Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science

Book One The Two Fundamental Observations.- 1. Science Demands the Concept of Thing.- Etymology of the term explication.- Its customary meaning.- The position of Comte and Mach.- The metaphysics of positivism.- The order of nature.- The mathematical form of laws.- Qualitative laws.- The disappearance of genus.- Water.- The elements, according to Soddy.- The ideal gas and crystals.- Gersonides and St. Thomas.- Law, an ideal construct.- The law of inertia and Archimedes' principle.- Relations in relation to us.- Positivism and common sense perception.- The "immediate data of consciousness," according to Bergson.- The program of Mill and the true evolution of science.- Physics forbids the intervention of the subject.- Representational theories and abstract theories.- Thermodynamics and kinetic theory.- Thermodynamics and the concept of thing.- Objects created by science.- Theories and the essence of things.- The permanence of theoretical entities.- Geometry and material solids.- Burned sulfur and carbon.- Science destroys the world of common sense.- Where does the metaphysics of laws come from?.- Science is not positivistic.- 2. Science Seeks Explanation.- The goal of science for Bacon, Hobbes and Comte.- For Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne and Pascal.- The divergence between Comte and Littre.- The thirst for knowledge.- Newtonian gravitation.- Explanation in biology.- The Council of Brussels (The search for a physical theory.- Einstein.- Lorentz, Planck, etc..- The phenomenological stance.- What a positivist ought to have said.- The scientist and the ordinary man.- Magic.- Explanatory science.- Theory, a step in the direction of law.- Rankine and Maxwell.- Explanation and the concept of thing.- The two tendencies.- Book Two The Explanatory Process.- 3. Deduction.- Cause.- Sufficient reason.- Bossuet's image.- The necessity of the effect.- Cause and law; efficient cause.- Cause and reason.- Cuvier (The interdependence of functions.- The ruminants, their cloven hoofs and their horns.- The organism and the geometric curve.- Finalism in Cuvier.- Logical content and temporal relation.- The confusion.- Cause and ontology.- The weak foundations of theories: valence.- Werner's system.- Valence varies.- Impact.- The philosophers and Hume's demonstration.- Fictitious entities in theories.- Electrical theory.- Ockham's razor.- Theories are indispensable.- Phlogiston and acidum pingue.- Priestley, Cavendish, Scheele and Black.- The role of Lavoisier.- The prestige of theories does not come from the fundamental observations.- It comes from the deduction.- Deduction applied to laws.- of logical necessity.- It is a notion foreign to positivism.- The same schema but different reasons.- The theory disregards the ontological character of science.- 4. Rationality Postulated.- The postulate of rationality.- Even positivistic science to some extent presupposes it.- Comte and overly detailed investigation.- Comte and Mariotte's law.- Phenomena beyond the reach of lawfulness.- The world of atoms and subatoms.- Statistics and the underlying phenomena.- Temperature and Brownian motion.- Comte's real opinion.- Laws must be knowable.- Kepler's laws.- The genesis of his discoveries.- His field was particularly propitious.- Nature and genus.- The hierarchy of conditions.- Balfour's "fibrous structure" of reality.- The "subexistence" of laws for Bertrand Russell.- Comte and stellar research.- The scientist and the metaphysics of theories.- The reality of theoretical entities.- The true laws of nature.- Laws follow theories.- Kepler's laws and the Copernican system.- Approximate laws.- The "realism" of science for Bertrand Russell.- Sufficient reason and rationality.- The Stoics.- Logical relation and temporal relation.- Goblot's theory.- The true reason for the anomaly.- The Ionians.- Aristotle's theory.- The task of the physicist, according to Geminus.- Analogy with Hegel.- Galileo's adversaries.- Progress through deduction.- The forms of deduction.- They are easily substituted for one another.- Baconian empiricism.- Method in physics, according to Bouasse.- Method in the other sciences.