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The title of this work is to be taken seriously: it is a small book for teaching students to read the language of determinism. Some prior knowledge of college-level mathematics and physics is presupposed, but otherwise the book is suitable for use in an advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate course in the philosophy of science. While writing I had in mind primarily a philosophical audience, but I hope that students and colleagues from the sciences will also find the treatment of scientific issues of interest. Though modest in not trying to reach beyond an introductory level of analysis, the work is decidedly immodest in trying to change a number of misimpressions that pervade the philosophical literature. For example, when told that classical physics is not the place to look for clean and unproblematic examples of determinism, most philosophers react with a mixture of disbelief and incomprehension. The misconcep tions on which that reaction is based can and must be changed.
Graham Solomon, to whom this collection is dedicated, went into hospital for antibiotic treatment of pneumonia in Oc- ber, 2001. Three days later, on Nov. 1, he died of a massive stroke, at the age of 44. Solomon was well liked by those who got the chance to know him—it was a revelation to ?nd out, when helping to sort out his a?airs after his death, how many “friends” he had whom he had actually never met, as his email included correspondence with philosophers around the world running sometimes to hundreds of messages. He was well respected in the philosophical community more broadly. He was for several years a member of the editorial board for the Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science. While he was employed at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, several of us at the University of Wat- loo always regarded our own department as a sort of second academic home for him. We therefore decided that it would be appropriate to hold a memorial conference in his honour. Thanks to the generous ?nancial support of the Humphrey Conference Fund, we were able to do so in May 2003. Many of the papers in this volume were presented at that conf- ence.
A collection of essays exploring the relations between music and the scientific culture of Galileo's time. It takes a broad historical approach towards understanding such topics as the role of music in Galileo's experiments and in the scientific revolution
From the mid-1960s, after the important works by J. Hintikka, S. Körner, W. Sellars and P.F. Strawson, there has been a marked revival of Kantian epistemological thought. Against this background, featuring fruitful exchange between historical research and theoretical prospects, the main point of the book is the discussion of Kantian theory of scientific knowledge from the perspective of present-day analytical philosophy and philosophy of empirical and mathematical sciences. The main topics are the problem of a priori knowledge in logic, mathematics and physics, the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, the constitution of physical objectivity and the questions of realism and truth, the Kantian conception of time, causal laws and induction, the relations between Kantian epistemological thought, relativity theory, quantum theory and some recent developments of philosophy of science. The book is addressed to research workers, specialists and scholars in the fields of epistemology, philosophy of science and history of philosophy.
This book consists of a collection of essays written between 1965 and 1981. Some have been published elsewhere; others appear here for the first time. Although dealing with different figures and different periods, they have a common theme: all are concerned with examining how the method of hy pothesis came to be the ruling orthodoxy in the philosophy of science and the quasi-official methodology of the scientific community. It might have been otherwise. Barely three centuries ago, hypothetico deduction was in both disfavor and disarray. Numerous rival methods for scientific inquiry - including eliminative and enumerative induction, analogy and derivation from first principles - were widely touted. The method of hypothesis, known since antiquity, found few proponents between 1700 and 1850. During the last century, of course, that ordering has been inverted and - despite an almost universal acknowledgement of its weaknesses - the method of hypothesis (usually under such descriptions as 'hypothetico deduction' or 'conjectures and refutations') has become the orthodoxy of the 20th century. Behind the waxing and waning of the method of hypothesis, embedded within the vicissitudes of its fortunes, there is a fascinating story to be told. It is a story that forms an integral part of modern science and its philosophy.
With publication of the present volume, The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science enters its second phase. The first fourteen volumes in the Series were produced under the managing editorship of Professor James J. Leach, with the cooperation of a local editorial board. Many of these volumes resulted from colloguia and workshops held in con nection with the University of Western Ontario Graduate Programme in Philosophy of Science. Throughout its seven year history, the Series has been devoted to publication of high quality work in philosophy of science con sidered in its widest extent, including work in philosophy of the special sciences and history of the conceptual development of science. In future, this general editorial emphasis will be maintained, and hopefully, broadened to include important works by scholars working outside the local context. Appointment of a new managing editor, together with an expanded editorial board, brings with it the hope of an enlarged international presence for the Series. Serving the publication needs of those working in the various subfields within philosophy of science is a many-faceted operation. Thus in future the Series will continue to produce edited proceedings of worthwhile scholarly meetings and edited collections of seminal background papers. How ever, the publication priorities will shift emphasis to favour production of monographs in the various fields covered by the scope of the Series. THE MANAGING EDITOR vii W. L. Harper, R. Stalnaker, and G. Pearce (eds.), lIs, vii.
