The Uses of Analogies in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Science

2011

The object of this paper is to look at the extent and nature of the uses of analogy during the first century following the so-called scientific revolution.Using the research tool provided by JSTOR we systematically analyze the uses of “analog” and its cognates (analogies, analogous, etc.) in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for the period 1665–1780. In addition to giving the possibility of evaluating quantitatively the proportion of papers explicitly using analogies, this approach makes it possible to go beyond the maybe idiosyncratic cases of Descartes, Kepler, Galileo, and other much studied giants of the so-called Scientific Revolution. As a result a classifi…

Individuals Across the Sciences

2015

International audience; What are individuals? How can they be identified? These are crucial questions for philosophers and scientists alike. Criteria of individuality seem to differ markedly between metaphysics and the empirical sciences - and this might well explain why no work has hitherto attempted to relate the contributions of metaphysics, physics and biology on this question. This timely volume brings together various strands of research into 'individuality', examining how different sciences handle the issue, and reflecting on how this scientific work relates to metaphysical concerns. The collection makes a major contribution to clarifying and overcoming obstacles to the construction …

A partial elucidation of the gauge principle

2008

The elucidation of the gauge principle "is the most pressing problem in current philosophy of physics" said Michael Redhead in 2003. This paper argues for two points that contribute to this elucidation in the context of Yang–Mills theories. (1) Yang–Mills theories, including quantum electrodynamics, form a class. They should be interpreted together. To focus on electrodynamics is potentially misleading. (2) The essential role of gauge and BRST symmetries is to provide a local field theory that can be quantized and would be equivalent to the quantization of the non-local reduced theory. If this is correct, the gauge symmetry is significant, not so much because it implies ontological conseque…

Une objectivité kaléidoscopique : construire l'image scientifique du monde

2011

article accepté par la revue Philosophie, en cours de publication, date de publication provisoire; National audience

Symetry and its formalisms : mathematical aspects

2009

International audience; This article explores the relation between the concept of symmetry and its formalisms. The standard view among philosophers and physicists is that symmetry is completely formalized by mathematical groups. For some mathematicians however, the groupoid is a competing and more general formalism. An analysis of symmetry that justifies this extension has not been adequately spelled out. After a brief explication of how groups, equivalence, and symmetries classes are related, we show that, while it’s true in some instances that groups are too restrictive, there are other instances for which the standard extension to groupoids is too unrestrictive. The connection between gr…

The exceptionality of space-time symetries

2009

The Uses of Analogies in 17th and 18th Century Science

2011

International audience; The object of this research is to look at the extent and nature of the uses of analogy during the first century following the so-called scientific revolution. Using the research tool provided by JSTOR we systematically analyze the uses of “analog” and its cognates (analogies, analogous, etc) in the hilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London(PT) for the period 1665-1780. In addition to giving the possibility of evaluating quantitatively the proportion of papers explicitly using analogies, this approach makes it possible to go beyond the maybe idiosyncratic cases of Descartes, Kepler or Galileo and other much studied giants of the so-called Scientific Rev…

La multiplicité des explications scientifiques

2014

The objectivity of physical theories

2010

Conceptual Foundations of Yang-Mills Theories

2008

International audience