- 5. Identity and Identification.- The identity of antecedent and consequent.- Leibniz and Plato.- Tautological identity.- Mathematical demonstration.- Hegel: identity contains diversity.- The necessity of contradiction.- Hegel's position and the antinomies of Kant.- Hegel and mathematical reasoning.- The dialectic and the going beyond.- Identity introduced.- The square of the hypotenuse.- The astonishment provoked by the demonstration.- The equality is restricted.- Poincare's cascade of equations.- The proof and the concept for Hegel.- Leibniz's opinion.- The synthetic in mathematical proof.- The active role of the intellect.- The schema or process of identification.- Genus in mathematics and in physics.- Spontaneous identification and deliberate identification.- The reason the mind resists the demonstration.- The equality of cause and effect.- Persistence in time.- Diversification by space.- Mechanism and substantial qualities.- Implicit conservation and incomplete conservation.- What is conserved becomes a real thing.- The peculiar dignity of the principles of conservation.- Preformation.- Leibniz and his contemporaries.- Spermists and ovists.- The moderns.- Maeterlinck.- The appeal of preformationism.- Evolution and development.- Explanation by displacement.- Matter demands to be explained.- The operations of the mind are intertwined.- The influence of mathematics.- Little evidence of it in the ancient atomists.- Their theories derive from causal identity.- Aristotle's testimony.- Physical theory imposes identification.- It suppresses the statement of the envisaged goal.- The cause of the persistent.- Substance and its qualities.- The statement of the principle of sufficient reason.- The connection between temporal cause and the cause of the permanent.- The unity of matter.- Rational matter is space.- The properties of the ether.- Matter having only geometric qualities.- The world reduced to space.- 6. The Irrational.- The irrational, permanent limitation on explanation.- The mathematical irrational.- Sensation.- Leibniz's "mill,".- The attitude of science.- Mechanism.- The specific energy of the nerves.- Montaigne's point of view.- Hobbes' opinion.- Impressions of light and impressions of sound.- The maximum intensity of the sensation of light.- Protests from the philosophers.- The suicide of reason.- This irrational is an a priori notion.- The irrationality of diversity in Newton.- His predecessors.- Science partially explains diversity.- Carnot's principle.- The prototype of irreversible phenomena.- Eternal return.- The kinetic theory of Carnot's principle.- Probable distribution.- The box and the marbles.- The warm body and the moving body.- Change and probability.- Arrhenius's hypothesis.- The infinity of time and the infinity of space.- Arrhenius's hypothesis and kinetic theory.- The enigmatic given.- The improbable initial distribution.- Change understood as necessary.- The reality of atoms.- Ostwald's attacks.- Atomic electricity.- The victory of atomism.- The diversification and unification of space.- The analogy between the two irrationals of diversity.- The chemical irrational.- The chemical irrational and quanta.- The unexpected irrational.- Stellar motion.- The unpredictable form of the future irrational.- The elements and their explanation.- Partial rationalization of the irrational.- We shall never be able to deduce nature.- 7. Biological Phenomena.- The finalist in biology.- Vitalism.- The struggle between vitalism and mechanism.- The retreat of vitalism.- Bichat's position.- Modern day biologists.- Explanations, established and future.- The vitalist claim.- The antivitalist thesis.- Future biological irrationals.- Analogy with the chemical irrational.- Difficulty of determining the limits of the vital phenomenon.- Hysteresis, tropisms.- Liquid crystals, imitation of forms of life.- Artificial fertilization, movements of the amoeba.- Chemical synthesis.- Animal energy.- Grafting of dead tissues.- Their reviviscence.- What is alive in an organism.- What a vitalistic demonstration would be like.- Difficulty of making our reason apply itself in a dry run.- Montaigne's bladder stones.- The vitalistic claim is premature.- The weakness of finalism.