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Review Articles-Philosophical Concepts in PhysicsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 30 (2): 283-286. 1999.
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59Comments on H. Field’s “Can We Dispense with Space-Time?‘PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1984. 1984.
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14Ultimate Explanations: Comments on TiplerPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1988. 1988.Tipler has previously argued that the nature of the universe is a matter of contingency rather than necessity. Now he argues that the existence of the universe can also be demonstrated to be a matter of necessity. I argue that both arguments are fatally flawed, and that neither supports the conclusion it is intended to establish.
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107Physics and Chance: Philosophical Issues in the Foundations of Statistical MechanicsCambridge University Press. 1993.Statistical mechanics is one of the crucial fundamental theories of physics, and in his new book Lawrence Sklar, one of the pre-eminent philosophers of physics, offers a comprehensive, non-technical introduction to that theory and to attempts to understand its foundational elements. Among the topics treated in detail are: probability and statistical explanation, the basic issues in both equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, the role of cosmology, the reduction of thermodynamics …Read more
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5Theory Reduction and Theory ChangeRoutledge. 2000.First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
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30KG Denbigh and JS Denbigh, Entropy in Relation to Incomplete Knowledge Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 7 (2): 54-55. 1987.
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71The language of nature is mathematics—but which mathematics? And what nature?Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 98 (3). 1998.In theoretical physics the physical states of systems are represented by components of mathematical structures. This paper explores three ways in which the representation of states by mathematics can give rise to foundational problems, sometimes on the side of the mathematics and sometimes on the side of understanding what the physical states are that the mathematics represents, that is on the side of interpreting the theory. Examples are given from classical mechanics, quantum mechanics and sta…Read more
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65In the wake of chaos: Unpredictable order in dynamical systemsPhilosophy of Science 64 (1): 181. 1997.
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35Gerard Emch and Chuang Liu, The Logic of Thermo-Statistical Physics (review)Metascience 12 (1): 59-62. 2003.Peer Reviewed.
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239Spacetime and conventionalismPhilosophy of Science 71 (5): 950-959. 2004.Salmon, following Reichenbach and others, maintained that distant simultaneity was conventional in a special relativistic world in a way in which this was not so in prerelativistic spacetime. This paper surveys and criticizes a number of proposals to unpack this claim. It goes on to argue that if the claim has validity, it rests upon differing facts about epistemic accessibility of temporal relations in the different spacetimes, and not directly upon any facts about differing causal structures i…Read more
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44Book Review: The Philosophy of Physics. By Roberto Torretti. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1999, xvi + 512 pp., $23.95 (review)Foundations of Physics 31 (5): 867-868. 2001.
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11Peter Kroes., Time: Its Structure and Role in Physical TheoriesInternational Studies in Philosophy 21 (1): 97-99. 1989.
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250Types of inter-theoretic reductionBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 18 (2): 109-124. 1967.
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80I’d Love to Be a Naturalist—if Only I Knew What Naturalism WasPhilosophy of Science 77 (5): 1121-1137. 2010.Naturalists tell us to rely on what science tells about the world and to eschew aprioristic philosophy. But foundational physics relies internally on modes of thinking that can only be called philosophical, and philosophical arguments rely upon what can only be called scientific inference. So what, then, could the naturalistic thesis really amount to?
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24The Elusive Object of Desire: In Pursuit of the Kinetic Equations and the Second LawPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1986. 1986.Despite over one-hundred years of effort, the origin of temporal asymmetry in the physical world still eludes us. While much has been learned about the role played by fundamental instabilities in microdynamics, by the imperfect isolation of systems and by cosmological facts in the origin of the behavior described by kinetic theory and thermodynamics, important puzzles still remain which continue to make the origins of asymmetric thermal behavior out of dynamically time symmetric underlying laws …Read more
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12Foundations of Space-time Theories: Relativistic Physics and Philosophy of Science by Michael Friedman (review)Journal of Philosophy 85 (3): 158-164. 1988.
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4Review: David Pearce, Roads to Commensurability (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 56 (1): 355-356. 1991.
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28Comments on Malament’s “ ”Time Travel’ in the Godel Universe‘PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1984. 1984.
Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mathematics |
Philosophy of Physical Science |