News and information from education, science, philosophy, books, all over the world
According to Manfred Zimmermann, an aversive sensory experience can be described as pain perception in animals , “Which is triggered by actual or threatened injury, induces motor and vegetative protective reactions, leads to learned avoidance and possibly changes species-specific behavior, including social behavior.” – Zimmermann, How do animals feel pain? This definition follows that for … Read More
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The philosophy of culture is a philosophy that formulates cultural theories, expresses distance from traditional conceptions and reflects cultural phenomena. It developed around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Century in the context of social and political changes in the pre-war- and post-war … Read More
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(Distribution of electromagnetic radiation. ) Electromagnetic radiation refers to a form of linear energy transfer. Visible light is electromagnetic radiation, but is only a small slice of the broad electromagnetic spectrum. The propagation of this radiation, of one or more … Read More
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General Relativity generated various early philosophical interpretations. His adherents have highlighted the “relativization of inertia” and the concept of simultaneity, Kantians and Neo-Kantians have underlined the approach of certain synthetic “intellectual forms” (especially the principle of general covariance, and logical empirics have emphasized the philosophical methodological significance of the theory.
Reichenbach approached the GR through the “relativity of geometry” thesis, trying to build a “constructive axiomatization” of relativity based on “elementary matters of fact” (Elementartatbestande) for the observable behavior of light rays, rods and clocks.
The mathematician Hermann Weyl attempted a reconstruction of Einstein’s theory based on the epistemology of a “pure infinitesimal geometry”, an extended geometry with additional terms that formally identified with the potential of the electromagnetic field.
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.11641.93281
The cosmological argument is a type of argument of classical natural theology that starts from some alleged properties of the observed universe (its coming into being, its being able to have been different from what it is, the contingency or … Read More
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Newton supported the idea of absolute time, unlike Leibniz, for which time is only a relation between events and cannot be expressed independently, a statement in concordance with the relativity of space-time.
Eternalism claims that the past and the future exist in a real sense, going to the idea that time is a dimension similar to spatial dimensions, that future and past events are “present” on the axis of time, but this view is challenged. On four-dimensional vision, the universe is an existing space-time topology, containing everything that has happened, everything that happens and everything that’s going to happen. It follows that there is no singular moment to be considered as insignificant as present. Time travel is possible if the four-dimensional vision including the time is correct, but it is not possible if presentism is true. William Godfrey-Smith says that “the metaphysical image underlying the discussion of time travel is that of the universe block, in which the world is conceived as extended in time as it is in space.”
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.18575.64163
(Power line near a railway track in Poland. ) Electricity is the effect of the movement of charged particles inside a conductive material, under the effect of a potential difference at the ends thereof. This physical phenomenon is present in … Read More
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The delimitation between science and pseudoscience is part of the more general task of determining which beliefs are epistemologically justified. Standards for demarcation may vary by domain, but several basic principles are universally accepted.
Karl Popper proposed falsifiability as an important criterion in distinguishing between science and pseudoscience. He argues that verification and confirmation can play no role in formulating a satisfactory criterion of demarcation. Instead, it proposes that scientific theories be distinguished from non-scientific theories by testable claims that future observations might reveal to be false.
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.29821.61926
A school of thought refers to a collection of people who share similar opinions or a similar point of view in philosophy, in their academic discipline, in their beliefs, in a social movement, in a cultural movement or in an … Read More
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The most well-known example of the impossibility of traveling in time is the grandfather paradox or self-infanticide argument: a person who travels in the past and kills his own grandfather, thus preventing the existence of one of his parents and thus his own existence. A philosophical response to this paradox would be the impossibility of changing the past, like Novikov self-consistency principle (if an event exists that would cause a paradox or any “change” to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero, thus it would be impossible to create time paradoxes).
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.31279.79521
