It is not risky at all to assert that fundamental physics has not been in good shape in the last forty years or so, not because of lack of work, talent, conjectures and resources, but because few really big advances (as big as, say, the discovery of thermodynamics, of relativity, of quantum field theory, or […]
Contemporary philosophy of science was, at least during its first decades (those of the glorious Vienna Circle), a kingdom of radically empiricist and positivist intellectuals: scientific knowledge had to be obtained and tested mainly through experiment, and everything that could not be robustly grounded on experimental observations was just dangerous speculation and metaphysics. The connections […]
“The last star will slowly cool and fade away. With its passing, the universe will become once more a void, without light or life or meaning.” So warned the physicist Brian Cox in the recent BBC series Universe. The fading of that last star will only be the beginning of an infinitely long, dark epoch […]
You will have read and heard a lot of times that we are living in a new geological period, that has been baptized as ‘the Anthopocene’: the age of the Earth in which our species has become the predominant force in the shaping of the planet’s geological features. Well, perhaps ‘predominant’ is too strong a […]
Just to take stock of what we have encountered in the previous entries of this series, regarding the ideas of contemporary philosophy of science than can find some kind of ‘ancestor’ in the works of ancient ‘philosophers’, we can mention Plato’s and Aristotle’s discussion about what are the essential differences and relationships between ‘scientific’ and […]
According to the traditional myth, mentioned in passing in the first entry of this series, contemporary philosophy of science would have started in the post-WWI Vienna, when a group of young philosophers and scientists, under the heading of Moritz Schlick, attempted to show how scientific knowledge could be unambiguously derived from observational data (or at […]
If you ask people to list the most intelligent animals, they’ll name a few usual suspects. Chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants are often mentioned, as are crows, dogs and occasionally pigs. Horses don’t usually get a look in. So it might come as a surprise that horses possess an unusual skill, widely considered an indicator of […]
One fascinating, as well as disconcerting fact about the evolution of Greek thought about science is that, almost immediately after the end of the ‘Classical’ period of philosophy, and particularly after Aristotle’s founding work on both philosophy and science, these two activities seemed to follow two radically separate courses. Actually, Greek science achieved its peak […]
Let me make a short interruption in our series about the prehistory of philosophy of science, to discuss a completely different point. I am writing this now, just because in the last days I think I have been able to clearly formulate a specific perplexity that for many years I had felt about what we […]
Besides being one of the main pioneers of scientific thought, Aristotle is the author of the work that can unquestionably be considered the first book explicitly and exclusively devoted to what we can call ‘philosophy of science’ . This small book is known by the rather insipid name of Posterior Analytics ( Ἀναλυτικὰ ὑστέρων ) […]