Philosophical Physics

Philosophical Physics is the latest instalment in Manuel DeLanda’s intervention in the philosophy of science.Rejecting the traditional empiricist vocabulary of “Theory,” “Observation,” and “Physical Law,” DeLanda argues that the objective content of physics is better understood through equations, measurements, instruments, and the evolving practices of scientific communities. Against monolithic accounts of scientific development, the book presents physics as a dynamic field composed of three interacting elements: domains of phenomena, communities of practitioners, and the material techniques that connect the two. Through detailed historical studies of mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, and relativity, DeLanda traces how new phenomena were created, stabilized, measured, and mathematically represented.Central to the book is a novel account of realism. Drawing on the work of physicists, engineers, instrument makers, and mathematicians, DeLanda develops a framework that combines causal realism – focused on mechanisms and interventions – with modal realism, which emphasizes the objective structures of possibility revealed by mathematical models. From Newton’s celestial mechanics and Carnot’s heat engines to Maxwell’s fields and Einstein’s spacetime, physics emerges as a heterogeneous and evolving practice shaped by experiment, calculation, invention, and abstraction.Philosophical Physics is essential reading for philosophers of science, historians of science, and scholars interested in realism, scientific practice, and the conceptual foundations of modern physics.