Abstract.There were numerous records of solar eclipse in China from the eighth century BC to the fifteenth century AD. Because these records are concise and formalized, I have arranged 938 items into a computer-readable table called ‘‘The table of historic Chinese regular records of solar eclipse’’. In this paper, I explain the structure of the table with a preliminary analysis and statistics of the historical records. To receive the table itself, please request it at [email protected].

This paper addresses the legendary total solar eclipse of 29 May 1919. Two British teams confirmed the light bending prediction by Albert Einstein: Charles R. Davidson and Andrew C. C. Crommelin in Sobral, Brazil and Arthur S. Eddington and Edwin T. Cottingham on the African island of Príncipe, then part of the Portuguese empire.By jointly analyzing the two astronomical expeditions supported by written and visual sources, I show how, despite extensive scholarship on this famous historical episode and the (...) historiographical emphasis on the plural dimensions of knowledge construction, many human and non-human actors have been kept in the shadow of the eclipse. I do so by focusing on what I call knowledge from the periphery together with knowledge from below, grounded literally on how localities (sites) affect choices and events, and growing outward to encompass a wide range of participants. I show how the geopolitical status of the two nations where the observational sites were located, and specifically Portugal's condition of colonial power, affected main decisions and events, while highlighting the active role of participants, ranging from experts from the peripheries and those involved in the travels to local elites and anonymous peoples, some of whom contributed to the observation of totality. (shrink)

The first part of this article examines Patricia O'Grady's recent attempt to identify the method by which Thales might have successfully predicted a solar eclipse. According to O'Grady, some 60% of the potentially visible lunar eclipses were followed 23½ months later by potentially visible solar eclipses. It is shown that this ratio is no more than 23%, and that the method fails to predict after which specific lunar eclipse a solar eclipse will appear. In (...) the second half of the article it is argued that on the basis of his own observations of major solar eclipses, Thales could have concluded that solar eclipses come in clusters of three, the second appearing 17 or 18 months, and the third 35 months, after the first one. In the years after the "predicted" eclipse of 28 May 585 BC, this apparent pattern disappeared again, which would explain why Thales managed to "predict" only one eclipse. (shrink)

Summary This study offers a detailed analysis of an episode of the popularization of astronomy which took place in Portugal, a peripheral country of Europe, and occurring in the early twentieth century. The episode was driven by the 28 May 1900 total solar eclipse which was seen on the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and Spain). Instead of focusing on one of the ends of the popularization process, we analyze the circulation of knowledge among scientists and the public, contrast the (...) aims of the various expeditions, professional and amateur, which took place on Portuguese soil, analyze their repercussions in the Portuguese astronomical landscape, and the different ways used by the Portuguese political elite and astronomical community to successfully appropriate this astronomical event to serve their varied agendas, political, social and scientific. In this episode of public enthusiasm for science, a central figure emerged in the network of the official commission, professional and amateur communities and the ‘general public’: Frederico Tomás Oom (1864–1930), an astronomer of the Lisbon Astronomical Observatory. This paper aims to illustrate the different layers of the circulation process, and at proving that the popularization of science was not a unidirectional process from scientists to lay people nor did it serve only a particular agenda, be it political, social or scientific. (shrink)

In this paper, three problems that have hardly been noticed or even gone unnoticed in the available literature in the cosmology of Philolaus are addressed. They have to do with the interrelationships of the orbits of the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon around the Central Fire and all three of them constitute potentially insurmountable obstacles within the context of the Philolaic system. The first difficulty is Werner Ekschmitt’s claim that the Philolaic system cannot account for the length of the (...) day (νυχϑήμερον). It is shown that this problem can be solved with the help of the distinction between the synodic day and the sidereal day. The other two problems discussed in this paper are concerned with two hitherto unnoticed deficiencies in the explanation of lunar eclipses in the Philolaic system. The Philolaic system cannot account for long-lasting lunar eclipses and according to the internal logic of the system, during lunar eclipses the Moon enters the shadow of the Earth from the wrong side. It is almost unbelievable that nobody, from the Pythagoreans themselves up to recent authors, has noticed these two serious deficiencies, and especially the latter, in the cosmology of Philolaus the Pythagorean. (shrink)

