Marij van Strien

Radboud University | RU · Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies

In this paper I examine the foundations of Laplace’s famous statement of determinism in 1814, and argue that rather than derived from his mechanics, this statement is based on general philosophical principles, namely the principle of sufficient reason and the law of continuity. It is usually supposed that Laplace’s statement is based on the fact th...

The theory of quantum mechanics has often been thought to show an affinity with logical empiricism: in both, observation plays a central role, and questions about what is unobservable are dismissed. However, there were also strong tensions between the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle and certain implications drawn from quantum physics. In th...

Bohr’s work in quantum mechanics posed a challenge to philosophers of science, who struggled with the question of whether and to what degree his theories and methods could be considered rational. This paper focuses on Popper, Feyerabend, Lakatos and Kuhn, all of whom recognized some irrational, dogmatic, paradoxical or even inconsistent features in...

Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics has generally been understood as an attempt to restore the determinism of classical physics. However, although Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, as he initially proposed it in 1952, does indeed have the feature of being deterministic, for Bohm this was never the main point. In fact, in other text...

This paper aims to show that the development of Feyerabend’s philosophical ideas in the 1950s and 1960s largely took place in the context of debates on quantum mechanics. In particular, he developed his influential arguments for pluralism in science in discussions with the quantum physicist David Bohm, who had developed an alternative approach to...

Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics has generally been received as an attempt to restore the determinism of classical physics. However, although this interpretation, as Bohm initially proposed it in 1952, does indeed have the feature of being deterministic, for Bohm this was never the main point. In fact, in other publications and in corresp...

Quantum physics is one of the cornerstones of modern physics and a scientifically informed philosophy of nature needs to integrate it. In particular, quantum mechanics is thought to have implications for example for the question whether nature is deterministic, the (im)possibility to observe without intervening, and the possibility of non-local int...

It is still commonly thought that when quantum mechanics was introduced, its shock lied in the fact that it went against a doctrine of determinism which was until then firmly established in science, and which had been almost universally accepted among scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Romizi’s book Dem wissenschaftlichen Determin...

Determinism is generally regarded as one of the main characteristics of classical physics, that is, the physics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. However, an inquiry into eighteenth and nineteenth century physics shows that the aim of accounting for all phenomena on the basis of deterministic equations of motion remained far out of reach. F...

According to Ernest Nagel, determinism is central to the scientific enterprise. Faced with the claim that determinism fails in quantum mechanics, Nagel proposed a notion of determinism which does not rely on a fundamental level of description, and can play a role in different scientific disciplines irrespective of their reducibility to physics. Nag...

When David Bohm published his alternative theory of quantum mechanics in 1952, it was not received well; a recurring criticism was that it formed a reactionary attempt to return to classical physics. In response, Bohm emphasized the progressiveness of his approach, and even turned the accusation of classicality around by arguing that he wanted to m...

In the mid-eighteenth century, it was usually taken for granted that all curves described by a single mathematical function were continuous, which meant that they had a shape without bends and a well-defined derivative. In this paper I discuss arguments for this claim made by two authors, Emilie du Châtelet and Roger Boscovich. I show that accordin...

The development of rigorous foundations of differential calculus in the course of the nineteenth century led to concerns among physicists about its applicability in physics. Through this development, differential calculus was made independent of empirical and intuitive notions of continuity, and based instead on strictly mathematical conditions of...

During the period 1860-1880, a number of physicists and mathematicians, including Maxwell, Stewart, Cournot and Boussinesq, used theories formulated in terms of physics to argue that the mind, the soul or a vital principle could have an impact on the body. This paper shows that what was primarily at stake for these authors was a concern about the i...

The recent discovery of an indeterministic system in classical mechanics, the Norton dome, has shown that answering the question whether classical mechanics is deterministic can be a complicated matter. In this paper I show that indeterministic systems similar to the Norton dome were already known in the nineteenth century: I discuss four nineteent...

It is commonly thought that before the introduction of quantum mechanics, determinism was a straightforward consequence of the laws of mechanics. However, around the nineteenth century, many physicists, for various reasons, did not regard determinism as a provable feature of physics. This is not to say that physicists in this period were not commit...

The reversibility problem (better known as the reversibility objection) is usually taken to be an internal problem in the kinetic theory of gases, namely the problem of how to account for the second law of thermodynamics within this theory. Historically, it is seen as an objection that was raised against Boltzmann's kinetic theory of gases, which l...