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Stillman Drake's Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo
... Galileo was an early advocate of mathematical modelling, or in modern parlance, instrumentalism. In The Assayer (1623) [209] (pp 237-238) he wrote: ...
In the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, it is asserted that science is merely another belief system, and should not be accorded any credibility above other belief systems. This assertion shows a complete misunderstanding of how both science and philosophy work. Not only science but all logic-based philosophies become pointless under the belief system hypothesis.
Science, formerly known as natural philosophy, is not a set of facts or beliefs, but rather a method for scrutinising ideas. In this it is far closer to a philosophical tool set than to an ideology. Popper’s view, widely endorsed by scientists, is that science requires disprovable propositions which can be evaluated using available evidence. Science is therefore not a system of belief, but a system of disbelief, which is a very different thing indeed.
This paper reviews the origins of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, discusses the numerous flaws in its fundamental premises and revisits the views of Michael Polanyi and Karl Popper who have been falsely cited as supporters of these premises. Two appendices are included for reference: one on philosophies of science and one on history of scientific methods. A third appendix on ethics and science has been published separately.
... All attempts at this point in time to understand the nature of the universe should properly be described as speculation, not science. But "admirable speculation," to use Galileo's words [12], is nevertheless an important part of science as it represents an attempt to begin to understand a scientific unknown. ...
Five hundred years ago the Roman Catholic Church wrongly opposed science. In my fifty years as a scientist, I have observed the Catholic Church reaching out to science, wholly unaware of widespread corruption and cartel-like behavior under guise of science, which leads, I allege, to the Vatican aiding and abetting activities that are not only anti-Christian, but which pose grave risks to human and environmental health.
... In 1623, Galileo, one of the greatest scientists of the millennium, precisely characterized human response to new ideas in a letter written to Don Virginio Cesarini (translated by Stillman Drake) [70]: Science tends to progress in logical steps. If a contradiction were correct, but is ignored, progress is impeded. ...
Albert Einstein was unsuccessful in attempting to understand the origin of Earth's magnetic field, which he considered to be one of the five most important unsolved problems in physics. Many who followed Einstein failed to understand the origin of the geomagnetic field because crucial prerequisite information was not available or was being systematically ignored by the geoscience community. Here I review the logical progression of discoveries from Earth's protoplanetary origin that led to my concept of a nuclear fission 'georeactor' at Earth's center, evidence of its existence, and the mechanism for generally maintaining stable operation over geological time scales and producing Earth's magnetic field. In the micro-gravity environment at Earth's center, uranium, mixed with reactor poisons from fission and decay products, forms the georeactor sub-shell, which is kept in motion by nuclear fission energy from uranium that settles-out forming the georeactor sub-core. The amount of nuclear fission energy produced in the sub-core reaches a steady state wherein the amount of fission energy produced balances the uranium precipitation and the energy transferred to the inner core heat-sink by convection. Sub-shell convection twisted by planetary rotation, I posited, produces the Earth's magnetic field by the dynamo concept first espoused by Elsasser. Occasionally, sub-shell convection is disrupted, for example, by surface trauma such as from a great meteor impact or by an intense outburst of charged particles from the sun, which can lead to a geomagnetic reversal or excursion. Such convection disruption may lead to an extra burst of nuclear fission energy which, by replacing the lost heat of protoplanetary compression energy, can trigger earthquakes and volcanic activity at Earth's surface. Eventually, the geomagnetic field will collapse with potentially devastating consequences for our highly-integrated, technology-based infrastructure. Humanity should approach that unknown time with eyes open and with a willingness to work together for common survival.
... In path-breaking 'The Assayer' [37] Galileo famously asserts that "philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes -I mean the universe -but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written. This book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it" (p.75, [39]; see also Drake's distinctive translation pp.237-238, [40]). ...
... All attempts at this point in time to understand the nature of the Universe should properly be described as speculation, not science. But "admirable speculation," to use Galileo's words [44], is nevertheless an important part of science, as it represents an attempt to begin to understand a scientific unknown. ...
Over my lifetime I have witnessed the decline of scientific capability and integrity in the physical sciences. When a new idea arises, it should be discussed and debated. Attempts should be made to refute the new idea; otherwise, it should be cited in subsequent literature. That is the way science progresses, not by attempting to suppress a new idea or failing that, to ignore it. But all too often, in instances of discoveries or insights that might cause major paradigm shifts, suppression or non-recognition is what happens. Here, I describe, from a first-person perspective, several paradigm shifts in astrophysics that have been systematically ignored, including the thermonuclear ignition of stars, the nature of dark matter, why vast numbers of galaxies have just a few prominent patterns of luminous stars, the origin of chemical elements, and a new speculation about the nature of the Universe.
... Este modelo, apresentado em seu trabalho fundamental Almagesto, era puramente geométrico e ainda geocêntrico como o de Aristóteles e descrevia relativamente bem os movimentos dos planetas. Somente quatorze séculos mais tarde é que os trabalhos revolucionários de Copérnico, Kepler e Galileu mostraram que este modelo não era satisfatório (NEU-GEBAUER, 1957;DRAKE, 1957;DUHEM, 1985). ...
Neste trabalho apresentamos uma revisão histórico-científica da importância da observação do eclipse solar ocorrido em Sobral em 1919. Revisamos alguns conceitos fundamentais que norteiam a história desta observação, que deu validade experimental à Teoria da Relatividade Geral (TRG). Considerando a importância que a observação teve na história da física, oferecemos uma narrativa que se inicia nos primórdios do pensamento humano, passando por diferentes épocas do nosso desenvolvimento como espécie até chegarmos aos estudos pré-Relatividade. A observação do eclipse de Sobral abriu novos horizontes na cosmologia, não só permitindo uma nova abordagem para o estudo do Universo em grande escala mas também por definir ferramentas que permitem mapear a distribuição de massa utilizando o fenômeno de lente gravitacional. Discutimos as medidas do desvio da luz de estrelas do aglomerado das Hyades e discorremos brevemente sobre a importância de uma revisão crítica da história da observação do eclipse e suas conseqüências para a qualidade da ciência que realizamos no país atualmente.
