相关论文: Aristotle: The first encyclopedist

In this paper I study the connection between logic and metaphysics in Plato's participation theory, from the structural properties of the latter. Although Plato was the first ever to formulate the contradiction principle explicitly (in the…

Galileo's realization that nature is not scale invariant, motivating his subsequent discovery of scaling laws, is traced to two lectures he gave on the geography of Dante's Inferno.

There is a myth that Einstein's discovery of general relativity was due to his following beautiful mathematics to discover new insights about nature. I argue that this is an incorrect reading of the history and that what Einstein did was to…

Feyerabend frequently discussed physics. He also referred to the history of the subject when motivating his philosophy of science. Alas, as some examples show, his understanding of physics remained superficial. In this respect, Feyerabend…

In this small note I try to summarize some observations about Euclid's remarkable role in mathematics and about the ambient philosophy.

Physics was in crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century because the newborn Maxwell's electromagnetism defied mechanistic preconceptions. Albert Einstein understood that the solution to the crisis required an audacious reworking of…

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…

At the beginning of the 20th century the classical electron theory (or, perhaps more appropriately, the classical electromagnetic mass theory) - the first physical theory that dared ask the question of what inertia and mass were - was…

This paper takes James David Forbes' Encyclopaedia Britannica entry, Dissertation Sixth, as a lens to examine physics as a cognitive, practical, and social, enterprise. Forbes wrote this survey of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century…

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…

The idea, formulated for the first time by Pauli, of a "creativity" of natural processes on a quantum scale is briefly investigated, with particular reference to the phenomena, common throughout the biological world, involved in the…

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…

Hipparchus is considered the greatest astronomer of antiquity. However, his fame is due, more than to what he has done, or said, or written, to what the scientists of some generation or of a few cen-turies later have written of him: above…

In his treatise addressed to Dositheus of Pelusium, Archimedes of Syracuse obtained the result of which he was the most proud: a sphere has two-thirds the volume of its circumscribing cylinder. At his request a sculpted sphere and cylinder…

It goes without saying that we are stuck with the universe we have. Nevertheless, we would like to go beyond simply describing our observed universe, and try to understand why it is that way rather than some other way. Physicists and…

There is no mysterious link between mathematics and physics, because both of them are human inventions designed to study the world.

The information-theoretic point of view proposed by Leibniz in 1686 and developed by algorithmic information theory (AIT) suggests that mathematics and physics are not that different. This will be a first-person account of some doubts and…

The nature of the physical space seems the most important subject in physics. A present paper proceeds from the assumption of physical reality of space contrary to the standard view of the space as a purely relational nonexistence - void.…

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…

For a long time now, confusion has existed in the minds of many over the meaning of various concepts in thermodynamics. Recently, this point has been brought to people's attention by two articles appearing on the well-known archive (arxiv)…