The Myth of the Framework by Popper Karl; Notturno M.A.;

Author:Popper, Karl; Notturno, M.A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1679193
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

NOTES

1 See Maxwell’s masterly article Atom in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

2 For many years I have been in the habit of giving an outline of the story (which begins with Hesiod) in my lectures.

3 I have criticized (Aristotelian) essentialism and also the theory of essential definitions in my books The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism; see the Indices, under ‘essence’ and ‘essentialism’.

4 Descartes, Principia Philosophiae, Elzevir, Amsterdam, 1644, part II, point 33f. By asserting the infinite divisibility of matter, Descartes prepared the way for Leibniz’s non-extended monads. (Monad=point. A point is unextended and therefore immaterial.) In II, 36 Descartes asserts the conservation of the ‘quantity of motion’ (quantitas motūs): God Himself ‘who in the beginning created matter together with motion and rest, conserves in its totality as much of motion and rest as he originally put into it’. Note that this ‘quantity of motion’ is neither our ‘momentum’, which has a definite direction and which is indeed conserved, nor our ‘angular momentum’ but, rather, mass times the (non-vectorial) amount of velocity which, as Leibniz showed (Mathematische Schriften, edited by C.I. Gerhardt, Weidmann, Berlin and Halle, 1849–63, volume VI, pp. 117ff.), is not conserved. (On the other hand, ‘force’ – which Leibniz thought was conserved – is not conserved either, not even vis viva (mv2/2), that is, kinetic energy. The fact is that both Descartes and Leibniz had an intuitive idea of the conservation laws, and though Leibniz came nearer to the truth than Descartes, neither got very near.)

5 Leibniz, Philosophische Schriften, edited by C.I. Gerhardt, Weidmann, Berlin, 1875–90, volume II, p. 170, lines 27f. J.W.N. Watkins has developed this argument in some detail, showing that for these ideas Leibniz was essentially dependent on Hobbes, whose term ‘conatus’ (translated into English by ‘endeavour’) Leibniz adopted, and which he identified with force. See J.W.N. Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas, Hutchinson, London, 1965, pp. 122–32; 2nd edition, 1973, pp. 85–94.

6 Boscovitch’s Philosophiae Naturalis Theoria Redacta ad Unicam Legem Virium in Natura Existentium was first published in 1758 in Vienna (the second, improved, edition was translated by J.M. Child as Theory of Natural Philosophy and published in London in 1922), Kant’s Metaphysicae cum geometria iunctae usus in philosophia naturali, cuius specimen I continet Monadologiam physicam (referred to in English as ‘Monadology’) in 1756 in Königsberg. Thirty years later Kant repudiated part of his Monadology in his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, published in Riga in 1786 (translated by James W. Ellington as Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1970). Though the essential idea of Boscovitch’s monadology is to be found in Kant (see Kant, proposition V for the finite number of discrete monads present in finite bodies, and proposition X for the central forces that are attractive over long distances and repulsive over short distances, and for Kant’s explanation of extension), Kant’s work is rather sketchy as compared with Boscovitch’s. (Added 1973.) Restrictions on the size of this paper when it was originally presented prevented me from discussing Faraday.

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