Overview

Three events, which happened all within the same week some ten years ago, set me on the track which the book describes. The first was a reading of Emile Meyerson works in the course of a prolonged research on Einstein's relativity theory, which sent me back to Meyerson's Ident- ity and Reality, where I read and reread the striking chapter on ""Ir- rationality"". In my earlier researches into the origins of French Conven- tionalism I came to know similar views, all apparently deriving from Emile Boutroux's doctoral thesis of 1874 De fa contingence des lois de la nature and his notes of the 1892-3 course he taught at the Sorbonne De ['idee de fa loi naturelle dans la science et la philosophie contempo- raines. But never before was the full effect of the argument so suddenly clear as when I read Meyerson. On the same week I read, by sheer accident, Ernest Moody's two- parts paper in the JHIof 1951, ""Galileo and Avempace"". Put near Meyerson's thesis, what Moody argued was a striking confirmation: it was the sheer irrationality of the Platonic tradition, leading from A vem- pace to Galileo, which was the working conceptual force behind the notion of a non-appearing nature, active all the time but always sub- merged, as it is embodied in the concept of void and motion in it.

Full Product Details

Author:   Z. Bechler
Publisher:   Springer
Imprint:   Springer
Edition:   1991 ed.
Volume:   127
Dimensions:   Width: 15.50cm , Height: 3.30cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   2.240kg
ISBN:  

9780792310549

ISBN 10:   0792310543
Pages:   588
Publication Date:   31 August 1991
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

I: The Tradition.- One: Aristotelian and Platonic Conceptions of Explanation.- Two: Aristotle’s Philosophy of Nature and Theory of Potentiality.- Three: Plato’s Concept of the Actual and His Philosophy of Nature.- II: The Logical Revolution.- Four: The Copernican Harmony.- Five: Bacon’s Informative Logic.- Six: Informativity and Paradox: Galileo’s Conception of the Nature of Physical Reality.- Seven: Descartes’ Informative Logic.- III: Newton’s Physics and its Critics.- Eight: Actual Infinity and Newton’s Calculus.- Nine: Newton’s Logic of Space and Time.- Ten: Modern Newtonian Historiography and the Puzzle of Newton’s Absolute Space.- Eleven: Absolute Motion and the Nature of Inertial Forces.- Twelve: Locke and the Meaning of “Empiricism”.- Thirteen: Newton’s Invention of the Problem of Induction.- Fourteen: Circularity and Newton’s Philosophy of Nature.- Fifteen: Leibniz’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature.- Sixteen: Berkeley’s Aristotelian Critique of Newton’s Physics.- Epilogue.- Appendix: Some Basic Ideas in Newton’s Physics.- Notes.

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