Related papers: Zeno, the philologists, and the scientists
Axions are an increasingly popular topic in theoretical physics, and are sparking a global experimental effort. In the following I review the motivations for the existence of axions, the theories underlying them, and the methods to search…
Did time begin at a Big Bang? Will the present expansion of the universe last for a finite or infinite time? These questions sound philosophical but are becoming, now in the twenty-first century, central to the scientific study of…
This work aims to formalize some of the ways scientific concepts are formed in the process of theoretical physics discovery. Since this may at first seem like a task beyond the scope of the exact sciences (natural and formal sciences), we…
Mathematicians and philosophers have appealed to categoricity arguments in a surprisingly varied range of contexts. One familiar example calls on second-order categoricity in an attempt to show that the Continuum Hypothesis, despite its…
This talk presents foundations of mathematics as a historically variable set of principles appealing to various modes of human intuition and devoid of any prescriptive/prohibitive power. At each turn of history, foundations crystallize the…
Axiomatizing mathematical structures is a goal of Mathematical Logic. Axiomatizability of the theories of some structures have turned out to be quite difficult and challenging, and some remain open. However axiomatization of some…
The paper defends the thesis that analysis of time meaning in a context of philosophy of physical and mathematical natural sciences and philosophical anthropology allows to clear basis of human being and to construct special model of…
Modern fundamental physics poses new questions for philosophy, which, as it seems to us, have not yet received appropriate attention from philosophers of science. This paper formulates a number of such questions in order to present them to…
The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been discussed since this theme first was brought up by Einstein and Bohr. This article describes a proposal for a new foundation of quantum theory, partly drawing upon ideas from statistical…
In 2007 an international conference engaged a reflection on the present conditions for sciences and scientific practice, to initiate a dialogue between science, philosophy, epistemology and sociology. Starting from many examples taken from…
I would like to consider the Beginning of space-time in this paper. First of all, we do consideration historical thought. A lot of philosophers have considered the relation between this real phenomenal world and the basic world in which the…
In this paper, I aim to clarify the unconscious ideologies and attitudes held by physicists through Prigogine's work. Prigogine was an outstanding chemist and physicist who made significant contributions to the development of…
As the etymology of the word shows, logic is intimately related to language, as exemplified by the work of philosophers from Antiquity and from the Middle-Age. At the beginning of the XX century, the crisis of the foundations of mathematics…
The fact that no evidence of new physics was found so far by LHC experiments has led some to call for the abandonment of the naturalness criterion. Others, on the contrary, have felt the need to break a lance in its defense by claiming that…
A cosmological model is proposed which uses a causality argument to solve the homogeneity and entropy problems of cosmology. In this model a chronology violating region of spacetime causally precedes the remainder of the Universe, and a…
Axiomatic set theory is almost universally accepted as the basic theory which provides the foundations of mathematics, and in which the whole of present day mathematics can be developed. As such, it is the most natural framework for…
We briefly comment (in italian) on present relations between the traditional philosophy and modern positive sciences, in particular exact sciences.
In the past century many fundamental results on unpredictability, undecidability and uncertainty have compelled scientists to grapple with the idea that some questions may never be resolved within our current theories. While this…
In this introductory note, I describe my particular view of the notion of ontological commitments as honest and pragmatic working hypotheses that assume the existence (out there) of certain entities represented by the symbols in our theory.…
A tradition handed down among physicists maintains that classical physics is a perfectly deterministic theory capable of predicting the future with absolute certainty, independently of any interpretations. It also tells that it was quantum…