Related papers: Classical Thought in Newton's General Scholium
We consider Einstein's attitude with regard to religion both from sociological and epistemological points of view. An attempt to put it into a wider socio-historical perspective has been made, with the emphasis on his ethnic and religious…
The work done by Isaac Newton more than three hundred years ago, continues being a path to increase our knowledge of Nature. To better understand all the ideas behind it, one of the finest ways is to generalize them to wider situations. In…
Newton seems to have stated a quantitative relationship between the position of a body in relative space and the position of the body in absolute space in the first scholium of his Principia. We show that if this suspected relationship is…
This article proposes a fresh and direct reading of foundational texts of philosophy and aims at bringing back the inflamed debates that are contemporaneous with the birth of Greek axiomatics, and indeed at understanding what is timeless in…
Aristotle is generally accepted as the father of logic. The ideas that he raised in his study of logical reasoning carried the development of science over the centuries. Today, in the era of AI, this title of the fatherhood of logic has a…
In his late work (De venatione sapientiae), Cusanus unfolded basic ideas of his brilliant theology. After a long period, this ingenious teaching became clearly recognizable especially in our time. Forward with his face to the back, modern…
Newton's basic ideas developed and evolved throughout his career and changed in sometimes surprisingly profound ways. In this paper I propose an outline of the evolution of Newton's conceptual framework by following the development of his…
The aim of this short note is to realize that the main reason for non-mechanistic explanation of Newton's gravitational attraction, is explicitly encapsulated in his famous General Scholium of the second Edition of Principia Mathematica…
We recount the successful long career of classical physics, from Newton to Einstein, which was based on the philosophy of scientific realism. Special emphasis is given to the changing status and number of ontological entitities and…
We study how the paradigm of Newton's science, based on the organization of scientific knowledge as a series of mathematical laws, was definitively accepted in science courses - in the last decades of the XVIII century, in England as well…
Since the early days of humankind, people have been asking questions about Nature of two kinds: why did that happen? And how can that be used? In a broad sense, science was born that day. We show indeed that science has two complementary…
This paper has two goals. The first goal is to show how an extension of second-order logic is a natural framework to formalize portions of Aristotle's \emph{Topics} and to bring to the foreground the logical, linguistic and philosophical…
"All men by nature desire to know," states Aristotle in the famous first sentence of his Metaphysics. Knowledge about fundamental particles and interactions, that is, knowledge about the deepest aspects of matter, is certainly high if not…
Here we propose a tour about the life of Isaac Newton, using a georeferenced method, based on the free satellite maps. Our tour is modelled on the time-line of the great scientist's life, as an ancient "itinerarium" was modelled on the…
Randomness is an unavoidable notion in discussing quantum physics, and this may trigger the curiosity to know more of its cultural history. This text is an invitation to explore the position on the matter of Thomas Aquinas, one of the most…
Einstein was in many ways like a detective on a mystery trail, though in his case he was on the trail of nature's mysteries and not some murder mystery! And like all good detectives he had a style. It consisted of taking facts that he knew…
In the present essay we attempt to reconstruct Newtonian mechanics under the guidance of logical principles and of a constructive approach related to the genetic epistemology of J. Piaget and R. Garc\'ia \citep{piag89}. Instead of…
In 1693, Isaac Newton answered a query from Samuel Pepys about a problem involving dice. Newton's analysis is discussed and attention is drawn to an error he made.
This article supports the epistemological claim that sound human reasoning about ultimate knowledge is either foundational or circularly justified. In particular, questions which naturally arise in theology, philosophy, and related…
Newton's centuries-old wisdom of standing on the shoulders of giants raises a crucial yet underexplored question: Out of all the prior works cited by a discovery, which one is its giant? Here, we develop a novel, discipline-independent…