Edd's Week 3 Timeline 1

William Whewell, (May 24,1794—March 6,1866)

May 24, 1794

Best known for his History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time, 3 vol. (1837), and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, History of Scientific Ideas, 2 vol. (1858), Novum Organon Renovatum (1858), and On the Philosophy of Discovery (1860). The second of these books refers to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620), dealing with inductive reasoning.

Auguste Comte (1798–1857)

1798

Founder of positivism; developed a philosophy of mathematics, a philosophy of physics, a philosophy of chemistry and a philosophy of biology, his most important work "the Course on Positive Philosophy 1830–1842 6 volumes." In which he explains The law of 3 stages and states that, in its development, humanity passes through three successive stages: the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive.

John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 7 May 1873)

May 20, 1806

His Theory of liberty addresses the nature and limits of the power that can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual and states that it is not a crime to harm oneself as long as the person doing so is not harming others. He is quoted as saying "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."]
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill)

Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809— April 19, 1882)

Feb 12, 1809

Shocked religious Victorian society by suggesting that animals and humans shared common ancestry. Well known publications; "Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle (1839)." "Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (1838–43)." and "On the Origin of Species (1859)."

George Henry Lewes (1817-1878)

Apr 30, 1817

Some of his famous quotes:
Originality is independence, not rebellion; it is sincerity, not antagonism.
The only cure for grief is action.
We must never assume that which is incapable of proof.
Science is the systematic classification of experience.
Personal experience is the basis of all real literature.
Many a genius has been slow of growth, oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring into beauty like a reed.

John Tyndall (1829-1893)

Aug 2, 1820

Showed that gases including CO2 and water vapour can absorb heat. His heat source was radiation from a copper cube containing boiling water (infrared radiation).Which showed that the Earth’s temperature was higher than expected, which was put down to the atmosphere acting as an insulator. But no-one knew the explanation for what we now call the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trapping heat.

Frederick Engels (28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895)

Nov 28, 1820

Developed what is now known as Marxism together with Karl Marx. In 1845. His major works:
The Holy Family (1844)
The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)
The Peasant War in Germany (1850)
Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (1878)
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)
Dialectics of Nature (1883)
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)

Ernst Mach (1838 – 1916)

1838

Most important publication was “The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of Its Development (1893)." Studied the propagation of sound waves, giving rise to principles of supersonics. Well-known for his philosophy of phenomenalism- an antirealist stance which regarded only sensations as real. Mach’s principle,” concerning the physical origin of inertia which explains it by assuming all the masses in the universe are connected.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)

Sep 10, 1839

Founder of American pragmatism. Also a theorist of logic, language, communication, and the general theory of signs. Graduated from Harvard in 1859 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry. His best-known works are the first two out of six articles "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" published in Popular Science Monthly from Nov 1877 through Aug 1878 entitled “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.”

Henri Poincare (April 29, 1854-July 17, 1912)

Mar 29, 1854

While a student, he discovered new types of complex functions that solved a wide variety of differential equations. This major work involved one of the first “mainstream” applications of non-Euclidean geometry. First to consider the global nature of the solution curves and their possible singular points (points where the differential equation is not properly defined).

John Dewey (1859–1952)

1859

Developed extensive and often systematic views in ethics, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion. Within the larger picture of Darwinian evolutionary theory, philosophy should be seen as an activity undertaken by interdependent organisms-in-environments.

Edmund Husserl (April 8, 1859-April 27, 1938)

Mar 8, 1859

Philosopher with a mathematical background. Developed a general theory of inferential systems, which he conceived of as a theory of science, saying that every science can be looked upon as a system of propositions that are interconnected by a set of inferential relations. He argues in Logical Investigations that the best way to study the nature of systems is to start with their sets of sentences and assertive utterances

Pierre Duhem (1861–1916)

1861

Physicist and historian and philosopher of science. The Duhemian thesis usually makes its appearance in the context of Duhem’s critique of the inductive method (or what he calls the Newtonian method), which rejects any hypothesis about imperceptible bodies and hidden movements and admits only general laws known by induction from observation.

Alfred North Whitehead (February 15, 1861-December 30, 1947)

Feb 15, 1861

Quotes:
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end when philosophic thought has done its best the wonder remains.
We think in generalities, but we live in details.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872 - February 2, 1970)

May 18, 1872

Famous quotes:
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

Friedrich Albert Moritz Schlick (14 April 1882 – 22 June 1936)

Mar 14, 1882

General Theory is perhaps his greatest work in its acute reasoning against synthetic a priori knowledge. This critique of synthetic a priori knowledge argues that the only truths which are self-evident to reason are statements which are true as a matter of definition, such as the statements of formal logic and mathematics.

Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

Oct 7, 1885

Nobel prize laureate in Physics 1922. Proposed a theory for the hydrogen atom, based on quantum theory that some physical quantities only take discrete values. Electrons move around a nucleus, but only in prescribed orbits, and If electrons jump to a lower-energy orbit, the difference is sent out as radiation. Bohr’s model explained why atoms only emit light of fixed wavelengths, and later incorporated the theories on light quanta.

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953)

1891

His doctoral thesis, The Concept of Probability in the Mathematical Representation of Reality (1915b). develops an account of probability appropriate for scientific inference. Includes Kant’s transcendental principle of causality with a transcendental principle of probability.

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970)

1891

One of the founders, and perhaps the leading philosophical representative, of the movement known as logical positivism or logical empiricism. Differed from the philosophical tradition not only in his suspicion of ordinary language and its potentially misleading “philosophical” artifacts, and in his engineering impulse to replace our inherited languages by better-constructed and more precise constructed linguistic frameworks.

Werner Heisenberg

Dec 5, 1901

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1932. his theory of quantum mechanics, (1925). We cannot always assign to an electron a position in space at a given time, nor follow it in its orbit, principle of uncertainty, the determination of the position and momentum of a mobile particle necessarily contains errors the product of which cannot be less than the quantum constant h.

Karl Popper (1902-1994)

1902

Observations can only disprove a theory, or falsify it. Popper’s falsification principle has been used to attack string and multiverse theories, which cannot be empirically tested. Everyone said this opponent of dogmatism was almost pathologically dogmatic. There was an old joke about Popper: "The Open Society and its Enemies should have been titled The Open Society by One of its Enemies."

Carl Gustav "Peter" Hempel (January 8, 1905 – November 9, 1997)

Jan 8, 1905

Important works:
1936: "Über den Gehalt von Wahrscheinlichkeitsaussagen" and, with Paul Oppenheim, "Der Typusbegriff im Licht der neuen Logik"
1942: The Function of General Laws in History
1943: Studies in the Logic of Confirmation
1959: The Logic of Functional Analysis
1965: Aspects of Scientific Explanation
1966: Philosophy of Natural Science
1967: Scientific Explanation

Kenneth James William Craik (29 March 1914 – 8 May 1945)

Mar 29, 1914

Works:
"The Nature of Explanation(1943)." Foundation for the concept of mental models, that the mind forms models of reality and uses them to predict similar future events. One of the earliest practices of cognitive science.
"Theory of Human Operators in Control Systems(1947)" published posthumously. An anthology of Craik's writings,

Stephen Edelston Toulmin (March 25,1922-Dec. 4, 2009

Mar 25, 1922

“Stephen’s essential contribution was to bring philosophy back from the abstractions of reason and logic the world of Plato and Descartes to the human condition,” His most important work in this vein was “Foresight and Understanding: An Enquiry Into the Aims of Science”\ (1961)." He proposed, instead of formal logic’s three-part syllogism, a model of persuasive argument consisting of six components.