-
68Why history matters to philosophy of physicsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 50 4-12. 2015.
-
9Recovering First Philosophy in Philosophy of PhysicsPhilosophy Today 49 (Supplement): 13-22. 2005.
-
2The "relativized a priori" : an appreciation and a critiqueIn Michael Friedman, Mary Domski & Michael Dickson (eds.), Discourse on a New Method: Reinvigorating the Marriage of History and Philosophy of Science, Open Court. 2010.
-
46Invariance Principles as Regulative Ideals: From Wigner to Hilbert: Thomas RyckmanRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 63 63-80. 2008.Eugene Wigner's several general discussions of symmetry and invariance principles are among the canonical texts of contemporary philosophy of physics. Wigner spoke from a position of authority, having pioneered for recognition of the importance of symmetry principles from nuclear to molecular physics. But perhaps recent commentators have not sufficiently stressed that Wigner always took care to situate the notion of invariance principles with respect to two others, initial conditions and laws of…Read more
-
36Two Roads from Kant: Cassirer, Reichenbach, and General RelativityIn Paolo Parrini, Merrilee H. Salmon & Wesley C. Salmon (eds.), Logical Empiricism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, University of Pittsburgh Press. 2003.
-
49Weyl, Reichenbach and the epistemology of geometryStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 25 (6): 831-870. 1994.
-
73Review of William Lane Craig, Quentin Smith (eds.), Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (9). 2010.
-
51Designation and Convention: A Chapter of Early Logical EmpiricismPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1990. 1990.An examination of Carnap's Aufbau in the context of Schlick's Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre of ten years earlier, suggests that Carnap's focus there on the sign-relation (Zeichenbeziehung) is an effort to retrieve a verificationist account of the meaning of individual scientific statements from the abyss of meaning-holism entailed by Schlick's proposal that scientific concepts be implicitly defined. The Aufbau's antipodal aspects, its reductive phenomenalism and quasi-Kantian concern with the const…Read more
-
86The Reign of Relativity: Philosophy in Physics 1915–1925Oxford University Press. 2005.Universally recognized as bringing about a revolutionary transformation of the notions of space, time, and motion in physics, Einstein's theory of gravitation, known as "general relativity," was also a defining event for 20th century philosophy of science. During the decisive first ten years of the theory's existence, two main tendencies dominated its philosophical reception. This book is an extended argument that the path actually taken, which became logical empiricist philosophy of science, gr…Read more
-
34Norman Sieroka. Umgebungen: Symbolischer Konstruktivismus im Anschluss an Hermann Weyl und Fritz Medicus. Zurich: Chronos, 2010. Pp. 416. €43.00 (review)Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 3 (1): 164-168. 2013.
-
21
-
90Surplus structure from the standpoint of transcendental idealism: The "world geometries" of Weyl and EddingtonPerspectives on Science 11 (1): 76-106. 2003.
-
8EinsteinRoutledge. 2017.Albert Einstein was the most influential physicist of the twentieth century. Less well-known is that fundamental philosophical problems, such as concept formation, the role of epistemology in developing and explaining the character of physical theories, and the debate between positivism and realism, played a central role in his thought as a whole. Thomas Ryckman shows that already at the beginning of his career, at a time when the twin pillars of classical physics, Newtonian mechanics and Maxwel…Read more
-
111What does History Matter to Philosophy of Physics?Journal of the Philosophy of History 5 (3): 496-512. 2011.Naturalized metaphysics remains a default presupposition of much contemporary philosophy of physics. As metaphysics is supposed to be about the general structure of reality, so a naturalized metaphysics draws upon our best physical theories: Assuming the truth of such a theory, it attempts to answer the “foundational question par excellence “, “how could the world possibly be the way this theory says it is?“ It is argued that attention to historical detail in the development and formulation of p…Read more
-
48Recovering First Philosophy in Philosophy of PhysicsPhilosophy Today 49 (Supplement): 13-22. 2005.
-
42A Retrospective View of Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern PhysicsIn J. Tyler Friedman & Sebastian Luft (eds.), The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer: A Novel Assessment, De Gruyter. pp. 65-102. 2015.
Stanford, California, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mathematics |
Philosophy of Physical Science |