- The adversaries of evolutionism.- The triumph of Darwin.- Its causes.- Finality implies consciousness.- The difficulties of this supposition.- The end must be in man's interest.- Omnipotence and infinite bounty.- A limited finality appears absurd.- Finalism can be useful.- Instinct and its reducibility.- Final cause, the sanctuary of ignorance.- Where Bacon was right against finalism.- Delbet's act of faith.- Driesch's explanation by geometry.- 8. Forms of Spatial Explanation.- A. Displacement from one body to another.- Displacement of an immaterial principle.- The attitude of modern physics.- The depths of space.- Le Sage's theory and radioactive bodies.- B. Folding.- C. Reduction in size.- The properties of Euclidean space.- The seed and the plant.- Infinitely small organisms in Pascal.- The flea and the elephant.- The cell and the molecule.- The molecular world.- The submolecular world.- Humanity's prescience and its limits.- The upper limit of our world.- Explanation by the infinitesimal has become more difficult.- D. The properties of geometric figures.- The ancient atomists.- Descartes.- Analogy with Lucretius.- Boyle and Lemery.- Stahl.- Qualitative conceptions in chemistry.- The attitude of chemists after Stahl.- The concept of the chemical element.- Constancy of the elements.- Their essential properties.- Affinity.- Qualitative physics.- It uses the concept of displacement.- The way atoms are grouped.- The chemistry of structure.- Stereochemistry.- Its merits.- Bayer's valences, the new crystallography.- Werner's octahedron.- The prestige of this conception.- The qualitative element in stereochemistry.- The conceptions of Lavoisier and Prout.- The system of Mendeleev and Moseley's discovery.- The theory of Sir Joseph Thomson.- E. Explanation by motion.- The piston and the brake.- Analogies with reduction in scale and immaterial principles.- Absolute kinetics.- The limits of this means of explanation.- 9. The Possibilities of Scientific Explanation.- Possible combinations in Lucretius.- The moderns.- The formula and the properties.- The difficulties of the problem.- Chromophores.- Rationalization appears possible.- New irrationals may crop up.- Explanation of being and of becoming.- Qualitative theories.- 10. The State of Potentiality.- Aristotle.- The conservation of energy.- Force, matter.- Existence in itself for Hegel.- The objects of common sense.- The seed, the nation.- Historical hypostases.- A man's genius.- Fiction can be useful.- Color.- Usefulness of historical hypostases.- Potential existence and Ockham's razor.- The germ, evolution.- The degree of identity of the two terms.- Easy return to naive realism.- Precision of the scientific notion.- The notion of potentiality in Hegel.- In Mnesarchus and in Spinoza.- Reason and contradiction.- Book Three Global Explanation.- 11. Hegel's Attempt.- The paradoxical appearance of the doctrine.- Its prestige.- The two logics and the two reasons.- Hegel's predecessors.- Schelling's claim.- It does not bear on logic.- The deduction of becoming.- Logic and metaphysics.- The deduction of reality.- Panlogism.- Nature is intelligible.- Hegel's disciples neglect his Naturphilosophie and even his logic.- What is of interest in the Naturphilosophie.- Descartes's work and his achievements.- Hegel's work is disconcerting.- The magnet and the syllogism.- The chemical process.- Hegel and the school of Schelling.- The scientific achievements of the philosophy of nature.- The scientific sterility of the Hegelian theory.- The infection of wounds.- The scope of deduction in Descartes and in Hegel.- Contingency and play in nature for Hegel.- Hegel and experimental science.- Hegel's knowledge of science.- The irrational in Hegel.- Its relation to the irrational in Newton.- Hegel appeals to direct sensation.- Hegel tried to discipline the irrational.- Mathematics and physical magnitudes.- The Anderssein.- Mathematical demonstration.- The law of falling bodies.- Power in mathematics.- Hegel's knowledge of mathematics.- Mathematics governed by abstract reason.- Philosophy must not imitate mathematics.- The distinction between the two reasons is an anomaly.- Rosenkranz's attitude.- The source of Hegel's distinction.