Newton’s Physics and the Conceptual Structure of the Scientific Revolution: (127 Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science)

Three events, which happened all within the same week some ten years ago, set me on the track which the book describes. The first was a reading of Emile Meyerson works in the course of a prolonged research on Einstein's relativity theory, which sent me back to Meyerson's Ident- ity and Reality, where I read and reread the striking chapter on "Ir- rationality". In my earlier researches into the origins of French Conven- tionalism I came to know similar views, all apparently deriving from Emile Boutroux's doctoral thesis of 1874 De fa contingence des lois de la nature and his notes of the 1892-3 course he taught at the Sorbonne De ['idee de fa loi naturelle dans la science et la philosophie contempo- raines. But never before was the full effect of the argument so suddenly clear as when I read Meyerson. On the same week I read, by sheer accident, Ernest Moody's two- parts paper in the JHIof 1951, "Galileo and Avempace". Put near Meyerson's thesis, what Moody argued was a striking confirmation: it was the sheer irrationality of the Platonic tradition, leading from A vem- pace to Galileo, which was the working conceptual force behind the notion of a non-appearing nature, active all the time but always sub- merged, as it is embodied in the concept of void and motion in it.

Table of Contents:
I: The Tradition.- One: Aristotelian and Platonic Conceptions of Explanation.- Two: Aristotle’s Philosophy of Nature and Theory of Potentiality.- Three: Plato’s Concept of the Actual and His Philosophy of Nature.- II: The Logical Revolution.- Four: The Copernican Harmony.- Five: Bacon’s Informative Logic.- Six: Informativity and Paradox: Galileo’s Conception of the Nature of Physical Reality.- Seven: Descartes’ Informative Logic.- III: Newton’s Physics and its Critics.- Eight: Actual Infinity and Newton’s Calculus.- Nine: Newton’s Logic of Space and Time.- Ten: Modern Newtonian Historiography and the Puzzle of Newton’s Absolute Space.- Eleven: Absolute Motion and the Nature of Inertial Forces.- Twelve: Locke and the Meaning of “Empiricism”.- Thirteen: Newton’s Invention of the Problem of Induction.- Fourteen: Circularity and Newton’s Philosophy of Nature.- Fifteen: Leibniz’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature.- Sixteen: Berkeley’s Aristotelian Critique of Newton’s Physics.- Epilogue.- Appendix: Some Basic Ideas in Newton’s Physics.- Notes.