Bøger i Studies in History and Philosophy of Science serien

This book explores René Descartes¿s attempts to describe particular bodies, such as rocks, minerals, metals, plants, and animals, within the mechanistic interpretation of nature of his philosophical program. Despite his early rationalistic epistemology, Descartes¿s increasing attention to collections, histories, lists of qualities, and particular bodies results in a puzzling ¿short history of all natural phenomenä contained in the Principles of philosophy (1644). The present book outlines the role of Descartes's observations and experimentation as he aimed to construct a universal science of nature, ultimately revealing the mechanization of nature in detail, and for curious bodies such as the Bologna Stone or the sensitive herb. What results is a theoretical natural history consistent with the mechanical principles of his philosophy, ultimately shedding new light on his attempt to produce a complete philosophy of nature.

This book tells the story of Agent Orange, its usage and the policies that surround it. Agent Orange contains a contaminant known as TCDD. It was the most widely used defoliant from 1965 - 1970 and became one of three major tactical herbicides used in Vietnam. More than 45 major health studies were conducted with Vietnam veterans from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Korea seeking a relationship between veterans' health and TCDD. Allegations of birth defects in the families of Vietnam veterans and the Vietnamese represented a case study in propaganda and deliberate misinformation by the government of Vietnam. The Policies of the US Government implemented by Congress and the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) identified 17 recognized associated presumptive diseases that failed the tests of "e;cause and effect"e; and common sense. This book tells the story of Agent Orange, its usage, the health studies and those policies from a diverse range of perspectives, delving into science, statistics, history, policy and ethics. It is of interest to scholars engaged in history, political and social philosophy and ethics.

1. Introduction: Reevaluating Christian Wolff''s Psychology2. Who Was Afraid of Wolff''s Psychology? The Historical Context3. The Origins and Development of Wolff''s Psychology in His German Writings4. Empirical Psychology: Between Reason and Experience5. Wolff and the Dogmas of Classical Rationalism6. Wolff''s Idea of Psychometria7. Wolff on Monadology and "Materialisterey"8. Wolff and the Logic of the Human Mind9. Image Composition as an Aesthetic-Epistemological Problem in Wolff''s Empirical Psychology10. In-between Psychology and Moral Philosophy: Christian Wolff''s Principle of Natural Obligation11. The Relation between Psychology and the Other Parts of Metaphysics: Ontology, Cosmology, and Theology12. Development and Diffusion of Wolff''s Psychology through His Disciples and Followers13. Wolffians and the Emancipation of Aesthetic Faculties14. Wolff and the Beginnings of Experimental Psychology in the Eighteenth Century15. The Science of the Soul and the Unyielding Architectonic: Kant versus Wolff on the Foundations of Psychology16. Hegel and Wolff''s Psychologies17. "The Most Excellent Psychological Systematist": Wolff''s Psychology in the Eyes of Wilhelm Wundt

Today remembered mainly as the inventor of the famous diagram that bears his name, Venn was an important figure of nineteenth-century Cambridge, where he worked alongside leading thinkers, such as Henry Sidgwick and Alfred Marshall, on the development of the Moral Sciences Tripos.

This book explores the notions of space and extension of major early modern empiricist philosophers, especially Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Condillac.

This open access book brings together for the first time all aspects of the tragic life and fascinating work of the polymath Robert Leslie Ellis (1817-1859), placing him at the heart of early-Victorian intellectual culture.

In addition, the title includes transcriptions of De Volder's teaching materials: disputations, dictations, and notes.Insightful analysis combined with a trove of primary source material will help readers gain a new perspective on a thinker so far mostly ignored by scholars.

This book explores the notions of space and extension of major early modern empiricist philosophers, especially Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Condillac.

This book develops a systematic approach to the role of failure in innovation, using the laboratory notebooks of America's most successful inventor, Thomas Edison.

This book addresses the mathematical rationality contained in the making of string figures.

By treating the immanent philosophy of Leibniz's dynamics, this book makes explicit the systematic aims and inherent limits of Leibniz's physical project, in addition to providing an alternative vision of the scientific understanding of the physical world in the late 17th and early 18th century.

This book provides a detailed analysis of Aristotle's Parts of Animals. The discussion of plant-like animals is important in Aristotle because of the question about the continuum between plant and animal life.