Reports of lunar and solar eclipses are of interest to students of both history and the history of science. Used with care, they can anchor significant historical events in time. Greek literature, like that of other civilizations, has its fair share of such reports. Often they motivate the actions of characters or expose aspects of belief. Sometimes they shed light on the assumptions of the writer. There are three places in theHistoriesof Herodotus where the author mentions darkenings of the (...) sky (generally taken to be solar eclipses), which have narrative significance and which assist in dating the wars between the Lydians and the Medes (1.74) and between the Greeks and the Persians (7.37 and 9.10). (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between religion, tradition and identity as seen from the myth about eclipses in a village in Central Java. Javanese people in rural areas still hold beliefs passed down from their ancestors about eclipses, both lunar and solar eclipses. Using a qualitative approach, the results of the study showed that the villagers believe that eclipses occur because of evil giants called buto named Batara Kala who try to devour the sun or the moon. This natural (...) phenomenon is believed to bring disaster to pregnant women and livestock. To fight the disaster, they must perform certain ceremonies or rituals. Based on ethnographic studies, this research provides an overview of eclipse mythology for Javanese locals and analyses it from identity theory. This shows that mythical rituals reflect a continuous identity formation. Although the traditions associated with these myths to some extent transcend the boundaries of the Islamic religion, they remain unchallenged. CONTRIBUTION: This research suggests that myths play an important role in the life and identity of the people who believe in them and perform the rituals associated with them. (shrink)

From the early ninth century until about eight centuries later, the Middle East witnessed a series of both simple and systematic astronomical observations for the purpose of testing contemporary astronomical tables and deriving the fundamental solar, lunar, and planetary parameters. Of them, the extensive observations of lunar eclipses available before 1000 AD for testing the ephemeredes computed from the astronomical tables are in a relatively sharp contrast to the twelve lunar observations that are pertained to the four extant accounts (...) of the measurements of the basic parameters of Ptolemaic lunar model. The last of them are Taqī al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Ma‘rūf’s trio of lunar eclipses observed from Istanbul, Cairo, and Thessalonica in 1576–1577 and documented in chapter 2 of book 5 of his famous work, Sidrat muntaha al-afkar fī malakūt al-falak al-dawwār. In this article, we provide a detailed analysis of the accuracy of his solar and lunar observations. (shrink)

The eclipse predictor (or Saros dial) of the Antikythera mechanism provides a wealth of astronomical information and offers practically the only possibility for a close astronomical dating of the mechanism. We apply a series of constraints, in a sort of sieve of Eratosthenes, to sequentially eliminate possibilities for the epoch date. We find that the solar eclipse of month 13 of the Saros dial almost certainly belongs to solar Saros series 44. And the eclipse predictor (...) would work best if the full Moon of month 1 of the Saros dial corresponds to May 12, 205 BCE, with the exeligmos dial set at 0. We also examine some possibilities for the theory that underlies the eclipse times on the Saros dial and find that a Babylonian-style arithmetical scheme employing an equation of center and daily velocities would match the inscribed times of day quite well. Indeed, an arithmetic scheme for the eclipse times matches the evidence somewhat better than does a trigonometric model. (shrink)

This paper investigates the methods of eclipse prediction in China before the fourth century AD, with a detailed example of the eclipse theory in the Jing chu li (Luminous Inception System ). As the official calendar of the Jin dynasty and the Kingdom Wei during the three kingdoms period, the Jing chu li was used for more than 200 years after it was adopted in 237 AD. From the San tong li (Triple Concordance System ) of the Western (...) Han to the Jing chu li, methods for predicting eclipses developed in three important ways: (i) from predicting only lunar eclipses to the prediction of both solar and lunar eclipses; (ii) from relying only on the mean periods of the sun and the moon to taking into consideration the variation in lunar velocity; and (iii) from estimating only a rough date to predicting the exact time of eclipses. This paper addresses two questions: first, how did ancient Chinese astronomers use cycles to predict eclipses in the Han dynasty? Second, how did astronomers such as Liu Hong and Yang Wei revise early eclipse prediction methods? The original text of the Jing chu li is analyzed to show how Yang Wei combined lunar velocity theory with the traditional method of predicting eclipses using cycles. (shrink)

ArgumentThe present paper is an attempt to understand how medieval astronomers working within the Ptolemaic astronomical context in which the annular eclipse is an unjustified and impossible phenomenon, could know, define, justify, and later make attempts that led to success in predicting annular solar eclipses. As a context-based study, it reviews the situation of annular eclipses with regard to the medieval hypotheses applied to the calculation of the angular diameters of the sun and the moon, which was basic (...) for contemplating the possibility of annular eclipses. This gives the premises and the preliminary insights that were necessary to clarify the complex situation of the annular eclipse in the late medieval Islamic period and to explain the historical mechanisms leading to justifying the phenomenon during that period. This was, first due to a convincing and efficient observational evidence which, of course, was available only to a number of medieval astronomers and significantly for only a limited time period, and, second, the result of an amazing interaction amongst various astronomical traditions available to them. At a more general level, the research aims to inspect or, at least, to give some impressions of the essential conditions, i.e., identification of phenomenon, empirical evidence, and the justifying underlying tradition, under which it became possible in the tradition-based science of the `medieval period to permit a not-already-defined and tradition-opposed phenomenon to be posed and justified. (shrink)