... Quite interestingly, our view of what defines an inertial system is in complete agreement with Galileo's interpretation of inertia. In Galileo's words: "All external impediments removed, a heavy body on a spherical surface concentric with the earth will maintain itself in that state in which it has been; if placed in movement toward the west (for example), it will maintain itself in that movement" [25]. This notion, which is termed "circular inertia" or "horizontal circular inertia" by historians of science, is a precursor to Newton's notion of rectilinear inertia [26,27]. ...
The Sagnac effect, named after its discoverer, is the phase shift occurring between two beams of light, traveling in opposite directions along a closed path around a moving object. A special case is the circular Sagnac effect, known for its crucial role in GPS and fiber-optic gyroscopes. It is often claimed that the circular Sagnac effect does not contradict special relativity theory (SRT) because it is considered an accelerated motion, while SRT applies only to uniform, non-accelerated motion. It is further claimed that the Sagnac effect, manifest in circular motion, should be treated in the framework of general relativity theory (GRT). We counter these arguments by underscoring the fact that the dynamics of rectilinear and circular types of motion are completely equivalent, and that this equivalence holds true for both non-accelerated and accelerated motion. With respect to the Sagnac effect, this equivalence means that a uniform circular motion (with constant w) is completely equivalent to a uniform rectilinear motion (with constant v). We support this conclusion by convincing experimental findings, indicating that an identical Sagnac effect to the one found in circular motion, exists in rectilinear uniform motion. We conclude that the circular Sagnac effect is fully explainable in the framework of inertial systems, and that the circular Sagnac effect contradicts special relativity theory and calls for its refutation.
... In other words, even properties of physical bodies like temperature that were thought to be "qualitative" (therefore not quantifiable, not measurable) were indeed quantitative. Following J. Michell [Mic04] such breakthroughs flourished in the XIV century and finally led to Galileo's belief that philosophy [of nature] is written in this grand book -I mean the universe -[...] in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth (Galileo Galilei, The Assayer, [Dra57]). ...
The Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) is scheduled to publish in 2018 a new edition of the Brochure, with the definition of the seven base units of the International System (SI). The new definition, now circulating in draft, is the most substantial change in the SI since its foundation in 1875, at the signature of the Metre Convention: in fact, for the first time all base units (and thereafter also all derived units) will no longer be defined based on a real physical object (as the kilogram prototype), or on a known physical phenomenon of a known reference material (as the triple point of water), or on a thought experiment (as the force of attraction between two parallel wires, placed at known distance and carrying an electric current), but based on “constants of nature”, whose numerical values will be fixed. The epistemological value of this extraordinary event cannot be ignored: afterwards, all measurement instruments will be calibrated based on these constants, ideally fixed once and forever.
In this thesis, the author introduces first the approach to the concept of measurement with some examples from the history of philosophy: a path is traced, which starting from ancient Greek philosophy and through modern science, brings to the current definition of measurement in the International Vocabulary of Metrology, used nowadays as the isomorphism between measurement quantities (the physical magnitude: length, time, mass or others) and the real numbers. Then the ontological approaches to the process of measuring are shown: from subjective relativism, to operationism, to representationalism. Switching to measurement units, the importance in their standardization and in the creation of the SI is stressed, also as “moral media-
tors”. The new definitions of the second, the metre and the kilogram are then analysed (with the controversial fixation of the hyperfine splitting frequency of caesium atom, of the speed of light in vacuum and of Planck constant). Some critical arguments against the New SI are then presented: whether or not the Metre Convention is fulfilled; the difference between “constants of nature” and “technical constants”, with the meaning and consequences of their fixation; whether constants of nature are “true constants”, or they are “assumed to be constant”. Eventually, the problem of “true” constants of nature is critically addressed, according to either a realist or an idealist ontological point of view, showing where the New SI proposed by BIPM demonstrates to follow one or the other approach, referring back to the examples from the
history of philosophy presented in the introduction.
... In other words, we put more weight on mathematics as a language to describe service systems. This strategy reminds us of Galileo's famous statement [5] Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe.... It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures;.... ...
This chapter addresses one of the key questions in service science: how to formalize expert knowledge. While this question has been treated mainly as a task of formal language design, we use an alternative approach based on machine learning. Investigating the history of expert systems in artificial intelligence, we suggest that three criteria, generalizability, learnability, and actionability, are critical for extracted expert rules. We then conclude that machine learning is a promising tool to satisfy these criteria. As a real example, we perform a case study on a task of condition-based maintenance in the railway industry. We demonstrate that our proposed statistical outlier detection method achieves good performance for early anomaly detection in wheel axles, and thus in encoding expert knowledge.
... However, despite the combined efforts of generations of astronomers and philosophers, not until Kepler empirically established what became eponymous laws of planetary motion in 1609 [49], did a reasonably correct description of planetary motion emerge.Kepler postulated that the motion of a planet is elliptical, but he did not explain the cause. Galileo's investigations occurred concurrently and resulted in the methodological paradigm[50] that would explain the general basis of Kepler's kinematic description in terms of forces and motion. Employing the scientific process of Galileo, Newton deduced the law of gravitation[51], one of the chief results included in the P rincipia published in 1687. ...