This book offers a framework that presents imagination as founded in the placement of appearances, and traces the development of the concept from Plato to Descartes to Kant, and on through recent theorists as diverse as Wittgenstein, Benjamin and Bachelard.

This book provides an entirely new interpretation of the impact of the early-modern Aristotelian tradition upon the rise of British Empiricism. It also reexamines the fundamental shift from a humanist logic to epistemology and facultative logic.

This is a treatise devoted to the foundations of quantum physics and the role that causality plays in the microscopic world governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. The book is controversial and will engender some lively debate on the various issues raised.

This book reconstructs aspects of the early career of Descartes, tracing the overlapping, intertwined development of his work in physico-mathematics, analytical mathematics, universal method and finally, systematic corpuscular-mechanical natural philosophy.

This edited volume features 20 essays written by leading scholars that provide a detailed examination of L'Homme by René Descartes. It explores the way in which this work developed themes not just on questions such as the circulation of the blood, but also on central questions of perception and our knowledge of the world. Coverage first offers a critical discussion on the different versions of L'Homme, including the Latin, French, and English translations and the 1664 editions. Next, the authors examine the early reception of the work, from the connection of L'Homme to early-modern Dutch Cartesianism to Nicolas Steno's criticism of the work and how Descartes' clock analogy is used to defend two different conceptions of the articulation between anatomical observations and functional hypotheses.The book then goes on to explore L'Homme and early-modern anthropology as well as the how the work has been understood and incorporated into the works of scientists, physicians, and philosophers over the last 150 years. Overall, readers will discover how the trend over the last few decades to understand human cognition in neuro-physiological terms can be seen to be not something unprecedented, but rather a revival of a way of dealing with these fundamental questions that was pioneered by Descartes.

Grete Hermann (1901-1984) was a pupil of mathematical physicist Emmy Noether, follower and co-worker of neo-Kantian philosopher Leonard Nelson, and an important intellectual figure in post-war German social democracy.

In the commentaries to this book we try to understand d'Alembert thoughts and how he contrives to translate his ideas on mechanics to the fluid realm with a new and radical point of view; how he arrives at the first two fundamental differential equations among the velocity components; and how he tries to reduce the resistance of a moving body, which is a change of its momentum, to the hydrostatical pressure, which is related to the gravity. All this knowing that his mechanics has no forces and no pressures as well, and that the fluids are aggregates of individual particles.The essay A New Theory of the Resistance of Fluids was a turning point in Fluid Mechanics because clearly, for the first time, the resistance is shown as the results of a fluid subjected to differential equations in a continuous mode instead of a set of impacts of individual particles. This contribution has been recognized by the scholars. However, only partial attention has been paid to this work, which can be justified due to the difficulty in its reading and also because it was eclipsed by the publication, a few years later, of Euler's three Memoirs that established modern hydrodynamics.

This volume provides a much needed, historically accurate narrative of the development of theories of space up to the beginning of the eighteenth century. It studies conceptions of space that were implicitly or explicitly entailed by ancient, medieval and early modern representations of the cosmos. The authors reassess Alexandre Koyré's groundbreaking work From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957) and they trace the permanence of arguments to be found throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. By adopting a long timescale, this book sheds new light on the continuity between various cosmological representations and their impact on the ontology and epistemology of space.Readers may explore the work of a variety of authors including Aristotle, Epicurus, Henry of Ghent, John Duns Scotus, John Wyclif, Peter Auriol, Nicholas Bonet, Francisco Suárez, Francesco Patrizi, Giordano Bruno, Libert Froidmont, Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Samuel Clarke. We see how reflections on space, imagination and the cosmos were the product of a plurality of philosophical traditions that found themselves confronted with, and enriched by, various scientific and theological challenges which induced multiple conceptual adaptations and innovations.This volume is a useful resource for historians of philosophy, those with an interest in the history of science, and particularly those seeking to understand the historical background of the philosophy of space.

Readers may trace the philosophical tradition to which Weyl refers and by which he is inspired (Kant, Husserl, Fichte, Leibniz, Becker etc.), and explore the mathematical tradition (Riemann, Helmholtz, Lie, Klein) that permitted Weyl to elaborate and solve his mathematical problem of space.