, Hooke, and others in the 1660s and does not use (...) evidence available in the late 1684. The document supports Newton’s contention that the aether medium incorporates very large voids thereby proving that body and space differ but does by no means completely reject its corporeal nature or eliminate its resistance. Newton’s use of the term inertia provides no conclusive evidence for a late date as often claimed and his definition of gravitas is difficult to reconcile with a late one. (shrink)