This research is focused on augmenting and extending classical dynamical methods by introducing flow-based methodologies into astrodynamical design and analysis. These flow-informed tools apply in extended phase spaces and through all levels of model fidelity. Thus, they apply where classical approaches begin to lose relevance and persist beyond this point. Such methodologies are common in various fields, and have recently begun to receive significant attention within the astrodynamical community for design and analysis efforts.
Trajectory design spaces are frequently vast and complex. In some cases, there are an infinite number of possibilities for particular solutions. Even after eliminating the infeasible choices, many options may still remain. Some strategies for selecting a candidate solution to incorporate into an astrodynamical design focus on simplification or reduction of the space. This approach has proven useful for many mission scenarios. However, such an approach, by its very nature, represents a potential loss of alternative solutions and may require reverting to the initial phases of the process when a new option is required. Approaches that reduce the distance from the initial design effort to its end result represent a potential improvement to the design process. Methods incorporating flow behaviors represent one such option where the understanding of the space is expanded and additional solutions are revealed.
The paper addresses the question of the identity of theology of science, fostering its interpretation as an intertextual narration. The starting point is the consideration of the domain of theology of science, which is viewed as a third domain of truth, according to Hans Urs von Balthasar. An analysis of the Swiss theologian’s perspective on this subject and the concept of God’s unknowability presents a strong counterargument to the claim that the natural sciences serve as a locus theologicus. Theology of science, nonetheless, exists and is engaged in a lively dialogue between science and theology, encompassing both the Revelation of God and the natural world or the Bible and the Book of Nature. What kind of discourse is this? This question concerns the position of theology of science within the field of science, specifically its objectivity and rigour, according to Evandro Agazzi’s analogical notion of science. Both the Bible and the Book of Nature ensure the objectivity of theology of science, while its rigour is established by the narrative paradigm. Therefore, theology of science can be seen as an intertextual narrative that engages both the Bible and the Book of Nature. The narrative paradigm of theology of science is subsequently elucidated, with particular emphasis on its cognitive aspects, narrative reasoning, the corresponding verification method, and Jewish corrective. The conclusion outlines a special task for theology of science in the modern age.
Modern science began as natural philosophy. Two ingredients are essential: first, the adoption of the metaphysical conjecture that the universe is such that phenomena obey mathematically precise laws; and secondly, a scrupulous concern to assess theories by means of observation and experiment (in addition to compatibility with the metaphysical conjecture). Both elements are to be found in the crucial work of Kepler and Galileo; and they are to be found in the first edition of Newton’s Principia too. But then, in response to criticism, Newton removed every hint of the conjectural and metaphysical from subsequent editions, and claimed dishonestly to have derived everything from phenomena by induction. As a result of Newton’s immense prestige, scientists after Newton came to take for granted versions of his inductivist conception of science. As a consequence, a wedge was driven between science and philosophy, to the detriment of both. That is the post-Newtonian blunder. Never corrected, it has devastatingly trivialized subsequent philosophy, in depriving it of contact with science and the world. We need to correct the post-Newtonian blunder, acknowledge that all versions of the Newtonian conception of science are untenable, implement aim-oriented empiricism, and transform science so that it becomes natural philosophy.
How can the world as it appears to us, the world we live in, exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? That is our fundamental problem, encompassing all others of science, thought, and life. Academic philosophy ought to have developed as the discipline that keeps alive imaginative and critical thinking about this problem—about how it interacts with more particular and specialised problems—in universities, and in cultural and social life. If philosophy had developed in this way, as Critical Fundamentalism, it would have noticed, and highlighted long ago the bad philosophy dominating academic inquiry. But philosophy has not, and still does not, put Critical Fundamentalism into practice. Modern philosophy began well: Descartes’ Cartesian dualism is an early attempt at solving our fundamental problem. But then an extraordinary thing happened. Philosophers after Descartes rejected Cartesian dualism but, instead of returning to the problem that Descartes tried, and failed, to solve, namely our fundamental problem, they continued to struggle with problems generated by Cartesian dualism, the very doctrine they had rejected! That is the post-Cartesian blunder; it had a disastrous impact on subsequent academic philosophy. It blinded academic philosophers to the damaging irrationality of knowledge-inquiry.
The dissertation investigates the conceptual developments behind the main accounts of the nature of perceptive qualities and how they have led to incomprehensibilities at the heart of the mind-body problem. Contemporary accounts of the nature of colors hold that colors are either:
1. in the mind, projected upon reality (projectivism)
2. confused concepts that do not straightforwardly correlate to anything in reality (eliminativism)
3. qualities of worldly objects (naive realism or physicalism)
4. dispositions that cause the respective perceptions (dispositionalism)
The dissertation shows that all four theories have been discussed since the time of Galileo. They are the result of a distinction philosophers have widely agreed on thenceforward, namely the distinction between what Locke calls “primary” and “secondary qualities.”
According to the distinction, experiences or ideas of secondary qualities must be produced by configurations and movements of particles constituted of primary qualities. In spite of subscribing to this claim, philosophers such as Descartes and Locke also claim that the connection between primary qualities and ideas of secondary qualities is inconceivable. The combination of these two claims is the “paradox of the primary-secondary quality distinction.”
The philosophical disputes around the distinction usually ignore the “hard problem” of inconceivability and instead circle around the above described four different types of explanations of secondary qualities in terms of primary qualities. These explanations contradict each other ontologically, but nevertheless they share the same root: the view that the empirical world is mathematical.
