Having trouble viewing this email? View an online version http://hps.createsend1.com/t/r/e/tjuluuy/xdrwyuty/b/ HISTORY &
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Dear HP 5th September 2011 6pm - 7.30pm Alan Chalmers (University of Sydney) ' Boyle on intermediate causes and explanations: The key to the Scientific Revolution'. Robert Boyle drew a distinction between 'intermediate' causes and explanations, that involve experimentally accessible causes such as weight and elasticity, and ultimate causes and explanations, that trace the causes of phenomena back to the unchanging atoms whose motions and arrangements were presumed by mechanical philosophers to be responsible for them. I argue that this distinction provides the key to understanding what was novel about the new kind of knowledge that gained currency in the period referred to as the Scientific Revolution. From this vantage point it can be appreciated that the emergence of the new experimental science was relatively independent of the scholarly debates conducted by natural philosophers. In this paper I defend this position in the context of hydrostatics, That science, in the hands of Pascal and Boyle, serves as a paradigm example of the new experimental science. Its distinctive features are highlighted by comparing the articulation and defence of hydrostatics by Pascal and Boyle with Stevin's version , which was in the tradition of practical mathematics, and with Descartes version, which sought ultimate, corpuscular explanations of hydrostatic phenomena. The Scientific Revolution is best seen as involving the emergence of experimental science as distinct from natural philosophy rather than as the replacement of one natural philosophy, the Aristotelian world view, by another, the mechanical world view. Science Meeting Room 450 Carslaw Building, Camperdown Campus HPS WEBSITE [http://sydney.edu.au/science/hps/] SCIENCE NEWS [http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/science/] EMAIL US [mailto:[email protected]] FORWARD TO A FRIEND http://hps.forwardtomyfriend.com/r/xdrwyuty/918A8176/tjuluuy/l/n [http://style=] To make sure you continue to see our emails in the future, please add [[email protected]] [mailto:[email protected]] to your address book or safe senders list Disclaimer [http://sydney.edu.au/disclaimer.shtml] | Privacy statement [http://sydney.edu.au/privacy.shtml]| University of Sydney [http://sydney.edu.au/] | Unsubscribe http://hps.createsend1.com/t/r/u/tjuluuy/xdrwyuty/p/
_______________________________________________ SydPhil mailing list: http://sydphil.info 1000 subscribers now served!! To UNSUBSCRIBE, change your MEMBERSHIP OPTIONS, find ANSWERS TO COMMON PROBLEMS, or visit our ONLINE ARCHIVES, please go to the LIST INFORMATION PAGE: http://sydphil.info
