The Cosmos of Science: Essays of Exploration by John Earman, John D. Norton

By John Earman, John D. Norton

Whilst did technology develop into a neighborhood task? Does chaos suggest the top of determinism? those are the various questions requested in essays which conceal the historical past of technological know-how, arithmetic and physics, medical technique and motion and rationality.

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It is not sufficient for an Aristotelian science that we have a particular observation that it snowed on the morning of 23 January 1979 in Chicago, Illinois, or that on 26 September 1664, a particular apple was observed to fall from a tree and hit Isaac Newton on the head. What is necessary for Aristotelian science is that it be generally accepted that it snows in northern climes in the winter months, or that heavy bodies fall; this is what constitutes experience as opposed to mere perception. To go from perception, the individual deliverance of the senses on a particular occasion, to what Aristotle and Aguilonius call experience, what we might call an experiential fact, requires the.

As illustrated in that example, Descartes's method has two parts: a reductive step, leading us from a question posed to an intuition, and a constructive step, in which a deduction of the answer to the question is presented. In Rule 8 Descartes poses the problem of finding the anaclastic line, that is, the shape of a surface "in which parallel rays are refracted in such a way that they all intersect in a single point after refraction" (AT X 394). ). But, Descartes notes, this question is still "composite and relative," that is, not sufficiently simple, and we must procede further in the reduction.

9,402; see other sources cited passim in this work, such as Acosta, Columbus, Aristotle, Knolle's History of the Turks, Gilbert, and Virgil). Bacon suggests that we be liberal in what we include in natural histories; the only thing he categorically excludes is "superstitious stories ... and experiments of ceremonial magic," which he dismisses as "old wives tales" (1863, vol. 8, 360, 49). But among the sorts of things that Bacon does allow in his natural history, he recognizes that there will be differences in the degree of certainty.

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