Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (2024)

Trans/Form/Ação, 2020

This article derives some morals from the examination of the physico-mathematical view of scientific laws and its place in the current philosophical debate on laws of nature. After revisiting the expression scientific law, which appears in scientific practice under various names (such as laws, principles, equations, symmetries, and postulates), I briefly assess two extreme, opposite positions in the literature on laws, namely, full-blown metaphysics of laws of nature, which distinguishes such laws from the more mundane laws that we find in science; and nomological eliminativism, which ultimately contends that we should dispense with laws in science altogether. I argue that both positions fail to make sense of the laws that we find in scientific practice. For this, I outline the following twofold claim: first, most laws in physics are abstract mathematical statements; and second, they express some of the best physical generalisations achieved in this branch of science. Thus understoo...

Proving his three laws of motion using complex formulas, at the end of his book Sir Isaac Newton wrote in the form of an essay about the mysterious fourth law of the Universe, which acts on living earthly beings in the form of a vibrating Spirit or light. Unfortunately, modern science did not see anything special in these lines, thereby losing sight of the fact that this is Newton's fourth and special law. I am firmly convinced that the future of all mankind is closely connected with this law, the only question is how we will correctly understand and study it.

Bulletin of the Kansas Association of Teachers of Mathematics, 1959

Logical Empiricism and the Physical Sciences: From Philosophy of Nature to Philosophy of Physics, 2021

Phallacies are scientific ideas, hypotheses and theories that may have once been considered true but should no longer be considered completely true. They are more than just fallacies since they control science and its history to such a high degree that they have become 'phallic' symbols that are very difficult to overthrow - Thus the name 'phallacies'. As a matter of historical accuracy and modern scientific truth, physics is now full of such 'phallacies' and some of them are considered our most cherished scientific 'truths'. For example, common history tells us that the Second Scientific Revolution resulted from two specific experimental crises and the revolution overthrew Newtonian physics. Both of these presently accepted historical truths are 'phallacies'. The twentieth century revolution in science resulted from the successes of Newtonian physics, not its mistakes, and Newtonian science is every bit as alive today as it was one or even two centuries ago. It was never overthrown, but modern quantum theory must say it was overthrown to justify its own existence in the face of severe problems of its own making. The two experiments that scientists cite as the causes of the revolution were nothing more than the 'flotsam and jetsam' of deeper underlying physical principles that raised questions about the Newtonian concepts of space, time, matter and mind. The revolution was as much about mind as it was about matter, but that simple straightforward fact is almost never mentioned in the histories of the revolution and its emergence. The first Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century was not the first, it was really the second. The period of classical Greek natural philosophy from Thales to Aristotle was actually the first revolution in human scientific thought, so it should now be called the Zeroth Scientific Revolution. These and many more such 'phallacies' shape our modern scientific worldviews and thereby limit the further evolution and development of science. The scientific and academic communities must identify and accept the reality of these 'phallacies' if it is to continue the phenomenal successes of the past.

The Propensity For Human Scientific Inquiry To Be 'Force-Fitted' To Pre-Determined Perceptions Of Reality

Journal of Ancient Philosophy

In this essay I will argue for an interpretation of the remarks of Physics 1.1 that both resolves some of the confusion surrounding the precise nature of methodology described there and shows how those remarks at 184a15-25 serve as important programmatic remarks besides, as they help in the structuring of books 1 and 2 of the Physics. I will argue that “what is clearer and more knowable to us” is what Aristotle goes on to describe in 1.2—namely, that nature exists and that natural things change—his basic starting-point for natural science. This, I shall hope to show, is the kind of “immediate” sense datum which Aristotle thinks must be further analyzed in terms of principles (archai) and then causes (aitia) over the course of Physics books 1 and 2 to lead to knowledge about the natural world.[1] Such an analysis arrives at, as I shall show, a definition (horismos) of nature not initially available from the starting-point just mentioned (i.e., it is in need of further analysis), and ...

International Journal of Mechanical and Production Engineering Research and Development, 2020

Oxford, 2023

This book argues that the Enlightenment was a golden age for the philosophy of material bodies, and for efforts to integrate coherently a philosophical concept of body with a mathematized theory of mechanics. Thereby, it articulates a new framing for the history of 18th-century philosophy and science. It explains why, more than a century after Newton, physics broke away from philosophy to become an autonomous domain. And, it casts fresh light on the structure and foundations of classical mechanics. Among the figures studied are Malebranche, Leibniz, Du Châtelet, Boscovich, and Kant, alongside d’Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace and Cauchy.

Advances in Historical Studies, 2014

throughout the history of physics, the source of natural motion was an active intangible, a metaphisical asuumpion in the scene of motionsAristotle: heaven, first moverNewton: abolute space, vis insitasEinstein: the metrical field of space timsfrom my book "Selected stories in mathematics and physics" Lambert academic publihing, amazon

I show that Aristotelian physics is a correct approximation of Newtonian physics in its appropriate domain, in the same precise sense in which Newton theory is an approximation of Einstein's theory. Aristotelian physics lasted long not because it became dogma, but because it is a very good theory.

The Mathematical Intelligencer, 2006

International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2005