Historical chronology is the discipline that establishes the dates of events and reconstructs the calendars used in ancient, medieval, and early modern times. Traditional accounts state that Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) created this field by combining philological with astronomical data and techniques. But the celestial phenomena most relevant to chronology are solar and lunar eclipses. From antiquity onwards, astrologers saw these as ominous and connected them to great events on earth. Though Scaliger used dated eclipses in his work, it was (...) a number of relatively obscure sixteenth-century astronomers and scholars who realized that one could date events by eclipses and began doing so in a systematic way, without assigning them any ominous force. (shrink)

In early modern times, solar eclipses were feared events that gave rise to much astrological speculation, even though these events could already be predicted long in advance. Around 1700, the situation was already different. Astrology had lost its status as a science and had largely been pushed out of the universities. On the other hand solar eclipses had become very important for cartography. From the beginning and end times of the eclipse at different locations, the differences of (...) their geographical coordinates could be calculated. The changed situation can be illustrated perfectly by the eclipses of August 12, 1654 and May 12, 1706. Whereas in 1654 there were still many astrologically influenced warnings, in 1706 there was great calm in this respect, and instead numerous astronomers tried to record the event correctly and compare their results with those of other observers. (shrink)

This paper presents a new edition of the Back Plate Inscription (BPI) of the Antikythera Mechanism, a series of descriptions of circumstances associated with eclipses indicated cyclically by the inscriptions of the Mechanism’s Saros Dial Scale. Our edition features several significant new readings as well as the confirmation of a disputed reading pertaining to one of the index letters by which the BPI’s paragraphs are linked to the specific eclipse glyphs of the Saros Dial. On the basis of the (...) new text, we deduce a revision of the established models for determining which lunar months of the Saros cycle had solar and lunar eclipse possibilities (EPs) and for assigning the solar EPs to paragraphs of the BPI. We further confirm that the entire extant part of the BPI comprises consecutive paragraphs concerning the solar EPs, all inscribed along the right side of the Mechanism’s Back Plate, and we revisit the questions of what the BPI’s predictions mean and how they relate to the model for the solar EPs. (shrink)

A country‘s development is bound to be influenced by external occurrences. This article analyses two astronomical examples in which Portuguese nationals used high visibility events in the international scientific community to press their own scientific interests upon the government, whether these interests were, or were not, directly linked to the events themselves.During the 1840s and 1850s the parallax, i.e. the distance, of Groombridge’s star 1830 was hotly debated. The astronomer Hervé Faye‘s suggestion at the Académie des Sciences de Paris that (...) observations be made in Lisbon due to its privileged location and the inadequacy of the Lisbon Navy Observatory to perform them rekindled the efforts to improve the Portuguese Navy observatory.In the 1850s and 1860s other Portuguese higher education institutions also wanted to upgrade their facilities or build new ones. Following accepted traditions, scientific field trips were considered a useful part of the acquisition planning for larger instruments, and therefore an important part of regeneration and renewal projects. The Portuguese scientists were, however, limited in their travels by government imposed budget constraints. The total solar eclipse of 18 July 1860 provided an extra argument to send Portuguese scientists abroad. The government support of the eclipse expedition led to an opportunity to travel through other countries and view their observatories and equipment.In the end, neither the Navy astronomers nor those from the Coimbra Astronomical observatory, the other significant site of Portuguese astronomical research, managed to fulfil their objectives, but the contacts initiated by some of the Portuguese travellers were important for the development of the Portuguese national Meteorological and Magnetic Observatories. (shrink)

Girls Laughters Solar Eclipse Output Solar Eclipse The programmatic ontology of our contemporary technical-information age is marked by a complicity with algorithmic architectures : new models of information processing evolving with the entropically-hiden complexities and open-ended contingencies of material evolution. Algorithms are abstractly-coordinated entities of “soft thought” sui generis. In fusing generative concreteness with abstract modelling – i. e. matter with information – - Galerie sonore – Nouvel article.

