Book · February 22, 2024
From pebbles to planets, tigers to tables, pine trees to people; animate and inanimate, natural and artificial; bodies are everywhere. Bodies populate the world, acting and interacting with one another, and they are the subject-matter of Newton's laws of m ...
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Journal ArticlePhysics Today · August 1, 2023
The Philosophy and Physics of Noether’s Theorems: A Centenary Volume, James Read and Nicholas J. Teh, eds. ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2023
In this chapter, we argue that Du Châtelet’s account of motion is an important contribution to the history of the absolute versus relative motion debate. The arguments we lay out have two main strands. First, we clarify Du Châtelet’s threefold taxonomy of ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2023
Newton’s Principia reconceptualizes rational mechanics and physics, and offers a novel unification of these heretofore distinct disciplines. In this paper, I argue for a reading of the Principia that insists on a strict distinction between the rational mec ...
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Journal ArticleStudies in history and philosophy of science · August 2021
We all know that, nowadays, physics and philosophy are housed in separate departments on university campuses. They are distinct disciplines with their own journals and conferences, and in general they are practiced by different people, using different tool ...
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Journal ArticleStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B - Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics · August 1, 2019Full textOpen AccessCite
Chapter · December 13, 2018
This book argues that Du Châtelet put her finger on the central problems that lay at the intersection of physics and metaphysics at the time, and tackled them drawing on the most up-to-date resources available. ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2018
The first edition of Du Châtelet’s Institutions de Physique (hereafter translated as Foundations of Physics) was published in 1740,1 and was written in France in the late 1730s, in the wake of Newton’s Principia, at a time when Cartesian natural philosophy ...
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Journal ArticleHOPOS · March 1, 2017
Recent discussions of structuralist approaches to scientific theories have stemmed primarily from John Worrall’s “Structural Realism” in which he defends a position (since characterized “epistemic structural realism”) whose historical roots he attributes t ...
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Journal ArticleStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A · January 1, 2015
By means of an example, special relativity and presentism, I argue for the importance of reading history of physics as a contribution to philosophy, and for the fruitfulness of this approach to doing integrated history and philosophy of science. Within phi ...
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Journal ArticlePhilosophy of Science · December 1, 2013
Within philosophy of physics it is broadly accepted that presentism as an empirical hypothesis has been falsified by the development of special relativity. In this article, I identify and reject an assumption common to both presentists and advocates of the ...
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Journal ArticleStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A · September 1, 2013
I discuss three principles of unity available in Newton's physics, appealing to space and time, causal interaction, and law-constitution respectively. I compare these three approaches with respect to aggregation (how a collection of entities can compose a ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2012
In his Principia Newton offers us a science of bodies in motion. Such a science has bodies as its subject-matter, but what are these bodies? If Newton's three laws of motion are to say anything, then there must be bodies for them to refer to. I shall label ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2011
My goal is to develop a structuralist approach to the objects of physics that is realist – but there are obstacles in the way. This paper is about three of them. The first is familiar, having received a great deal of attention in the recent literature, an ...
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ConferencePhilosophy of Science · January 1, 2010
Taking Bogen and Woodward's discussion of data and phenomena as his starting point, McAllister presents a challenge to scientific realism. I discuss this challenge and offer a suggestion for how the scientific realist could respond to both its epistemic an ...
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Journal ArticleStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B - Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics · January 1, 2008
In November and December 1915, Hilbert presented two communications to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences under the common title 'The Foundations of Physics'. Versions of each eventually appeared in the Nachrichten of the Academy. Hilbert's first communicat ...
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Chapter · December 1, 2007
The group theoretical notion of symmetry is the notion of invariance under a specified group of transformations. "Invariance" is a mathematical term: something is invariant when it is left unaltered by a given transformation. This mathematical notion is us ...
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ConferencePhilosophy of Science · December 1, 2006
This paper explores varieties of scientific structuralism. Central to our investigation is the notion of 'shared structure'. We begin with a description of mathematical structuralism and use this to point out analogies and disanalogies with scientific stru ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2006
The group theoretical notion of symmetry is the notion of invariance under a specified group of transformations. “Invariance” is a mathematical term: something is invariant when it is left unaltered by a given transformation. This mathematical notion is us ...
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Journal ArticleBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science · January 1, 2004
In a recent paper in this journal, Kosso ([2000]) discussed the observational status of continuous symmetries of physics. While we are in broad agreement with his approach, we disagree with his analysis. In the discussion of the status of gauge symmetry, a ...
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Book · December 4, 2003
Highlighting main issues and controversies, this book brings together current philosophical discussions of symmetry in physics to provide an introduction to the subject for physicists and philosophers. ...
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