In recent years, many philosophers of modern physics came to the conclusion that the problem of how objectivity is constituted (rather than merely given) can no longer be avoided, and therefore that a transcendental approach in the spirit of Kant is now philosophically relevant. The usual excuse for skipping this task is that the historical form given by Kant to transcendental epistemology has been challenged by Relativity and Quantum Physics. However, the true challenge is not to force modern physics into a rigidly construed static version of Kant’s philosophy, but to provide Kant’s method with flexibility and generality. In this book, the top specialists of the field pin down the methodological core of transcendental epistemology that must be used in order to throw light on the foundations of modern physics. First, the basic tools Kant used for his transcendental reading of Newtonian Mechanics are examined, and then early transcendental approaches of Relativistic and Quantum Physics are revisited. Transcendental procedures are also applied to contemporary physics, and this renewed transcendental interpretation is finally compared with structural realism and constructive empiricism. The book will be of interest to scientists, historians and philosophers who are involved in the foundational problems of modern physics.
and less as the emanation unden\'ent radioactive decay, and it became motion less after about 30 seconds. Since this process was occurring very rapidly, Hahn and Sackur marked the position of the pointer on a scale with pencil marks. As a timing device they used a metronome that beat out intervals of approximately 1. 3 seconds. This simple method enabled them to determine that the half-life of the emanations of actinium and emanium were the same. Although Giesel's measurements had been more precise than Debierne's, the name of actinium was retained since Debierne had made the discovery first. Hahn now returned to his sample of barium chloride. He soon conjectured that the radium-enriched preparations must harbor another radioactive sub stance. The liquids resulting from fractional crystallization, which were sup posed to contain radium only, produced two kinds of emanation. One was the long-lived emanation of radium, the other had a short life similar to the emanation produced by thorium. Hahn tried to separate this substance by adding some iron to the solutions that should have been free of radium, but to no avail. Later the reason for his failure became apparent. The element that emitted the thorium emanation was constantly replenished by the ele ment believed to be radium. Hahn succeeded in enriching a preparation until it was more than 100,000 times as intensive in its radiation as the same quantity of thorium.
In July 2006, a major international conference was held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada, to celebrate the career and work of a remarkable man of letters. Abner Shimony, who is well known for his pioneering contributions to foundations of quantum mechanics, is a physicist as well as a philosopher, and is highly respected among the intellectuals of both communities. In line with Shimony’s conviction that philosophical investigation is not to be divorced from theoretical and empirical work in the sciences, the conference brought together leading theoretical physicists, experimentalists, as well as philosophers. This book collects twenty-three original essays stemming from the conference, on topics including history and methodology of science, Bell's theorem, probability theory, the uncertainty principle, stochastic modifications of quantum mechanics, and relativity theory. It ends with a transcript of a fascinating discussion between Lee Smolin and Shimony, ranging over the entire spectrum of Shimony's wide-ranging contributions to philosophy, science, and philosophy of science.
This volume presents a selection of papers from the Poincaré Project of the Center for the Philosophy of Science, University of Lisbon, bringing together an international group of scholars with new assessments of Henri Poincaré's philosophy of science—both its historical impact on the foundations of science and mathematics, and its relevance to contemporary philosophical inquiry. The work of Poincaré (1854-1912) extends over many fields within mathematics and mathematical physics. But his scientific work was inseparable from his groundbreaking philosophical reflections, and the scientific ferment in which he participated was inseparable from the philosophical controversies in which he played a pre-eminent part. The subsequent history of the mathematical sciences was profoundly influenced by Poincaré’s philosophical analyses of the relations between and among mathematics, logic, and physics, and, more generally, the relations between formal structures and the world of experience. The papers in this collection illuminate Poincaré’s place within his own historical context as well as the implications of his work for ours.