Immanuel Kant is a very important philosopher of
science. In fact, he spent a large portion of his time working with physics. He
had quite a lot to say about physics, so I can only give a short summary of his
work. Probably the two fields he concerned himself with that are still
prevalent today are Dynamics and Mechanics.
In his work on Dynamics, he tried to reason through
how matter can exist in the way that it does. He reasoned that if there were
only attractive forces acting on matter, the universe would simply implode as
there would be no force to counteract the attractive force. However, if only a
repulsive force was present, the opposite would happen: the universe would
expand to infinity. As we know, neither of these have happened, so Kant
reasoned that there must be a balance of attractive and repulsive forces at
work. In addition to this, he also stated that matter is infinitely divisible.
In his work on Mechanics, he had three laws that he
proposed. The First Law of Mechanics was that the amount of matter is constant
throughout any changes in matter. His Second Law of Mechanics is that every
change in matter is due to an external cause (you might notice that this law is
very similar to Newton’s First Law, which states that a body will remain in its
current state unless acted on by an external force. Kant stated that the
difference is that he attempted to prove it through reason, whereas Newton went
only by experience). His Third Law of Mechanics is in the communication of
motion, action and reaction are the same.
By Nicholas Moore: Section 9, Group 1
Again, this is only a small summary of his work in
physics. He had much more to say about physics, but he dabbled in biology, chemistry, and psychology as well. If you would like to know more, the site I used
for information is http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-science/
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.