- Scientific explanation rests on identity.- This is a tautology.- Science abuses hypothetical concepts.- It is useless to try to explain a chemical reaction.- The source of Hegel's epistemological opinions.- Hegel's epistemology and his logic.- What must be retained from Hegel's opinions and what must be rejected.- The dialectical process.- The quandary of the commentators.- For Hegel the irrational is unique.- Hegel's Vernunft does not exist.- Is becoming reasonable?.- Trendelenburg's criticism.- Evolution of the notion of becoming in McTaggart.- It ends up with Parmenides.- Science and becoming.- Science's successive compromises.- Science does not conserve the irrational.- One irrational or multiple irrationals?.- Everything seems to be connected.- The irrational is unforeseeable.- 12. Schelling's Objections.- The chimerical nature of Hegel's undertaking.- Schelling's Preface.- One does not deduce what is negative.- The driving force is the terminus ad quem.- The transition between idea and nature.- The causa sui.- Kant's criticism.- The prestige and the weakness of the Hegelian position.- Hegel's palinodes.- The apothegm of the real and the reasonable.- Schelling's idealism.- His philosophy of nature.- The implications of Schelling's attacks.- The position of the philosophy of nature in the two systems.- What exists, for Schelling, is given.- The spiritualization of reality.- The philosophy of nature is speculative physics.- His attitude toward experience.- Confirmation by experience declared necessary.- The difference between the two Naturphilosophies.- The given must nevertheless be recognized as consistent with reason.- The identity of nature with the world of ideas.- The philosophy of nature and transcendental idealism.- The disciples.- The solution cannot be complete.- Schelling's oscillations.- Maintaining the two points of view simultaneously.- The problem of Schelling's interrupted production.- His precocity.- The announcements that come to nothing.- The explanations of Kuno Fischer and Hartmann.- Brehier's explanation.- The fragmentary character of Schelling's work.- His annoyance at Cousin.- The ambiguity of Schelling's doctrine disappears in Hegel.- Cousin and Hegel's Encyclopedia.- The source of his admiration.- Schelling feels a continuity between himself and Hegel.- Praise of Hegel.- Simultaneous attacks.- Positive and negative philosophy.- The new system and the philosophy of nature.- Hegel inspires Schelling to reconsider.- Schelling's innate realism.- The will.- Schelling must have hesitated to "betray" the idealistic movement.- He finally resigned himself to it.- The antiphilosophic reaction in Germany.- The value of Hegel's enterprise.- The complexity of Schelling's thought.- Schelling's doctrine more human than Hegel's.- 13. Hegel and Comte.- Hegel's attempt seems anachronistic.- His positivism.- Kepler's laws and the Newtonian reduction.- The chemical elements.- Science for Comte and for Hegel.- Analogy with Kant.- Hegel's margin and positive science.- It is a mistake of degree.- It is due to the spirit of the times.- Cousin's attitude.- Comte's influence.- Hegel's scorn for nature.- The stars compared to skin eruptions.- The "logical arrogance" of the Hegelians.- McTaggart's attitude.- The humility of science.- Hegel and Comte both disregarded explanatory science.- 14. Hegel, Descartes and Kant.- Experience in Descartes.- The continuity of the deductive chain.- The parentage of this conception.- Hegel derives from Kant.- What Kant deduced.- Hegel extends the limits of deduction.- Kantian deduction derives from Descartes.- The Baconian evolution.- Hegel is less bold than Aristotle.- Trendelenburg's criticism.- It would also apply to Descartes and Kant.- The a priori separated out from experimental science.- Necessity of this process.- The attitude of the mechanist.- Hegel's hope not unreasonable.- The empiricist evolution and its claims.- The scope of mathematical deduction in Kant.- The discontinuity of scientific deduction.- Galileo's attitude.- The hypothesis in Newton.- In Lavoisier, Priestley and Schelling.- Cauchy.- The abandonment of the mechanistic faith.- The contribution of Bacon and Comte.