Girls Laughters Solar Eclipse Output Solar Eclipse The programmatic ontology of our contemporary technical-information age is marked by a complicity with algorithmic architectures : new models of information processing evolving with the entropically-hiden complexities and open-ended contingencies of material evolution. Algorithms are abstractly-coordinated entities of “soft thought” sui generis. In fusing generative concreteness with abstract modelling – i. e. matter with information – - Galerie sonore – Nouvel article.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Renaissance Thought on the Celestial Hierarchy:The Decline of a Tradition?Feisal G. MohamedThe Dionysian arrangement of the angels was dismantled on the one hand because its author was increasingly regarded as a "counterfait," and on the other hand because Protestants upheld the Bible's supremacy over all the "vain babblings of idle men." In consequence, those who like Spenser celebrated the "trinall triplicities," look back upon a great past that had (...) provided a vision hallowed by time and graced by an impressive array of intellects.—C. A. Patrides1It has been some forty years now since C. A. Patrides first argued in these pages that English Renaissance views on the celestial hierarchy constitute "the decline of a tradition," an argument made so convincing by his encyclopedic articles on the subject that scholars have been content to accept it. Indeed there is a good deal of evidence suggesting that the tradition of the ninefold hierarchy of angels associated with the Pseudo-Dionysius suffered serious injury at the hands of the Renaissance and Reformation. Subjected to the scrutiny of Renaissance scholarship and in light of the rediscovery of several Neoplatonists, particularly Proclus, it became quite clear that the Corpus Dionysiacum had been written centuries later than its author pretended. In the mid-fifteenth century Lorenzo Valla argued that because the Areopagus was a legal rather than a philosophical assembly, because none of the Greek or Latin fathers make mention of Dionysius, and because the claim in the letter to Polycarp to have witnessed [End Page 559] in Heliopolis the solar eclipse at the moment of Christ's death is a clear fabrication, placement of the Corpus in the first century should be doubted.2 These suggestions went largely unnoticed until Desiderius Erasmus, returning from England (where William Grocyn had begun murmurs regarding the Areopagitic origin of the Corpus), discovered in Louvain a manuscript of Valla's commentary on the book of Acts and incorporated its conclusions in his influential annotations on the New Testament.3 The discovery of Dionysius's pseudonymity and Erasmus's suggestion that Dionysian ceremonies could no longer be connected to the apostolic church would damage permanently the now Pseudo-Areopagite's influence. In a classic case of complicity between Renaissance humanism and Reformation theology—both Protestant and Catholic, it must be stressed—the sixteenth century turned away from Dionysian thought in general and from The Celestial Hierarchy in particular. The interrogation of apostolic origin begun by prominent Catholic thinkers like Erasmus and Cardinal Cajetan was most convenient to reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin, both of whom described the author of the Corpus as "Dionysius, whoever he was."4Such an open-and-shut presentation of sixteenth-century Dionysiana, however, ignores several factors. One of them is that Renaissance scholars were not the first to question the dating of the Corpus: Peter Abelard fueled general perception of his heretical tendencies by suggesting that Dionysius may not have been the Pauline convert mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles.5 Much more important, however, is the number of Renaissance scholars for whom Dionysius was a formative influence. Despite his stance on the authenticity of the Corpus, Lorenzo Valla describes Dionysius in the peroration to his Encomium Sancti Thomae Aquinatis as playing the flute in a celestial symphony before the throne of God.6 For Nicholas Cusanus, as F. Edward Cranz describes [End Page 560] it, "Dionysius is the most important Christian theologian with no runner-up who is even close."7 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola saw Dionysius's writings as following directly from the teachings of Paul.8 Marsilio Ficino employed Dionysius in his comments on angels in the Theologia Platonica, translated and commented on The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology, and consistently endorsed first-century dating of the Corpus Dionysiacum.9 Ambrogio Traversari, who described Dionysius as "Apostoli disciplus," would also produce a fresh translation acceptable to humanist tastes in 1437, which would receive wide dissemination in the 1499 edition produced by Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples.10 Lefèvre saw the Corpus as apostolic in origin and authority and went so far as to endorse the traditional conflation of Dionysius with Saint... (shrink)

Pessimists predict that future scientific theories will replace present scientific theories. However, they do not specify when the predicted events will take place, so we do not have the chance to blame them for having made a false prediction, although we might have the chance to praise them for having made a true prediction. Their predictions contrast with astronomers’ predictions. Astronomers specify when the next solar eclipse will happen, so we have both the chance to blame them for (...) having made a false prediction and the chance to praise them for having made a true prediction. The pessimists’ prediction remains unvirtuous until they specify when scientific revolutions will occur. This critical point applies no less to the selectivist’s prediction. (shrink)

The comment endorses and reinforces Daniel W. Graham’s highly original and attractive proposal that early Greek cosmology develops in two stages. In what Graham calls the “meteorological stage” of the sixth century BCE, celestial objects are explained as formations either from fire or from watery exhalations in a roughly planar model of the cosmos. In the “lithic stage” of the mid- and late fifth century introduced by Anaxagoras, the model is that of a central earth around which solid stone-like celestial (...) objects revolve held aloft in a vortex. The change to the lithic stage comes about, according to Graham, as the implications of Parmenides’ epoch-making discovery that the moon is illuminated by the sun come to be understood and are then theoretically exploited. The present comment also proposes that the false explanations of lunar phases and lunar and solar eclipses in the meteorological-stage cosmologies, respectively, of Xenophanes and of Heraclitus may have played a helpful heuristic role in the theoretical breakthrough to heliophotism. (shrink)

Aetius 2.24.1 includes a reference to the ‘corona’ apparent during a total solar eclipse, and suggests a theory, also discernible in Plutarch, that it is a case of the optical phenomenon known as a ‘halo.’.