Edmund Husserl claims that this conception entails a profound confusion. He sets out to explain the confusion through a genealogy of the “mathematization of nature.” In an exegesis of The Crisis of the European Sciences, I distinguish four steps of mathematization:
1. generalization
2. idealization
3. formalization
4. symbolization
The combination of these steps leads to, in Husserl’s assessment, a confusion of theoretical entities with the experiential world. Contrary to what is often thought, the concept of the lifeworld is not simply a belated response to Heidegger, but Husserl’s ultimate expression of his lifelong study of the relation of mathematics and experience. He contends that the incomprehensibility of the connection between original experience and the scientific world leads to a crisis of the foundation and significance of philosophy and science. The recovery of original experience is for Husserl thus not only a way to avoid philosophical misunderstanding of the results of science, but also an answer to a profound crisis of meaning.
Husserl’s genealogy of mathematization allows for a neat explanation for why the paradox seems unavoidable. Ideas of secondary qualities are not directly mathematizable, and therefore it seems that they must be produced by primary qualities. Yet, this seems inconceivable because the results of mathematization techniques (primary qualities) are compared to something categorically different, namely experiential qualities (ideas of secondary qualities). While it would be futile to look for direct correlates, the genealogy of the development of the paradox shows a way to a differentiated understanding of the relation between experience and the scientific concept of the world.
Bruno Latour’s distinctive historiographic standpoint on the origins of scientific revolutions and the multifarious accounts of their reconstructions are elicited. It is contended that, in spite of their highly iconoclastic character, Latour’s views can be welcomed for their innovative approach to the inquiries of social facets of science. In particular, they can elucidate the foundations of the lucid mature theory change model proffered in our preceding writings. Correspondingly, the Copernican Revolution is envisaged in the wayward context of intense interaction and interpenetration of Aristotelean and Ptolemaic sophisticated research practices. Eventually, the Aristotle – Ptolemy pagan cosmology could not help but be exposed to repeated cogent attacks during the Middle Ages since it apparently confronted the renowned principles of monotheism, not admitting the impervious demarcation line between the celestial and mundane realms. All the opposite worlds should have one and the same Creator. Commencing with the unification, Copernicus, in effect, paved the way for the descent of mathematics from Heaven to Earth and the spread of natural philosophy from Earth to Heaven.
The great chemist Robert Boyle was also a serious student of the Bible and Christian theology, both of which profoundly influenced his natural philosophy. Christian beliefs and moral attitudes motivated him to extend human dominion over the creation by advancing scientific knowledge and giving medicines from his laboratory to the poor. His outspoken advocacy of empiricism, over and against those who believed that unaided reason was sufficient to probe the depths of nature, was rooted in the conviction that the free, wise, and powerful Creator knows the creation far better than we creatures ever will. He vigorously promoted what he called "the mechanical philosophy", partly because he found it far more theologically attractive than the pagan Greek conception taught in the universities, which conceived of "Nature" as a semi-divine being with a mind and powers of its own. It also underscored the great complexity of the world machine, requiring an intelligent Creator to have assembled it-thereby (he hoped) moving people not only to acknowledge God but to live piously and humbly.
Reviel Netz offers a radically contingent counterfactual history in which the absence of Archimedes would have prevented early modern Europe's scientific revolution and perhaps the nineteenth-century industrial revolution too. I argue that we need to be more explicit about methods in counterfactual arguments. Techniques developed by economic historians and political scientists seem to point toward a more constrained range of possibilities, and also favor assigning more importance to external material forces. Absent Archimedes, I suggest, we would live in a different world from this one, but not very different.
The early modern era produced the Scientific Revolution, which originated our present understanding of the natural world. Concurrently, philosophers established the conceptual foundations of modernity. This rich and comprehensive volume surveys and illuminates the numerous and complicated interconnections between philosophical and scientific thought as both were radically transformed from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. The chapters explore reciprocal influences between philosophy and physics, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and other disciplines, and show how thinkers responded to an immense range of intellectual, material, and institutional influences. The volume offers a unique perspicuity, viewing the entire landscape of early modern philosophy and science, and also marks an epoch in contemporary scholarship, surveying recent contributions and suggesting future investigations for the next generation of scholars and students.
Painted in Rome around 1615, Jusepe de Ribera's series of half figures personifying the five senses invites a diplomatic audience associated with the Lincean Academy to a performance of prudence, a virtue meant to characterize the judgment of both art and of sensory experience. Ribera's series is new evidence for how the demonstration of prudence in conversation motivated ownership and display of art and shaped art's contribution to natural philosophy. Ribera's “Five Senses” articulates the distinction between sense and prudence, and reveals the importance of discussion, dissimulation, and social performance to the way early Seicento art was produced and consumed.