- The successes of theoretical science.- They are won by the route Hegel condemns.- Scientific explanation does not succeed everywhere.- Nowhere can rationalization be complete.- Mathematical deduction conforms to the order of things.- Neither Descartes's nor Hegel's attempt was absurd.- What explains the enormity of Hegel's failure?.- The sterility of Peripateticism.- Science's abandonment of quality.- The divorce between science and philosophy in Germany.- The "science" constructed by philosophers.- Science and philosophy cannot ignore on another.- Bradley's attempt at a delimitation.- Antiphilosophic reaction in Germany.- The union of science and philosophy in Descartes.- Book Four Scientific and Philosophic Reason.- 15. Science and Philosophic Systems.- What is the metaphysics of science?.- Common sense.- Scientific reason destroys the world of common sense.- The distinction between common sense and mechanism.- Scientific claims contrary to common sense.- The impossibility of a catholic doctrine in science.- The four solutions proposed.- Mechanism.- The attitude of the physicist.- Energeticism.- Its difficulties.- The thrust of science toward atomism.- Transcendental realism.- Mathematical idealism.- The Marburg school.- The idealistic affirmation.- The carbon atom.- The "spiritualization" of science in Schelling.- The divergent paths of science and philosophy.- Sensible reality.- Science and philosophy can approach each other on specific points.- Science and mathematical idealism.- The corporeity of geometrical figures.- Panalgebrism and pangeometrism.- The complete deduction of mathematics.- The mathematical form of knowledge.- Realistic and idealistic arguments drawn from mathematics.- Concrete numbers.- Aristotle's arguments against mathematicism.- Mathematical physics.- The world as necessary and the disappearance of coefficients.- The irrational and quality.- The future irrational.- The mental attitude of the biologist.- The mathematical form of the irrational.- The absolute beginning and the intervention of the divinity.- Pushing the assumption back.- The limits of this pushing back.- The panmathematical illusion and its source.- Idealism and positivism.- Positivism and Hegelianism.- Deductive positivism.- Deduction from the principles.- Deductive positivism is an idealistic conception.- Positivism and mathematical idealism.- The passage from idea to being.- Reality reconstructed by means of mathematical concepts.- Multiple transitions.- Gradations of the transition for Hegel.- The ataraxia of science.- The individual scientist.- His convictions fluctuate.- Common ideas.- Urbain's testimony.- The conceptions are implicit.- Common sense modified.- Philosophic theory and scientific construction.- 16. The Rationality of the Real Reconsidered.- The resemblance between Cartesian science and modern science.- This would be an enigma if science were positivistic.- It is explained by the role of deduction.- Kant and rational mechanics.- Plausible principles.- They are not immutable.- They yield to new principles.- They cannot be part of the "metaphysical foundations,".- Partial agreement in science and in common sense.- The process of common sense.- Unconscious and conscious processes.- The structure of the world of sensation.- Perceptions independent of the self.- The spatial form.- The empiricist theory.- It is inapplicable to scientific conceptions.- The objects of common sense change.- Common sense ontology.- The reaction of the individual to the environment.- The theory of evolution.- The postulate of perfect identity.- Rationality and the elan vital.- The rational and the useful.- The intellectus ipse.- The opposition between reason and sensation.- Hope for agreement in Hegel.- The opaqueness of physical fact.- Comte's position.- Hasty rationalization.- The superior rationality of the mathematical.- Laws and theories.- Descartes's deduction and ours.- The true task of the scientist.- Science and its applications.- The method of the scientist.- The sterility of the Baconian program.- Claude Bernard's observations.- The testimony of our contemporaries.- The search for the fiber.- Judiciary astrology.- Natural astrology.- Tables of measurements.