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Tatiana Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa’s Contributions to Dimensional Analysis
Get PDFTatiana Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa was an important physicist, mathematician, and educator in 20th century Europe. While some of her work has recently undergone reevaluation, little has been said regarding her groundbreaking work on dimensional analysis. This, in part, reflects an unfortunate dismissal of her interventions in such foundational debates by her contemporaries. In spite of this, her work on the generalized theory of homogeneous equations provides a mathematically sound foundation for dimensional analysis and has found some appreciation and development. It remains to provide a historical account of Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa's use of the theory of homogeneous functions to ground (and limit) dimensional analysis. We take as a central focus Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa's contributions to a debate on the foundations of dimensional analysis started by physicist Richard Tolman in 1914. I go on to suggest an interpretation of the more thoroughgoing intervention Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa makes in 1926 based on this earlier context, especially her limited rehabilitation of a "theory of similitude" in contradistinction to dimensional analysis. It is shown that Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa has made foundational contributions to the mathematical foundations and methodology of dimensional analysis, our conception of the relation between constants and laws, and our understanding of the quantitative nature of physics, which remain of value
Health, Well-Being, and Quality of Life A Philosophical Analysis
Get PDFThis book analyses and discusses from a philosophical perspective the concepts of health, well-being and quality of life in contemporary biomedical research. The guiding idea of the book is that different concepts of health, well-being, and quality of life lead to different types of projects, actions and policies, both at the individual and institutional level. For this reason, it is important to analyse them and make them clear, in their interweaving of objective dimensions (the facts) and evaluative dimensions (the values)
Environmental Intelligence: Redefining the Philosophical Premises of AI
Get PDFAs an alternative to the long history of interpreting Artificial Intelligence as the attempt to rationalize and mechanize human ingenuity, thereby transcending nature and its perceived limits, this article proposes an interpretation of the conceptual foundations of Environmental Intelligence as the effort to develop digital technology and data-intensive algorithmic systems to sustain and enhance life on this planet. Thus articulated, EI provides a framework to challenge and redefine the philosophical premises of AI in ways that can explicitly spur the responsible and sustainable development of computational technologies towards public interest goals
Towards an Account of Complementarities and Context-Dependence
Get PDFModern physics proposals present deep tensions between seemingly contradictory descriptions of reality. Views of wave-particle duality, black hole complementarity, and the Unruh effect demand explanations that shift depending on how a system is observed. However, traditional models of scientific explanation impose a fixed structure that fails to account for varying observational contexts. This paper introduces context-dependent mapping, a framework that reorganizes physical laws into self-consistent subsets structured around what can actually be observed in a given context. By doing so, it provides a principled way to integrate complementarity into the philosophy of explanation
Non-Humean laws of nature without spacetime
Get PDFRecent approaches in quantum gravity suggest that spacetime may not be a fundamental aspect of reality, but rather an emergent phenomenon arising from a more fundamental substratum. This raises a significant challenge for traditional accounts of laws of nature, which are typically grounded in spatiotemporal concepts. This paper discusses two non-Humean strategies for formulating laws of nature in the absence of spacetime: the 'non-temporal evolution' approach and the 'global constraints' approach. The argument begins by showing that the latter permits a more naturalistic stance than the former. A tentative defence is then provided against the objection that laws as global constraints are too thin to provide genuine metaphysical intelligibility and explanatory power
Radical Ontic Structural Realism as a Structuralist Existence Monism
Get PDFRadical ontic structural realism (ROSR) argues that structure is all that there is and that objects are metaphysically eliminable. By making such claims, ROSR is widely considered metaphysically obscure. To address this, I propose a novel characterisation of ROSR, drawing on two metaphysical concepts: existence monism, attributed to Spinoza by Bennett (1984) and Spinoza’s concept of modes. These concepts are adaptable to ROSR, which becomes a structuralist existence monism, where putative objects are reconceptualised as modes of the world’s structure. This proposal directly contributes to solving two problems ROSR faces: (A) the need for a metaphysical framework clarifying ROSR’s key claims and (B) ROSR’s need to account for the apparent plurality of objects we experience. Drawing on Wallace and Timpson’s (2010) spacetime state realism, I suggest a solution to a third problem, (problem C), McKenzie’s (2024) challenge to ROSR's status as a substantive metaphysical doctrine. My reformulation of ROSR is a natural interpretation of this solution. I also compare my proposal to French’s (2014) ROSR, and Esfeld and Lam's (2011) moderate structural realism, highlighting my proposal's advantages
Do Scientific Communities Understand? A Fictionalist Account
Get PDFScientific understanding typically involves multiple specialists performing interdependent tasks. According to several social-epistemological accounts, this suggests that scientific communities are collective epistemic subjects. We argue instead that the data does not warrant the postulation of a collective subject. Our position, rather, is fictionalist: we argue that the use of sentences attributing understanding to scientific communities amounts to loose talk which is best construed as indicating how social environments associated with a scientific community promote individual scientists' understanding
Wavefunction Mereology
Get PDFI propose and defend an analysis of the parthood relation among quantum wavefunctions. Roughly put, according to the analysis, one wavefunction is part of another just in case the latter can be projected onto the former. This analysis brings mereology into closer contact with contemporary physics, implies many standard mereological principles, challenges some traditional mereological presuppositions, and supports compelling answers to long-standing questions about parthood
Einstein Was Not a Flat Physicalist: Principle Theories, Constructive Theories, and the Direction of Constraint
Get PDFEinstein’s distinction between principle theories and constructive theories is methodological rather than metaphysical. Principle theories such as thermodynamics and relativity articulate empirically distilled constraints that delimit admissible microphysical models, while constructive theories remain provisional and revisable. This paper reconstructs Einstein’s framework from primary sources and argues that recent appeals to it by Meir Hemmo and Orly Shenker—under the banner of Flat Physicalism—invert its functional hierarchy. What is presented as an Einsteinian template instead supports a reductionist metaphysics foreign to Einstein’s methodology and increasingly misaligned with the structural commitments of contemporary physics
Farewell to Abundance? A Feyerabendian Critique of AI Algorithmic Homogenization, and the Battle for Human Cognition
Get PDFThis paper critically examines the growing influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) through the lens of Feyerabend’s philosophy, specifically his defense of pluralism and the conquest of abundance. This influence poses a challenge to us by flattening the diversity and richness of human world and cognition. Our paper explores how AI systems actively sculpt reality by curtailing human preferences and narrowing the scope of what is considered real or possible.
This algorithmic compression of reality is shown to be a direct assault on the abundance Feyerabend sought to protect. The algorithmic flattening will be explored in an empirical study, from which the concept of cognitive debt emerges. This cognitive impairment, coupled with the impoverishment of our shared reality, underscores the urgency of Feyerabend’s call to fight attempts to reduce abundance and devalue human existence. The paper concludes that Feyerabend’s pluralistic view offers a philosophical resource for critically facing the AI-driven world