Explanation in the Sciences

Emile Meyerson's writings on the philosophy of science are a rich source of ideas and information concerning many philosophical and historical aspects of the development of modem science. Meyerson's works are not widely read or cited today by philosophers or even philosophers of science, in part because they have long been out of print and are often not available even in research libraries. There are additional chevaux de !rise for all but the hardiest scholars: Meyerson's books are written in French (and do not all exist in English versions) and deal with the subject matter of science - ideas or concepts, laws or principles, theories - and epis­ temological questions rather than today's more fashionable topics of the social matrix and external influences on science with the concomitant neglect of the intellectual content of science. Born in Lublin, Poland, in 1859, Meyerson received most of his education in Germany, where he studied from the age of 12 to 23, preparing himself for a career in chemistry. ! He moved to Paris in 1882, where he began a career as an industrial chemist. Changing his profession, he then worked for a time as the foreign news editor of the HAVAS News Agency in Paris. In 1898 he joined the agency established by Edmond Rothschild that had as its purpose the settling of Jews in Palestine and became the Director of the Jewish Colonization Association for Europe and Asia Minor. These activities represent Meyerson's formal career.

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Book One The Two Fundamental Observations.- 1. Science Demands the Concept of Thing.- Etymology of the term explication.- Its customary meaning.- The position of Comte and Mach.- The metaphysics of positivism.- The order of nature.- The mathematical form of laws.- Qualitative laws.- The disappearance of genus.- Water.- The elements, according to Soddy.- The ideal gas and crystals.- Gersonides and St. Thomas.- Law, an ideal construct.- The law of inertia and Archimedes' principle.- Relations in relation to us.- Positivism and common sense perception.- The "immediate data of consciousness," according to Bergson.- The program of Mill and the true evolution of science.- Physics forbids the intervention of the subject.- Representational theories and abstract theories.- Thermodynamics and kinetic theory.- Thermodynamics and the concept of thing.- Objects created by science.- Theories and the essence of things.- The permanence of theoretical entities.- Geometry and material solids.- Burned sulfur and carbon.- Science destroys the world of common sense.- Where does the metaphysics of laws come from?.- Science is not positivistic.- 2. Science Seeks Explanation.- The goal of science for Bacon, Hobbes and Comte.- For Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne and Pascal.- The divergence between Comte and Littré.- The thirst for knowledge.- Newtonian gravitation.- Explanation in biology.- The Council of Brussels (The search for a physical theory.- Einstein.- Lorentz, Planck, etc..- The phenomenological stance.- What a positivist ought to have said.- The scientist and the ordinary man.- Magic.- Explanatory science.- Theory, a step in the direction of law.- Rankine and Maxwell.- Explanation and the concept of thing.- The two tendencies.- Book Two The Explanatory Process.- 3. Deduction.- Cause.- Sufficient reason.- Bossuet's image.- The necessity of the effect.- Cause and law; efficient cause.- Cause and reason.- Cuvier (The interdependence of functions.- The ruminants, their cloven hoofs and their horns.- The organism and the geometric curve.- Finalism in Cuvier.- Logical content and temporal relation.- The confusion.- Cause and ontology.- The weak foundations of theories: valence.- Werner's system.- Valence varies.- Impact.- The philosophers and Hume's demonstration.- Fictitious entities in theories.- Electrical theory.- Ockham's razor.- Theories are indispensable.- Phlogiston and acidum pingue.- Priestley, Cavendish, Scheele and Black.- The role of Lavoisier.- The prestige of theories does not come from the fundamental observations.- It comes from the deduction.- Deduction applied to laws.- of logical necessity.- It is a notion foreign to positivism.- The same schema but different reasons.- The theory disregards the ontological character of science.- 4. Rationality Postulated.- The postulate of rationality.- Even positivistic science to some extent presupposes it.- Comte and overly detailed investigation.- Comte and Mariotte's law.- Phenomena beyond the reach of lawfulness.- The world of atoms and subatoms.- Statistics and the underlying phenomena.- Temperature and Brownian motion.- Comte's real opinion.- Laws must be knowable.- Kepler's laws.- The genesis of his discoveries.- His field was particularly propitious.- Nature and genus.- The hierarchy of conditions.- Balfour's "fibrous structure" of reality.- The "subexistence" of laws for Bertrand Russell.- Comte and stellar research.- The scientist and the metaphysics of theories.- The reality of theoretical entities.- The true laws of nature.- Laws follow theories.- Kepler's laws and the Copernican system.- Approximate laws.- The "realism" of science for Bertrand Russell.- Sufficient reason and rationality.- The Stoics.- Logical relation and temporal relation.- Goblot's theory.- The true reason for the anomaly.- The Ionians.- Aristotle's theory.- The task of the physicist, according to Geminus.- Analogy with Hegel.- Galileo's adversaries.- Progress through deduction.- The forms of deduction.- They are easily substituted for one another.- Baconian empiricism.- Method in physics, according to Bouasse.- Method in the other sciences.- 5. Identity and Identification.- The identity of antecedent and consequent.- Leibniz and Plato.- Tautological identity.- Mathematical demonstration.- Hegel: identity contains diversity.- The necessity of contradiction.- Hegel's position and the antinomies of Kant.- Hegel and mathematical reasoning.- The dialectic and the going beyond.- Identity introduced.- The square of the hypotenuse.- The astonishment provoked by the demonstration.- The equality is restricted.- Poincaré's cascade of equations.- The proof and the concept for Hegel.- Leibniz's opinion.- The synthetic in mathematical proof.- The active role of the intellect.- The schema or process of identification.- Genus in mathematics and in physics.- Spontaneous identification and deliberate identification.- The reason the mind resists the demonstration.- The equality of cause and effect.- Persistence in time.- Diversification by space.- Mechanism and substantial qualities.- Implicit conservation and incomplete conservation.- What is conserved becomes a real thing.- The peculiar dignity of the principles of conservation.- Preformation.- Leibniz and his contemporaries.- Spermists and ovists.- The moderns.- Maeterlinck.- The appeal of preformationism.- Evolution and development.- Explanation by displacement.- Matter demands to be explained.- The operations of the mind are intertwined.- The influence of mathematics.- Little evidence of it in the ancient atomists.- Their theories derive from causal identity.- Aristotle's testimony.- Physical theory imposes identification.- It suppresses the statement of the envisaged goal.- The cause of the persistent.- Substance and its qualities.- The statement of the principle of sufficient reason.- The connection between temporal cause and the cause of the permanent.- The unity of matter.- Rational matter is space.- The properties of the ether.- Matter having only geometric qualities.- The world reduced to space.- 6. The Irrational.- The irrational, permanent limitation on explanation.- The mathematical irrational.- Sensation.- Leibniz's "mill,".- The attitude of science.- Mechanism.- The specific energy of the nerves.- Montaigne's point of view.- Hobbes' opinion.- Impressions of light and impressions of sound.- The maximum intensity of the sensation of light.- Protests from the philosophers.- The suicide of reason.- This irrational is an a pri…