In recent years a number of scholars have argued that Faraday's theories of matter and force were founded on concepts which were derived from Boscovich'sTheoria Philosophiae Naturalis(1758). The notion that Faraday's ideas display Boscovichean tendencies is not a new one: it was proposed by several of Faraday's immediate successors and has been noted by more recent commentators. Statements of this kind are not implausible as assertions of a general correspondence between Faraday's views on matter, as expressed in the “Speculation touching (...) Electric Conduction and the Nature of Matter” of 1844, and Boscovich's theory of point atomism, but Professor L. Pearce Williams has made much stronger claims for the dependence of Faraday's ideas on Boscovich's theory of matter. Williams' interpretation has been questioned by recent scholarship, and in this paper I wish to advance an alternative interpretation of Faraday's ideas on electricity and the nature of matter. (shrink)

Reasoning without experience is very slippery. A man may puzzle me by arguents [sic] … but I’le beleive my ey experience ↓my eyes.↓ernan mcmullin once remarked that, although the “avowedly tentative form” of the Queries “marks them off from the rest of Newton’s published work,” they are “the most significant source, perhaps, for the most general categories of matter and action that informed his research.”2 The Queries (or Quaestiones), which Newton inserted at the very end of the third book of (...) the Opticks3 or its Latin rendition, Optice,4 constitute that part of his optical magnum opus which he reworked and augmented the most—especially between 1704 and 1717. While the main text of the Opticks itself underwent .. (shrink)

Bošković's explanatory procedure and his concept of explanation represents a certain departure from Newton's causal theory and his theory of explanation. Apart from particular elements of causal explanation, Bošković developed an alternative, non‐causal explanatory strategy. In this paper two different elements of this strategy are discussed: (i) the micro‐reductive explanatory strategy based on Bošković's idea of determination, and (ii) a type of explanation of a theory by means of a more general law, through a thought‐experiment. In addition, an outline of (...) the proposed (iii) ‘argument theory’ of explanation in his mature period is made. These aspects are considered with respect to the realist and anti‐realist elements in Bošković's epistemology. (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)

As the seventeenth century progressed, there was a growing realization among those who reflected on the kind of knowledge the new sciences could afford (among them Kepler, Bacon, Descartes, Boyle, Huygens) that hypothesis would have to be conceded a much more significant place in natural philosophy than the earlier ideal of demonstration allowed. Then came the mechanics of Newton's Principia, which seemed to manage quite well without appealing to hypothesis (though much would depend on how exactly terms like "force" and (...) "attraction" were construed). If the science of motion could dispense with causal hypothesis and the attendant uncertainty, why should this not serve as the goal of natural philosophy generally? The apparent absence of causal hypothesis from the highly successful new science of motion went far towards shaping, in different ways, the account of scientific knowledge given by many of the philosophers of the century following, notable among them Berkeley, Hume, Reid, and Kant. This "Newtonian" interlude in the history of the philosophy of science would today be accounted on the whole a byway. The Principia, despite its enormous achievement in shaping subsequent work in mechanics, was from the beginning too idiosyncratic from an epistemic standpoint to serve as model for the natural sciences generally. (shrink)

: Newton's critics argued that his treatment of gravity in the Principia saddles him with a substantial dilemma. If he insists that gravity is a real force, he must invoke action at a distance because of his explicit failure to characterize the mechanism underlying gravity. To avoid distant action, however, he must admit that gravity is not a real force, and that he has therefore failed to discover the actual cause of the phenomena associated with it. A reinterpretation of Newton's (...) distinction between the "mathematical" and the "physical" treatment of force indicates how he can reject each horn of this dilemma. (shrink)

This book presents a systematic reconstruction of Leibniz’s dynamics project (c. 1676-1700) that contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the concepts of physical causality in Leibniz’s work and 17th century physics. It argues that Leibniz’s theory of forces privileges the causal relationship between structural organization and physical phenomena instead of body-to-body mechanical causation. The mature conception of Leibnizian force is not the power of one body to cause motion in another, but a kind of structural causation related to the (...) configuration of integral systems of bodies in physical evolution. By treating the immanent philosophy of Leibniz’s dynamics, this book makes explicit the systematic aims and inherent limits of Leibniz's physical project, in addition to providing an alternative vision of the scientific understanding of the physical world in the late 17th and early 18th century. (shrink)