The logician interested in an account of science that is faithful to the actual practice of science has a number of problems, not the least of which are the following: first, the problem of avoiding psychologism, and second, the problem of having historical sources that are illuminating about the logical turns characterizing a piece of research that ended in discovery.

There is ample evidence that Professor Thomas S. Kuhn's concept of scientific paradigms has been accepted as an important, original, and permanent contribution to the discussion and writing on the logic of scientific change, but nevertheless there is something unsatisfactory about it for philosophers in particular.

Although he was not the first Western philosopher, Plato was the first to define clearly the aim that has characterized Western philosophy since its beginnings. The principal capacities in which the human being acts are scientific, moral, mathematical, artistic, political, and religious, and the aim of philosophical activity was to achieve a standpoint providing complete explanation and justification by finding and eliminating the elements of dogmatism, unrealized ignorance, and mere hypothesis by which, in the capacities mentioned, the human being is (...) influenced. The ideal envisaged was the self-inclusive understanding, achieved by the understanding's successive advancement and containment of all conceivable criticism of itself. The criticisms by Parmenides and Zeno of Ionian and Pythagorean physics and Socrates’ criticism of various aspects of Athenian life were excellent examples. (shrink)

This paper is about the reference or denotation of the concepts and descriptions of modern physics in contrast to Galilean-Newtonian physics and some reflections therein of some widely influential misunderstandings of Einstein's empiricism.

Most historians of science and historians of philosophy have advanced the doctrine that philosophy preceded science, the so-called Pre-socratics from Thales to Democritus being the philosophers who provided the stimulus for science to begin.There are a few historians who see the Pre-socratics as scientists. However, these historians seem without exception to be uncertain about two of the Pre-socratics: Parmenides, who appears to them to be essentially a philosopher or a logician, and Zeno, the Eleatic, who excites their attention mainly because (...) of the influence of his paradoxes reflected in the history of mathematics. (shrink)

Scientific astronomy began with the Greeks. The background for it was a knowledge which the Greeks had in common with older peoples such as the Babylonians and Egyptians of certain celestial regularities: the apparent daily movement of the sun from East to West, the apparent annual motion of the sun in the foreground of different constellations of stars and around the earth, the apparent nightly movement of the moon and visible stars from East to West, the periodic waxing and waning (...) of the moon, and the different periodic displacements of the visible planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. All of this antecedent astronomical knowledge and more was knowledge that was sought, acquired, classified, transmitted, and improved because it had practical importance or was deemed to have practical importance, as for calendar-making, time-keeping, and advice to rulers of society concerned about making state decisions under auspicious conditions. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.