Philosophia Mathematica Advance Access originally published online on October 4, 2007
Philosophia Mathematica 2008 16(1):140-144; doi:10.1093/philmat/nkm037
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Copyright © The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press
Book Review |
Jesper Lützen. Mechanistic Images in Geometric Form: Heinrich Hertz's Principles of Mechanics
* Department of Philosophy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-2067, U.S.A.
Correspondence: pincock@purdue.edu
Jesper Lützen. Mechanistic Images in Geometric Form: Heinrich Hertz's Principles of Mechanics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii + 318. ISBN 0-19-856737-5
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Philosophers unacquainted with the workings of actual scientific practice are prone to imagine that our best scientific theories deliver univocal representations of the physical world that we can use to calibrate our metaphysics and epistemology. Those few philosophers who are also scientists, like Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894), tend to contest this assumption. As Jesper Lützen relates in his scholarly and engaging book, Hertz's Principles of Mechanics (1894) contributed to a lively debate about the content of classical mechanics and what, if anything, this highly successful scientific theory told us about the physical world. Lützen provides an in-depth reconstruction of how Hertz reacted to the foundational problems within the physics of his day and then used these problems to motivate his influential philosophical reflections on the nature of science and scientific theorizing. While giving a thorough portrait of how Hertz brought together science and philosophy, Lützen himself offers an excellent example of