Kostas Tampakis - George Ν. Vlahakis Introduction - The Power Of Names 11 POETRY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Pauline Choay-Lescar Geopoetry In Walt Whitman’s Leaves Of Grass 15 Simone Palmieri A Survey On The Functionality Of Metrical-Rhyming Structures In Italian Advertising . . . . . . 25 Marion Simonin The Fourth State Of Material By Leonard Gaspar. A Poetry To Stich Up? 41 Io Stephanidou Scientific Fragments Of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry In Art: A Comment On Janet Malcolm’s Cut Up Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Kostas Tampakis “To Leave Parnassus And Climb The Rugged Mountain Of Science”– Theodoros Orphanidis, Poetry And Science In Nineteenth Century Greece . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Maria Terdimou Zero And Infinity In Modern Greek Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PROSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Constantin Canavas The Affective Narrative Of The Lunar Distance. Science And Literature In The Cosmicomics By Italo Calvino . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Evangelia Chordaki Hidden Paths – Unconventional Practices. A Her-Story Of Circulation Of Medical Knowledge In The Late Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Manolis Kartsonakis The Leading Approach To The Scientific Revolution Through Literature Forms: Reports, Dialogues And Letters Within Copernicus’, Kepler’s And Galileo’s Works . . . . . . . . . 111 Gianna Katsiampoura Science And Scientists In Crime Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Constantinos Morfakis - Katerina Vlantoni Science, Technology And Society, Searching For The Enemy Of The People . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Roula Tsitouri Exploring Aphasia: Samuel Beckett’s Late Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Michael Wainwright On What Matters For African Americans: W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls Of The Black Folk In The Light Of Derek Parfit’s Reasons And Persons 149 Anne-Gaëlle Weber Scholarly Uses Of Literature At The End Of The 18th Century And In The 19th Century . . . . . . 157 George N. Vlahakis Mesmerism In Nineeteenth–Century Greek Popular Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
This thesis is concerned with that branch of the history of science which takes as its central problem the question of scientific progress, defined as the growth of knowledge and understanding about the world. It is an area of enquiry which has been suppressed, in recent years, by the development of historical methodologies which eschew all epistemological deliberations and their established ramifications. This thesis, therefore, addresses itself to the following areas. In Chapter One consideration is given to the degree to which the present ascendancy of contextual, social history of science depends upon formulating methodological strategies that deny the very legitimacy of a progress history of scientific ideas. These strategies are shown to depend upon the old definition of internalist, intellectual history of science, which drew upon related areas in the philosophy of science. Some basic arguments in favour of the possibility of progressive histories of scientific ideas, which have been ignored by the discipline as a whole, are rehearsed. Chapter Two is devoted to an account of how a present-day philosophy of science, aim-oriented empiricism, offers a solution to the problem of induction which, by demonstrating that scientific rationality has a historical dimension, provides a suitable historiographic framework for a progress-oriented history of scientific ideas. Chapter Three examines the work of Galileo in the light of this new historiographic framework. Firstly, it is demonstrated to be an option 7 for exegesis, an account of how ideally rational science ought to be which does not rationally reconstruct the past Secondly, it illuminates Galileo's work in significantly new ways, demonstrating that by making explicit the metaphysical dimension already implicit in Galileo's methodology, his work can be shown to have an underlying unity - and be part of a progressive tradition - in ways which other interpretations, distracted by the seeming disunity at the methodological level, fail to appreciate. Finally, Chapter Four considers the possibility of a beneficial, reciprocal relationship between developments in the philosophy of science and in progressive histories of scientific ideas.
Africa was the only continent not to achieve the 2015 Millennium Development Goal of 50% poverty reduction. This paper asks whether Africa will fare better in meeting Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) addressing poverty and hunger by 2030. To answer this question, we examine a diverse body of literature and provide relevant longitudinal data collected over 13 years of field research. We find that ‘sustainable development’ is a failed concept immersed in the contemporary global economic system that favors growth over ecosystem stability and international institutions that undervalue women’s capacity for sustainability in their care-work as food providers. We examine barriers to women’s farming (climate change, gender bias, limited access to land, technology, finance) and provide examples of women’s innovative strategies for overcoming barriers in their care practices toward family and community well-being and ecosystem health. We find that Africa will likely repeat past failures without community-level interventions that empower women to achieve SDGs on poverty, hunger, gender equity, and ecosystem management. We uncover similar holistic thinking in women’s agricultural practices and scientific conception of ‘ecosystem services’.
This paper examines the legacy of the Galileo Affair as a weapon used by Protestants against those who, despite the scientific age of the earth, read Genesis literally. Believing science to have a legitimate role in correcting biblical interpretations, nineteenth-century religionists sought to explain the doctrine of creation in accordance with the geological evidence for “Deep Time.” This was the lesson they gleaned from the Catholic Church’s condemnation of Galileo. Yet by casting the controversy over Genesis in the categories supplied by the conflict over geo-centrism and the Bible, these Protestants misrepresented both contests, as have the historians studying them.
The role of geometry in human movement is not as evident as the presence of geometric configurations in art, architecture and design. In this paper, I summarize how my research on geometric configurations transitioned, from theoretical explorations and computational design, to built objects and movement practices. The geometric properties of the icosahedron, one of the five regular polyhedra, are applied to interpret the proportions of the human body, guiding and inspiring movements leading to mindfulness.
גלילאו לא המציא את הטלסקופ. עם זאת, העיון בכתביו והאופן בו בנה והשתמש במכשיר מעידים כי היה הראשון שהבין כיצד הוא פועל. גלילאו שיכלל את הטלסקופ והפכו לכלי מחקר באמצעותו גילה דברים חדשים על טבעם של גרמי השמיים ופיענחם בדרך שונה מזו שהיתה מקובלת על בני זמנו.
Several decades ago Alexandre Koyré’s interpretation of Galileo as a Platonist of a specific sort was the dominant view, but today it is largely out of fashion. In this paper I argue that, if wrong regarding the experimental side of Galilean science, Koyré’s interpretation was substantially correct as to its crucial ontological and epistemological components. In this light I defend the view that Galileo should be seen as an advocate of a physico-mathematical version of Platonism.
Traditionally, the ‘scientific worldview’ is said to have originated in Western Europe in 1543, when Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies was published in Vienna — a book that not only introduced much of literate Europe to the notion of a ‘heliocentric universe’, but was also contrary to Aristotelian teaching. In 1686, Newton published his Principia, which put a final nail in the coffin of Aristotle's physics. The 143-year period between these two publications is usually known as the Scientific Revolution.
The label ‘Scientific Revolution’ is not meaningless – the 16th and 17th centuries indeed witnessed a dramatic intellectual transition, as we indicated in Chapter 1 – but for the following reasons it can mislead:
Copernicus and his successors inherited the tradition of Classical learning that had continued, transmuted but unbroken, through the Islamic golden age and late mediaeval Europe (see Chapter 4 and below).
European views of the natural world had not become entirely ‘modern’ by Newton’s time.