- One cannot observe all the conditions.- Guyton de Morveau and phlogiston.- His experiments on Prussian blue.- They hold no interest for us.- The pseudosciences.- The calculation of probability based on statistics.- Nonexistent compounds.- The will to believe.- The ineffective or noxious remedies of the past.- The will to be cured.- The search for the fiber and the internal link.- Analogy.- Dissimilarities between phenomena.- The researcher dismisses them in his mind.- The familiar phenomenon.- The working of ordinary reason.- Instinct.- Communion with nature.- What it would imply for the scientist.- Clear ideas and obscure ideas.- Condillac's affirmation.- A decision and the reasons for it.- The scientist who does research and the scientist who reports his results.- Kepler's folly.- What is the source of Bacon's error?.- How it was able to persist.- The value of clarity.- The dignity of reason.- Croce's position.- The practical and science.- What an experimental result really is.- What the generalization of the results of science leads to.- The scientific gain from philosophic speculation.- Incentives coming from the a priori side.- 17. The Epistemological Paradox.- The prestige of the positivistic conception.- Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle.- The logical aspect: Leibniz.- Condillac.- The mind distorting fundamental identity.- Stanley Jevons.- The epistemological aspect: the atomists.- One forgets the philosophic origin of atomism.- Its continuity.- The testimony of modern scientists.- The philosophers.- Zeller and Burnet.- The principles of conservation.- Inertia.- The conservation of matter.- The conservation of energy.- Empiricist and aprioristic affirmations.- The real essence of the principles: Leibniz.- Kant.- Poinsot.- Hegel, Whewell.- Wundt.- Spir.- He overex-tends the domain of deduction.- Kroman, Tannery.- Planck, Gaston Milhaud.- Lalande.- Kozlowski.- Wilbois, Ward.- The discontinuity of the development.- Riehl.- Hegel.- His attack against science.- The fundamental paradox of science.- Science is theoretical and lawful at the same time.- The concept of experimental knowledge is contradictory.- The two currents coexist peacefully.- 18. The Oneness of Human Reason.- The intelligence itself is antinomic.- Reason and sensation.- Science, philosophy and common sense.- The diversity between science and philosophy.- The roundabout method of scientific reasoning.- The concepts of philosophy and of science.- Overly hasty deduction is antiscientific.- Hegel's error compounded by his very virtues.- The usefulness of the positivistic warning.- Relations between science and philosophy.- Common sense.- The science of the past and its teachings.- The planet Mars and phlogiston.- The domination of the reigning theory.- The fruit and the flower for Hegel.- The outdated theory.- The fruitful error.- The continuity of theories.- Hegel's thought.- Comte and the history of the sciences.- The variation in reason for Hegel.- What such a supposition implies.- Reason and new problems.- The new element implicitly preexisted.- The sphericity of the earth.- The relativity of space.- The spatialization of time.- Hypergeometry.- Duhem's condemnation is invalid.- Despite Hegel, becoming remains irrational.- Boltzmann's theory.- Reason is antinomic but immutable.- The catholicity of reason.- Appendices.- 1 The Precursors of Hume.- 2 The Resistance to Lavoisier's Theory.- 3 The Formula of the Universe in Laplace and in Taine.- 4 Arrhenius's Theory and Other Such Efforts.- 5 Hegel's Political Attitude.- 6 The Prestige and the Decline of Hegelian Philosophy.- 7 Abstract and Concrete Reason in Hegel.- 8 Hegel's Panlogism.- 10 The Philosophy of Nature and Scientific Progress.- 11 Hegel, Schelling and Chemical Theory.- 12 Hegel and National Science.- 13 Hegel's Artistic Sense and Sense of Rhythm.- 14 The Hegelian Dialectic and Experience.- 15 Schelling, Hegel and Victor Cousin.- 16 The Identity of Thought and Reality in Schelling.- 17 Schelling's Announced Works.- 18 Caroline Schelling.- 19 Personal Relations Between Schelling and 20 Hegel.- 20 Tycho Brahe, Astrology and the Motion of the Earth.- 21 Non-Euclidean Space and Physical Verification.- Index of Names.