The battle of Salamis can be dated with a high degree of certainty. Probably about the time of that battle, Cleombrotus was at the Isthmus, constructing the defences there . At some point while building the wall, he considered giving chase to the Persian army. When his sacrifice was answered by a solar eclipse, he took this as a bad omen and immediately returned to Lacedaemon . The eclipse visible to Cleombrotus could only have been that of (...) 2 October 480. Now it is generally supposed that Cleombrotus would not have thought to abandon the construction of the wall and pursue Xerxes unless the latter had just begun his retreat from Athens. Thus, as Herodotus says that a few days () after the battle of Salamis Xerxes withdrew from Attica , the battle of Salamis probably occurred before 2 October 480. (shrink)

A table in five columns for the radii of the Sun, the Moon, and the shadow is included in sets of astronomical tables from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century, specifically in those by John of Gmunden (d. 1442), Peurbach (d. 1461), the second edition of the Alfonsine Tables (1492), Copernicus (d. 1543), Brahe (d. 1601), and Longomontanus (d. 1647). The arrangement is the same and the entries did not change much, despite many innovations in astronomical theories in this (...) time period. In other words, there is continuity in presentation and, from the point of view of the user of these tables, changes in the theory played no role. In general, the methods for computing the entries are not described and have to be reconstructed. In this paper, we focus on the users of these tables rather than on their compilers, but we refer to modern reconstructions where appropriate. A key issue is the treatment of the size of the Moon during a solar eclipse which was not properly understood by Tycho Brahe. Kepler’s solution and that of his predecessor, Levi ben Gerson (d. 1344), are discussed. (shrink)

Excerpt from Relativity: The Electron Theory and Gravitation The first edition of this book was published while the General Principle of Relativity was being worked out, before it seemed possible to arrive at any confirmation from observation. Shortly after, however, it was shown that the new theory explained the motion of the perihelion of Mercury, and now the result of the Solar Eclipse expedition has clinched matters. It seemed best to leave practically untouched the account of the special (...) principle as the natural avenue of approach to the broader view, which is described at length in Part II. Acknowledgment is due to the authors friends, Prof. H. F. Baker and Mr. E. V. Appleton, who kindly read through the proofs of the new matter. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Summary Raphael Meldola FRS (1849–1915) was professor of chemistry at the City and Guilds Technical College in Finsbury. He was a colleague and close friend of Silvanus Phillips Thompson FRS (1851–1916), the college principal and professor of physics. This paper follows an earlier one on Thompson and the making of his career. It is intended to illustrate further the ways in which scientists of Meldola and Thompson's generation gained advancement within the scientific community. Meldola had interests beyond chemistry, including a (...) serious interest in field entomology. In this he had several well-known mentors including Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin. The paper, which includes much new information derived from archival work, is presented as six thematic narratives related, among other things, to chemical and technical education, dye chemistry, the Royal Society solar eclipse expedition of 1875, natural history and Darwinism, field clubs, learned societies, and the honouring of scientists. Together these narratives illustrate a generalist/voluntarist career pattern that came to an end with the First World War. (shrink)

Mathematical models are often expected to provide not only predictions about the phenomenon that they represent, but also explanations. These explanations are answers to why-questions and particularly answers to why the predicted phenomenon should occur. For instance, models can be used to calculate when the next total solar eclipse will happen, and then to explain why it will take place on July 2, 2019. In this regard we can obtain explanations from a model if we can solve the (...) model equations which govern the phenomenon under study. But some equations have no explicit solution or are too complicated to solve. In these cases it is difficult for a... (shrink)