Most importantly, the process of change was underpinned by a wider cultural transformation.
Vision and hearing are dependent on disparities of spatial patterns received by two eyes and on time and intensity differences to two ears. However, the experiences of a single world have masked attention to these disparities. While eyes and ears are paired, there has not been parity in the attention directed to their functioning. Phenomena involving binocular vision were commented upon since antiquity whereas those about binaural hearing are much more recent. This history is compared with respect to the experimental manipulations of dichoptic and dichotic stimuli and the instruments used to stimulate the paired organs. Binocular color mixing led to studies of binaural hearing and direction and distance in visual localization were analyzed before those for auditory localization. Experimental investigations began in the nineteenth century with the invention of instruments like the stereoscope and pseudoscope, soon to be followed by their binaural equivalents, the stethophone and pseudophone.
The role of Galileo in the history of modern science has been and will always be subject to debate. If it is not true that he invented the scientific method – it is of Hellenistic origin – based on the comparison between theory and experiment, it is true that he made a fundamental contribution to its clarification and dissemination. If Galileo was unclear about some of his scientific results and also on epistemological aspects, they were all solved by his colleagues and students. Castelli, Torricelli, Cavalieri, and Viviani stand out among them. Cavalieri and Torricelli generalized the uncertain Galilean principle of inertia bringing it to its modern form, which was only implicit in Galileo. Viviani in his biography attributed to his master a purely empirical method, charging it with experimental activities in many sectors; in addition to falling bodies, he also took care of thermology and magnetism experiments. Although the description of Viviani was most probably not faithful, it represents a sign that Galileo had transmitted to his heirs a method in which the role of experiment was crucial.
According to some authors, Popper 's realism is blatantly incoherent mainly because of his commitment with the correspondence theory of truth and due to the fact that in his theory of science is granted that, though the general aim of science is the search for truth, it might happen that a specific theory reaches that aim without us being able of knowing it. In this paper, I explain, briefly, the particularities of Popper's realism, his views on truth as a regulative ideal for science, and I show that, regardless the impossibility of establishing in a definitive way that truth has been reached, there is no incoherence that endangers his project. In this way, I answer Cardenas and others' criticisms against Popper's realism and his views on the general aim of science, and I identify the sources from which this kind of misunderstanding springs.
“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth” is oft-repeated in Christian churches. Combine a belief in the Almighty with the biblical creation narrative in which the heavens and the earth and all they contain are created in seven days and you have all the ingredients necessary for a showdown with science. God Almighty, according to this view, is the omnipotent creator of the universe; he speaks the world into instantaneous existence; on one day he says that the land should produce vegetation and, voilà, all of the plants and trees inhabit the earth; on another day he fills the waters with sea creatures and the sky with birds; on the sixth day, he populates the land with wild animals. And then, in the blink of an eye, he spoke humankind into existence. Humans, like all of the other animals, were created directly by Omnipotence. God spoke, it was done, and it was good.
Ashkenazi Jews, who make up 80 percent of the Jews in the world today, have, on average, the highest IQs of any ethnic group in the world. While Asians are often touted as the smartest people in the world, Ashkenazi Jews as a group average 115 on an IQ test—eight points higher than Asians and dramatically higher than the world average of 79.1. Ashkenazin skills in verbal reasoning, comprehension, working memory, and mathematics are simply astounding—the group averages 125 on an IQ test of verbal reasoning. Since 1950, 29 percent of Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Ashkenazi Jews, who represent a mere 0.25 percent of the global population. Did God choose the Jews because they were so brilliant or because, as legend has it, they were the best story-tellers?
Retoryczna i filozoficzna interpretacja "Wagi probierczej" Galileusza
Unless carried out “liberally,” a historical study of the liberal arts may produce only a record of reutilized ideas and practices and offer little real insights. To avoid these, the present chapter would analyze the liberal arts in close relation to the major intellectual tasks in each historical period. Thus, it will see how the Aristotelian logic provided Medieval students with a sharp scalpel for dissecting feudalism and orthodox Christianity. How did seventeenth century science as the mathematical explication of physical world would try to close the desperate schism of Christendom? How did science, which had been expected to guarantee world peace, meet with a severe defeat in the face of WW I and bring about the revival of the humanities?
The Moon is our nearest neighbor in space, Earth’s partner in a never-ending dance around the Sun, and for much of each month it’s also the most prominent object in the nighttime sky. The Moon whirls around the celestial vault in just over 27 days and each day appears slightly different – a sliver of light at the beginning and end, a brilliant silvery disk in between. Compared to every other naked-eye object in the sky, the Moon is a flagrant show-off. Its regular waxing-waning cycle is so obvious that it formed the basis of early calendars, providing a convenient interval of time between the day and the more subtle annual cycle of the Sun and seasons. While there is only one purely lunar calendar in wide use today, the Moon remains an important cultural symbol. The flags of more than half a dozen nations feature its crescent, and some of the world’s most important religious festivals are linked to its phases. As both a signpost of the cosmic and a symbol of inaccessibility, the Moon has been a source of inspiration and mystery throughout the ages.
After following the frenetic wanderings of Mars, we turn now to planets that proceed through the sky at a much more leisurely pace. Jupiter and Saturn, the largest planets of the solar system, lie much farther from the Sun – and us – than Mars. Jupiter’s lane of the solar system racetrack is about five times the size of Earth’s, and Saturn’s track is nearly twice as large as Jupiter’s. Their wanderings through the constellations are much less dramatic than the splendid whirl of Mars, but the motions are similar, with retrograde loops centered on the time when they’re opposite the Sun in our sky. As with Mars, Jupiter and Saturn come to opposition when our faster-orbiting Earth overtakes and passes them, and this is the time when they’re closest, shine brightest and appear largest in a telescope. However, their slower orbital speeds translate to more frequent oppositions: Jupiter’s recur every 13 months, while Saturn’s happen a couple of weeks later each year (see Appendix D for details). Their plodding regularity results in seasonal appearances that approximate those of the background stars. Jupiter travels through roughly one constellation of the zodiac each year and Saturn tracks about half that, so skywatchers can count on seeing these planets only slightly later each successive year. A special treat occurs about every two decades, when Jupiter overtakes Saturn and the solar system’s biggest worlds shine in tight formation.
