Related papers: Classical Thought in Newton's General Scholium
We describe in detail an advanced project devised for outstanding High School (or undergraduate) students with appropriate abilities in physical reasoning (rather than with a good standard preparation), centered around the well-known…
Are we smarter now than Socrates was in his time? Society as a whole certainly enjoys a higher degree of education, but humans as a species probably don't get intrinsically smarter with time. Our knowledge base, however, continues to grow…
The history of intellectuals consists of a complicated web of influences and interconnections of philosophers, scientists, writers, their work, and ideas. How did these influences evolve over time? Who were the most influential scholars in…
The science of complexity is based on a new way of thinking that stands in sharp contrast to the philosophy underlying Newtonian science, which is based on reductionism, determinism, and objective knowledge. This paper reviews the…
Einstein's philosophy of physics (as clarified by Fine, Howard, and Held) was predicated on his Trennungsprinzip, a combination of separability and locality, without which he believed objectification, and thereby "physical thought" and…
This paper explores the ethical implications of integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) in educational settings, from primary schools to universities, while drawing insights from ancient Greek philosophy to address emerging concerns. As AI…
I discuss Ren{\'e} Thom's approach to philosophy based on his mathematical background. At the same time, I will highlight his connection with Aristotle, his criticism of the modern view of science as a predictive process, his ideas on…
The constantly growing body of scholarly knowledge of science, technology, and humanities is an asset of the mankind. While new discoveries expand the existing knowledge, they may simultaneously render some of it obsolete. It is crucial for…
The von Neumann attitude on such a deep interpretational question as the role of a human observer in order for the quantum description of measurement to be consistent has been long misrepresented. The large majority of the subsequent…
Several chapters in this book present various aspects of Michel Henon's scientific acheivements that spread over a large range of subjects, and yet managed to make deep contributions to most of them. The authors of these chapters make a…
Quantum mechanics can seem like a departure from everyday experience of the physical world, but constructivist theories assert that learners build new ideas from their existing ones. To explore how students can navigate this tension, we…
The dissemination of natural philosophy in the 18th-century, which was based primarily on Newton's pioneering work in mechanics, optics and astrophysics, is presented as seen through a remarkable textbook written by a little known Irish…
From antiquity the conceptual perception of space changed painfully and at a relatively slow pace. It went through mythological descriptions, religious beliefs, metaphysical worldviews and cosmological models with a mechanistic structure,…
Information is everywhere in nature which is very uncertain and unpredictable. But information, in itself, is a very ambiguous term. In this cursory write-up, we attempt to understand the formal meaning of information by quantifying…
This article is a summary of a talk about Richard Feynman, given at a conference Polymaths across the Eras organized in November 2023 by the St Cross Centre for the History and Philosophy of Physics (HAPP) in Oxford. It describes Feynman as…
Philosophers have spilled much ink over the discovery of ideas in the classical 'context of discovery'. However, there has been little engagement with the question of what constitutes a discovery of 'things in the world'. A much-overlooked…
It will be shown in this article that an ontological approach for some problems related to the interpretation of Quantum Mechanics could emerge from a re-evaluation of the main paradox of early Greek thought: the paradox of Being and…
I show that Aristotelian physics is a correct and non-intuitive approximation of Newtonian physics in the suitable domain (motion in fluids), in the same technical sense in which Newton theory is an approximation of Einstein's theory.…
I am most honoured to have the privilege to present the Foreword to this fascinating and wonderfully varied collection of contributions, concerning the nature of computation and of its deep connection with the operation of those basic laws,…
As it is well known, classical mechanics consists of several basic features like determinism, reductionism, completeness of knowledge and mechanicism. In this article the basic assumptions are discussed which underlie those features. It is…