This book comprises forty-one essays, some of them about solar eclipses, space stations, mushrooms, and refugees, but the majority focus on animals, mostly birds. Macdonald starts each piece with a personal recollection from childhood or adulthood. “Vesper Flights,” for instance—the essay that gives the book its title—begins: “I found a dead swift once, a husk of a bird under a bridge over the River Thames.... I picked it up, held it in my palm... and realised that I didn't know (...) what to do.” The author continues by setting out the little that she did know, before that encounter, about swifts—she knew only that they are very difficult to observe individually because of the velocity and the height of their flights. To her, the swifts had always been like “aliens on earth.”Those birds are known for their peculiar flights at dusk, when they go up almost vertically into the sky. Scientists used to believe that they went up to sleep; but, at the end of the 1970s, in order to study the interaction between birds and airplanes, Luit Buurma of the Netherlands made radar observations that showed the swifts do not sleep at high altitude. The hypothesis of Buurma and other scientists is that they go up to forecast the weather. In the convective boundary layer, the winds are unaffected by geographic components, and, at that altitude, the swifts may also orient themselves better, thanks in part to the polarized light that is clearest at twilight. “What they are doing,” Macdonald summarizes these findings, “is flying so high they can work out exactly where they are, to know what they should do next.”Macdonald was trained in the history of science, which explains her taste for telling stories in which she explains how we come to know other animal species. She stresses the importance of technical devices in the construction of knowledge (without military radar, scientists would never have known where the swifts were flying). In each chapter, she also underscores the problem of what she aptly calls “multispecies social etiquette”: it is such a problem (how to avoid collisions with birds, a particular kind of social interaction) that moved scientists to study swifts in the first place. I much enjoyed reading these parts of each chapter. I was less convinced, however, by the morals that she draws from animal behaviors—for example: “Swifts are my fable of community, teaching us about how to make right decisions in the face of oncoming bad weather, in the face of clouds that sit like dark rubble on our horizon.” What makes me uncomfortable with such general conclusions is that they could as well be reached without the birds. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to analyze the meaning of examples in C. Hempel’s works. Hempel uses many examples referring to readings of magnetic hand, burning of white phosphorus, predictions of properties of some elements of the table of Mendeleev, to astrophysical hypotheses, terms of total solar eclipse, throwing of dice, as well as on unmarried men, on white and black swans, green mermaids, black crows and white shoes, blue roses, predictions of Jones’ recovery, the eruption of (...) Vesuvius, the assassination of Julius Caesar, and other “special cases” and “concrete facts”. The question is raised as to whether the case studies are mere illustrative material, a form of argumentation; a way of verifying Hempel’s ideas, their “demonstrable confirmation”, and in this sense a definite empirical basis for the study. The necessity of analyzing concrete examples in the context of Hempel’s theoretical research is shown, for which the examples turn out to be an occasion for investigating the logic of confirmation and the logic of explanation, for analyzing the structures of explanans and explanandum, for understanding the differences in inductive and deductive logical constructions, and for analyzing “quasi-induction”. The paper discusses Hempel’s famous example, the crow paradox, which is named in his honor and is a kind of logical provocation. (shrink)

Within the timespan of two years, two books have been published on the Presocratics as scientists. In 2011 appeared Carlo Rovelli’s The First Scientist. Anaximander and His Legacy, (Yardley: Westholme), and in 2013 Daniel Graham’s Science before Socrates. Whereas Rovelli, whose main field of study is quantum gravity, argues that Anaximander was the first scientist, Graham maintains that Anaximander should not count as a scientist. Empirical science started with Anaxagoras, who used his assumption that solar eclipses occur when the (...) moon blocks its light (“antiphraxis”) to measure the size of the sun on the occasion of a solar eclipse, and to a lesser extent with Parmenides, who recognized that the moon receives its .. (shrink)

The bulk of this book is the second series of John Dewey Lectures, delivered by Professor Ayer in April 1970. To this, Ayer has added a criticism of Roy Harred’s purported refutation of Hume and a chapter about "non-truth-functional" conditionals that rounds out the lectures. Leaving Harred aside, this book provides an elegant, concise, and up-to-date introduction to the problem of induction and related issues concerning probability. Hume is here vindicated. Beginning by giving what may be the best, updated paraphrase (...) of Hume’s negative argument about causal judgments, Ayer explicates the subsumed atomicity, the denial of natural necessity, and the claimed vacuity or circularity of introducing the "uniformity of nature." Ayer goes on to distinguish a priori or logical probabilities, statistical or frequency judgments, and credibility or ground floor inductive judgments, and he summarily argues that the admissibility of the first two forms of judgment, properly understood, provides no real justification for credibility judgments, which, though not defined as subjective, turn out to need some support from our decision to project and therefore entrench certain predicates, or take as lawlike certain generalizations, rather than others. Ayer here includes a very clear explication and criticism of Carnap’s way out in the Logical Concept of Probability, and elsewhere. Ayer acutely summarizes and discusses the Hempel and Goodman paradoxes, taking a position substantially in agreement with Quine and Goodman, and welds this discussion into a Humean conclusion: "In a certain sense cases are what we choose them to be. We do not decide what facts habitually go together but we do decide what combinations are to be imaginatively projected. The despised savages who beat gongs at solar eclipses to summon back the sun are not making any factual error. It is a true generalization that whenever they beat the gongs the sun does shine again, and if they always keep up the ceremony, it is also a true generalization that the sun comes out again only when they beat the gongs. If we despise them, it is because they tell a fictional story about what would happen if they did not beat the gongs, which we do not accept. They see what goes on as well as we do; it is just that we have a different and, we think, a better idea of the way the world works." To say all this is just, of course, to summarize and refurbish Hume’s position on causality. But to do that has two very real values now: 1) It underlines and exposes the epistemic basis of the position taken by Hume’s heirs; 2) It makes clear what are the departures required if one is to differ in substance from Hume and Ayer.—J. L. (shrink)