Within Western civilization mathematics has always been deeply related to the idea (or the ideal) of science as such, and this for several reasons. The first is that the concept of knowledge, in its fullest meaning and significance, was quickly identified by early Greek philosophers with something more demanding than simple truth. While Parmenides had distinguished truth (alétheia) from opinion (dóxa), Plato noted that we certainly have “true opinions”, but they do not constitute knowledge in a full sense, that form of knowledge that he calls science (epistéme). According to this view there is a weak form of knowledge (namely opinion, which may be true, but is contingent and unstable), and a strong form of knowledge, which is science, and is characterized as being demonstrative and, in such a way, endowed with necessity and stability1. It is not difficult to recognize that such a requirement was imposed upon the ideal of science by the historical fact that mathematics had already attained in Greek culture the status of a demonstrative discipline. Indeed, several particular “mathematical truths” had been found by Egyptian and Mesopotamian scholars, but they consisted in the discovery of single instantiations of certain geometrical or numerical properties, while early Greek mathematicians were able to demonstrate general theorems, under which the said particular instantiations appeared to be contained, along with a potentially infinite amount of similar examples.
The Cognitive Psychology of ReligionEvolutionary Explanations of Religious BeliefExplaining God AwayCritiqueConclusion
NotesBibliography
This essay on the Second Meditation (M2) takes its cue, very loosely, from Descartes’ recommendation for reading Principles of Philosophy – that is, to read it once quickly, “like a novel,” and then two or three times more carefully, so that by the third or fourth reading the reader should discover “solutions” to any “difficulties” encountered earlier (AT 9B: 12). The essay consists of three readings of the second half of M2, which includes Descartes’ famous consideration of the piece of wax. The first section provides an initial analysis which raises a number of questions. The second section suggests some answers to these questions and attempts to reconstruct the main arguments that Descartes is offering. The third section reflects on the larger Cartesian methodologies and strategies that appear to be in play. ¶10 constitutes a bridge between the two halves of M2. Descartes confesses to an obsessive or highly tempting thought – “I cannot stop thinking this” – which persists even after his meditation thus far, namely that the corporeal things of which images are formed in my thought, and which the senses investigate, are known with much more distinctness than this puzzling ‘I’ which cannot be pictured in the imagination. It is the combating of this thought which dominates the second half of M2; I will refer to it as “the Thought.” Descartes suggests, without quite asserting it here, that the Thought is false – it is outside “the bounds of truth” – but he also seems to think that showing that the Thought is false is not enough to extirpate it. The strategy he announces for extirpating it is to give his mind “completely free rein, so that after a while, when it is time to tighten the reins, it may more readily submit to being curbed.”
To judge from the first five and a half of Descartes’ six Meditations, the senses have very little to recommend themselves. At the beginning of the Meditations, our sensory experience is regarded as susceptible to illusion, indistinguishable from dreaming, and of uncertain origin. Shortly thereafter the senses are judged to systematically mislead us about the nature of bodies, providing only “obscure” and “confused” perceptions of them through what may be “materially false” ideas. The senses, it seems, can’t even acquaint us properly with a little piece of wax! The intellect, rather than the senses, is the epistemic hero of the Meditations, guiding us to such important metaphysical truths as the existence of God, the real distinction between mind and body, and even the true nature of body. It is no wonder, then, that much of the secondary literature on Descartes’ treatment of the senses is devoted to understanding their epistemic shortcomings. The second half of the sixth and final Meditation treats the senses in a more positive light. Here Descartes defends the claim that sensory perception is a form of thinking unique to embodied minds: it arises from the union or “intermingling” of mind and body (AT 7: 81). While sensory perception may be problematic for the purpose of doing metaphysics, he insists that it is critical to our survival as embodied minds. There is, it seems, a division of cognitive labor in the embodied human mind: the intellect is our best guide to metaphysics; the senses are our best guides to action. While the French tradition has long attended to Descartes’ repurposing of the senses as guides to survival, Anglo-American commentators have only more recently attended to this part of the story, which is the focus of this chapter.
Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy has long been considered the founding text of modern philosophy, suggesting that philosophy begins in doubt and not in wonder as the Greeks supposed. Hegel put the idea thus: when we survey the history of ancient and medieval philosophy up to Descartes, we feel like a sailor on a storm-tossed sea who is finally able to shout “Land ahoy!,” for Cartesian doubt is not doubt about this or that particular matter, but a wholesale doubt in which the human mind, rejecting the authority of nature and God, sets out to be its own guide and to make a new, “absolute” beginning. Such is indeed the spirit of the First Meditation, subtitled “What can be called into doubt” and opening with Descartes recounting how the discovery of extensive error in many of the beliefs he had accepted from childhood led him to doubt “the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them” and to undertake “to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations” (AT 7: 17). As the “Synopsis of the Meditations” indicates, the First Meditation pursues this new beginning in a specific direction. The skeptical doubts it lays out, Descartes says, are intended only for “so long as we have no foundations for the sciences other than those which we have had up till now,” since their goal is to show how “the mind may be led away from the senses” (AT 7: 12). In other words, the First Meditation has as its aim to demolish the notion that knowledge rests upon the senses and to prepare the way for the different conception of knowledge developed in subsequent Meditations. This non-empiricist conception will not only insist on the existence of innate ideas; it will also assert, as in the wax example of Meditation Two (AT 7: 30–34), that even our most elementary beliefs about material things, such as that our sensations are of objects enduring over time, have their basis not in the senses themselves, but in the judging activity of the intellect.
