Katherine Brading - Böcker

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 motion. But what is a body? And how can we know how they behave? In Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason, Katherine Brading and Marius Stan examine the struggle for a theory of bodies.At the beginning of the 18th century, physics was the branch of philosophy that studied bodies in general. Its primary task was to provide a qualitative account of the nature of bodies, including their essential properties, causal powers, and generic behaviors. Pursued by a variety of figures both canonical (from Leibniz to Kant) and less familiar (from Du Châtelet and Euler to d'Alembert and Lagrange), this proved a difficult task. At stake were the appropriate epistemologies and methods for theorizing about the natural world. Solutions demanded the combined resources of philosophy, physics, and mechanics: what Brading and Stan call a “philosophical mechanics.” Brading and Stan analyze a century of widespread, concerted efforts to solve “the problem of bodies,” they examine the consequences of the many failures, both for the problem itself and for philosophy more generally. They reveal relationships among disparate themes of 18th century physics and philosophy, from the nature of matter to the motion of a vibrating string; causation to the principle of least action; and the role of subtle matter in collision theory to analytic mechanics. All of these, Brading and Stan argue, are related to the eventual emergence of physics as an independent discipline, autonomous from philosophy, more than a century after Newton's Principia. This book provides a new framing of natural philosophy and its transformations in the Enlightenment; and it proposes an account of how physics and philosophy evolved into distinct fields of inquiry.

Symmetry considerations dominate modern fundamental physics, both in quantum theory and in relativity. This book presents a collection of philosophy-on-physics papers, highlighting the main issues and controversies, and providing an entry into the subject for both physicists and philosophers. It covers topical issues such as the significance of gauge symmetry, particle identity in quantum theory, how to make sense of parity violation, the role of symmetry-breaking, the empirical status of symmetry principles, and so forth, along with more traditional problems in the philosophy of science. These include the status of the laws of nature, the relationships between mathematics, physical theory, and the world, and the extent to which mathematics dictates physics. A valuable reference for students and researchers, it will also be of interest to those studying the foundations of physics, philosophy of physics and philosophy of science.

Symmetry considerations dominate modern fundamental physics, both in quantum theory and in relativity. This book presents a collection of philosophy-on-physics papers, highlighting the main issues and controversies, and providing an entry into the subject for both physicists and philosophers. It covers topical issues such as the significance of gauge symmetry, particle identity in quantum theory, how to make sense of parity violation, the role of symmetry-breaking, the empirical status of symmetry principles, and so forth, along with more traditional problems in the philosophy of science. These include the status of the laws of nature, the relationships between mathematics, physical theory, and the world, and the extent to which mathematics dictates physics. A valuable reference for students and researchers, it will also be of interest to those studying the foundations of physics, philosophy of physics and philosophy of science.

The centerpiece of Émilie Du Châtelet’s philosophy of science is her Foundations of Physics, first published in 1740. The Foundations contains epistemology, metaphysics, methodology, mechanics, and physics, including such pressing issues of the time as whether there are atoms, the appropriate roles of God and of hypotheses in scientific theorizing, how (if at all) bodies are capable of acting on one another, and whether gravity is an action-at-a-distance force. Du Châtelet sought to resolve these issues within a single philosophical framework that builds on her critique and appraisal of all the leading alternatives (Cartesian, Newtonian, Leibnizian, and so forth) of the period. The text is remarkable for being the first to attempt such a synthetic project, and even more so for the accessibility and clarity of the writing. 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. It will be a useful source for students and scholars interested in the history and philosophy of science, and in the impact of women philosophers in the early modern period.