Observation and observability represent a crucial topic in the philosophy of science, as the huge production of papers and books on the subject attests. Philosophy of perception, on the other hand, is a field of study that took root effectively in the last decades. Even then, apparently, the main theories on observation have neglected the issue of determining which is the object of a successful perception. As a consequence, some theses that have recently been proposed are actually paradoxical, despite deriving (...) from renowned and, prima facie, satisfactory and complete theories. This is the situation of van Fraassen’s assertions on the (putative?) observation of images and rainbows (see 2001 and 2008) and of Sorensen’s claims on what one actually sees during a solar eclipse (see 2008). After putting forward a possible characterization of the object of perception, with no need of discussing the issue of intentionality, in this paper it will be shown that devoting adequate attention to this topic, together with acknowledging that observation is an action, in which the subject plays an indeed active role, would make it possible to avoid drawing conclusions that do not seem to be correct, such as the ones just mentioned. Any theory about observation will only be complete and adequate provided the object of perception is taken into account. (shrink)

Eclipses are proverbially fraught with forebodings. The solar eclipse of 1919 was no exception. Seen in retrospect, that eclipse marked the end of an old era and the beginning of a new in the philosophy of science. Not in science itself, be it noted, for the scientific life is a life of patience and sobriety and continuity, knowing little of what the world calls ‘sensation’. But for the onlookers, the philosophers of science, the event was drama. The (...) reign of Newton, long tottering, was finally broken; Einstein took up the vacant chair. Men were not slow to learn the lesson: if king-making can be done once it can be done again. Philosophy of science must needs hereafter be a philosophy of revolutions—whether continuous revolution or spasmodic revolutions is still a subject of debate. (shrink)

Recent research has shown that the use of astronomy as a chronological problem-solving tool has deep roots in the scholarly practices of the Latin Middle Ages, as is manifest from the writings of Marianus Scotus, Gerland, and other “critical computists” of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This essay enlarges the existing picture by introducing a hitherto unknown epistolary treatise of the mid-twelfth century. Written in Lotharingia in 1144, this poorly preserved work documents an attempt to reconstruct the timeline of world (...) history via techniques that had emerged within the Latin computus tradition prior to the advent of Greco-Arabic astronomy. Drawing on the so-called computus naturalis, the author performed lunar computations on the basis of observed eclipses and used them to propose new dates for the Creation and the Last Supper. He also relied on a revised estimate of the time and date of the vernal equinox, placing it on 16 March, and gave a detailed account of how this result can be derived from solar observations with a meridian line. By virtue of these methodological features, the Chronology of 1144 represents an important transitional stage between the “critical computists” and the use of eclipse-based dating methods by later scholars such as Giles of Lessines (fl. 1260). (shrink)

This paper is the second of a multi-part examination of the creation of the Babylonian mathematical lunar theories known as Systems A and B. Part I (Britton 2007) addressed the development of the empirical elements needed to separate the effects of lunar and solar anomaly on the intervals between syzygies. This was accomplished in the construction of the System A lunar theory by an unknown author, almost certainly in the city of Babylon and probably early in the 4th century (...) B.C. The present paper focuses mainly on System A and the likely process of its construction. The first three sections are largely descriptive – first of the basic concepts which underlie the theory; then of the component schemes comprising the theory; and finally of two distinctive texts which suggest how the theory was constructed. The crux of the paper is Sect. 4, which describes how the theory seems likely to have been constructed. Here the crucial insight in separating the effects of lunar and solar anomaly appears to have been recognizing that – of all the measurable intervals bounded by eclipses – only 235 months exhibits a variation due solely to lunar anomaly, and that by means of an elegant mathematical model the amplitudes of 223 and 12 months could be deduced from its amplitude. The rest of the section describes the likely details of the derivation of the Φ ~ Λ scheme, and the extension of the methodology to the other components of the theory. It concludes with a demonstration that Φ and its dependent schemes were anchored through the Φ ~ W scheme to the syzygy on –403 Aug 18 (GN 7391) which concluded the shortest 6-month interval in the first 24 saros cycles since –746 (and in fact in the 900 years separating Nabonassar and Ptolemy). The next three sections address a number of largely technical details and amplifications of the theory, beginning with the schemes describing the variation of lunar velocity (column F) in Sect. 5. Section 6 addresses issues concerning the interpretation of Φ and the so-call Saros Text (BM 36705), while Sect. 7 discusses System B’s corresponding treatment of the effects of lunar anomaly, illustrating both its derivative nature and mathematically less rigorous structure. Section 8 examines the accuracy of the two theories, showing that the System A theory was both remarkably accurate and superior to System B. The final section offers some brief remarks on the power and elegance of the mathematical treatment of the problem by the author of System A. (shrink)