The following discussion considers two ways in which Descartes approaches the nature of the self. It is proposed that the Meditations answers two distinct questions – What am I? and Who am I? Even though the text answers each question differently, we should not regard the two answers as in conflict with one another. A deeper appreciation of Descartes’ comments about the self throughout his corpus helps to reduce the apparent conflict between the self he defines as a ‘thinking thing’, and the self as constituted by a mind-body union. Contrary to what may seem to follow from the Second Meditation identification of self and thinking thing, a case can be made that our natural state is the lived experience of the embodied self. To remove ourselves from this state takes an extraordinary and unsustainable effort. The exercise in which we are about to engage has important ramifications for how we think about Descartes’ contribution to metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. We are all familiar with a certain caricature of the self that Descartes is alleged to have propagated, and one that contemporary philosophers of mind are apt to use when setting up their own views in opposition. Paul Churchland writes, for example, that “as Descartes saw it, the real you is not your material body, but rather a nonspatial thinking substance, an individual unit of mind-stuff quite distinct from your material body.” To accept this caricature requires ignoring a vast amount of textual material and assuming that the “you” in Churchland’s statement would have been unambiguous for Descartes. Terms referring to the self are indeed ambiguous for Descartes, and unavoidably so.
The dualism of mind and body is at the heart of Descartes’ system. It is, perhaps, his signature doctrine. It is hard to think of any subsequent philosophical system in the history of Western philosophy that does not prominently engage some version of “Cartesian” dualism. One of the earliest and most significant critics of Cartesian dualism was Spinoza. He regarded the correction of this doctrine as one of his most important achievements of his monistic system of philosophy. In what follows, however, we shall identify reasons for thinking that Spinoza’s own system mirrors some of the defects he found in Descartes’. Despite Spinoza’s highly negative appraisal of Descartes’ dualism, he takes on more of it than is apparent on the surface. We shall also see how Descartes’ dualism has available more philosophical resources than Spinoza recognized in his critique. This essay focuses first on Descartes’ own treatment of dualism, especially as it is developed in the Meditations and associated texts, and then on some of the highlights of Spinoza’s reaction to it. Descartes’ dualism Descartes himself does not use Latin or French words for the term “dualism.” The full title of the second edition of the Meditations includes, “... in which are demonstrated the existence of God and the distinction between the human soul and the body” (AT 7: 17, emphasis added). The demonstration appears in the Sixth Meditation; the distinction in question is a real distinction, a term which Descartes borrows from his medieval predecessors. The Sixth Meditation ends with a treatment of the human being as a union of mind and body; Descartes’ dualism thus embraces both the distinctness of mind and body and their being “closely joined,” “as it were, intermingled [quasi permixtum],” and forming “a unit” (AT 7: 81). The notorious tension between these requires examination at both ends. We turn first to the duality of mind and body, and then to their union.
My topic here is Descartes’ Third Meditation – but not the causal principles and proofs that have probably been the target of more philosophical irk than anything else in Descartes. Rather, I am concerned with the language in which they are couched, where Descartes speaks of an “objective” component, feature, or mode of ideas, a bit of medieval shoptalk he uses to distinguish among ideas insofar as they represent different things. Taking ideas objectively (rather than “materially”) differentiates them according to what the “Preface to the Reader” identifies as the “thing[s] represented by” operations of the intellect (AT 7: 8). The Third Meditation then refers to the degree of perfection of what the idea is of or about as its “objective reality,” in contrast to the reality that is “actual or formal” [actualis sive formalis; AT 7: 41–2], which properly belongs to causes. In these slightly oblique ways, Descartes uses the notion of objectivity to introduce issues of mental content and its representation in ideas. But I will argue that the Third Meditation takes only a first step towards accounting for the representational content of Cartesian ideas: it asks how it is possible for our ideas to have (stable) content, and finds the condition of possibility in the content of the particular idea of God. If I am right, the content of Cartesian ideas is to be understood in a less internalist way than is typical.
One of the views that is defended prominently in the First Meditation is that there exists the possibility that we are deceived about matters that are utterly evident to us. The possibility takes three different forms: that God created us with minds that are highly defective; that our minds evolved by chance and so are not dependable devices for tracking truth; and that an evil demon is deceiving us every time we grasp a result as obvious. It is tempting to hope that the argumentation that Descartes offers in the First Meditation is problematic, and that Descartes sees it to be problematic himself. If it is true that it is possible that our minds are deceived about matters that are utterly evident to us, it is hard to see how we would ever arrive at a result that we could trust. Commentators raised the worry immediately. If there exists the possibility that our minds are deceived about matters that are utterly evident to us, Descartes would not be entitled to move beyond the First Meditation and offer any arguments, and there would seem to be no way that he could establish (in the Third and Fourth Meditations) that God exists and created us with minds that are reliable. The First Meditation is clear in positing the existence of the possibility that our minds are deceived about matters that are utterly evident to us. If we attempt to locate an argument in Descartes’ corpus that attempts to confront that possibility head on, Descartes will always be subject to the objection that perhaps the argument is no good and we find it to be compelling for the sole reason that our minds are defective. I want to suggest that we approach the First Meditation possibilities by changing the subject a bit, and indeed, by pretending that we had never read the First Meditation at all. Strange as it sounds to say, that will give us the best sense of what the First Meditation is working to do.
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