book of nature
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Author(s):  
Ion Cordoneanu ◽  

Starting from the cycle of letters known as The Copernican Letters (1613-1615) and following through to the 1632 Dialogue, I will attempt to outline the context in which Galileo Galilei’s work is constituted as a veritable theory of nature research based on mathematics. Galilei rests on the principles of science to ground his choice for the Copernican model, as well as the separation of natural research from theology, but his concern for a unified philosophy of the natural world is intertwined in his work with the dignity of creation understood as “the great book of the world” by which divinity talks to man in the language of mathematics.


Philosophies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 84
Author(s):  
Susmit Bagchi

The quest to understand the natural and the mathematical as well as philosophical principles of dynamics of life forms are ancient in the human history of science. In ancient times, Pythagoras and Plato, and later, Copernicus and Galileo, correctly observed that the grand book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Platonism, Aristotelian logism, neo-realism, monadism of Leibniz, Hegelian idealism and others have made efforts to understand reasons of existence of life forms in nature and the underlying principles through the lenses of philosophy and mathematics. In this paper, an approach is made to treat the similar question about nature and existential life forms in view of mathematical philosophy. The approach follows constructivism to formulate an abstract model to understand existential life forms in nature and its dynamics by selectively combining the elements of various schools of thoughts. The formalisms of predicate logic, probabilistic inference and homotopy theory of algebraic topology are employed to construct a structure in local time-scale horizon and in cosmological time-scale horizon. It aims to resolve the relative and apparent conflicts present in various thoughts in the process, and it has made an effort to establish a logically coherent interpretation.


2021 ◽  
pp. 209-225
Author(s):  
Steven L. Goldman

Kuhn’s monograph fed into the broad antiestablishment spirit of the 1960s and elicited polar-opposite responses, from the defense of objectivity and realism within scientific knowledge to an enthusiastic embrace of the view of scientific knowledge as ineluctably subjective interpretations of experience. The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend aggressively attacked the rationality of scientific reasoning and eventually rationality itself. Kuhn’s new image of science fed into the emerging postmodernist critique of reason and truth as rhetorical devices wielded for political ends. Jacques Derrida’s “deconstruction” swept the humanities and social sciences, concluding that there could not be a single correct meaning of any text, including scientists’ “reading” of the “book” of nature. Concurrently, philosophers of science, among them Israel Scheffler, Imre Lakatos, and Karl Popper, began a counterattack against Kuhn, defending the rationality and objectivity of scientific knowledge and reason generally.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3(61)) ◽  
pp. 57-70
Author(s):  
Zbigniew Nowak

Modern science and technology are founded on the belief in the rationality and mathematical structure of the world. Learning about it, the progress and quality of our lives are related to the popularization of thinking about mathematical education as equipping students with the competencies necessary to read the Galilean “Book of Nature.” The article presents the idea of ​​a mathematical understanding of reality and the leading emotional-volitional and instrumental competencies that should be provided to students of elementary education in order to shape their beliefs about the effectiveness of this way of cognition and support them in acquiring appropriate knowledge and skills. In terms of field-specific and social competencies, it is about: awakening cognitive curiosity, building the attitude of epistemic and ethical optimism, belief in the inevitability and cognitive value of error, developing the ability to cooperate and compete in small groups, and to shape the attitude of researcher reliability. In terms of instrumental competencies, these would be: the ability to model phenomena at the level of substitutes (simulations), knowledge of numbers, decimal positional system and four arithmetic operations, the understanding of measurement and practical knowledge of measures, the ability to problematize phenomena from the natural world, having elementary knowledge of heuristics, a certain level of calculation efficiency and knowledge of basic geometric figures.


Author(s):  
Stephen R. C. Nichols

The chapter sketches out the theological and intellectual context of Jonathan Edwards’s doctrine of revelation. It notes first the broad characteristics of the doctrine in Edwards’s immediate heritage and then the peculiar challenges to it posed by the English deist thinkers of his day. The chapter argues that in the face of radical objections Edwards defended a recognizably Reformed version of the doctrine. The chapter then briefly considers his theology proper, noting that for Edwards God was essentially a communicative being and that his teleology was one aimed at God’s glorification through self-communication. While Edwards denied that the book of nature was salvific, his theology proper and teleology coupled with his metaphysical commitments to a form of idealism and to being as relational and communicative, meant that as regards the regenerate he was prepared to grant a far more expansive revelatory role for nature and history than was common to his heritage.


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