Science, and in particular the process of theory-change in science, formed the major inspiration for Karl Popper's whole philosophy. Popper learned about the success of Einstein's revolutionary new theory in 1919, and Einstein ‘became a dominant influence on my thinking—in the long run perhaps the most important influence of all.’ Popper explained why:In May, 1919, Einstein's eclipse predictions were successfully tested by two British expeditions. With these tests a new theory of gravitation and a new cosmology suddenly appeared, not (...) just as a mere possibility, but as an improvement on Newton—a better approximation to the truth … The general assumption of the truth of Newton's theory was of course the result of its incredible success, culminating in the discovery of the planet Neptune … Yet in spite of all this, Einstein had managed to produce a real alternative and, it appeared, a better theory … Like Newton himself, he predicted new effects within our solar system. And some of these predictions, when tested, had now proved successful. (shrink)

Farīd al-Dīn Abu al-Ḥasan ‘Alī b. al-Fahhād’s astronomical tradition as represented in the prolegomenon to his Alā’ī zīj (1172 AD) shows his experimental examination of the theories of his predecessors and testing the circumstances of the synodic phenomena as derived from the theories developed in the classical period of medieval Middle Eastern astronomy against his own observations. This work was highly influential in late Islamic astronomy and was translated into Greek in the 1290s. He evaluated al-Battānī’s Ṣābi’ zīj (d. 929 (...) AD) and al-Khāzinī’s Sanjarī zīj (fl. 1115 AD) with regard to the conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn in 1166 AD and found the errors of, respectively, about 35 and 10 days in the times predicted, which are verified by a recalculation on the basis of these works and modern theories. His inspection of the four solar theories established by his Islamic predecessors with respect to the quantitative differences between their predicted times for the occurrence of the vernal equinoxes is also correct. His calculation of the parameters of the solar and lunar eclipses in April 1176 has the errors of up to 1 h in the time and one digit in the magnitude. A general result of this study is that solely the evaluation of the synodic phenomena could mislead the judgment about the reliability and worthiness of the contemporary theories. (shrink)

Ibn al-Zarqālluh (al-Andalus, d. 1100) introduced a new inequality in the longitudinal motion of the Moon into Ptolemy’s lunar model with the amplitude of 24′, which periodically changes in terms of a sine function with the distance in longitude between the mean Moon and the solar apogee as the variable. It can be shown that the discovery had its roots in his examination of the discrepancies between the times of the lunar eclipses he obtained from the data of his (...) eclipse observations over a 37-year period in the latter part of the eleventh century and the predictions made on the basis of the lunar theories in the Mumta $$\textit{\d{h}}$$ an zīj (Baghdad, ca. 830) and al-Battānī’s zīj (Raqqa, d. 929), which were available to him at the time. What Ibn al-Zarqālluh found is, in fact, a special case of the annual equation of the Moon, which is applicable in the oppositions and, thus, in the lunar eclipses. The inequality was discovered independently by Tycho Brahe (d. 1601) and Johannes Kepler (d. 1630). As Ibn Yūnus (d. 1009) reports in his $$\textit{\d{H}}$$ ākimī zīj, Ibn al-Zarqālluh’s medieval Middle Eastern predecessors, the Persian astronomers Māhānī (d. ca. 880) and Nayrīzī (d. 922) as well as ‘Alī b. Amājūr (fl. ca. 920), were already acquainted with the problem of the eclipse timing errors, but it had remained unresolved until Ibn Yūnus provided a provisional, and incorrect, solution by reducing the size of the lunar epicycle. As we argue, the diverse ways to tackle the same problem stem from two different methodologies in astronomical reasoning in the traditions developed separately in the Eastern and Western regions of the medieval Islamic domain. (shrink)