Why did nineteenth-century German historians and physicists habitually warn against vices that they believed philosophers in particular embodied: speculation, absence of common sense, excessive systematizing? Drawing on a rich array sources, this article interprets vice-charging as rhetorical practice aimed at delineating empirical research from Naturphilosophie Geschichtsphilosophie practiced ...

Is presentism or possibilism compatible with Relativity ? This question has been much debated since the argument first proposed by Rietdijk and Putnam. The goal of this text is to study the implications of both special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics, on presentism, possibilism, and eternalism. We put the emphasis on the implicit metaphysical preconceptions underlying each of thes...

The contradictory implications of statistical mechanics have worried physicists and philosophers for centuries. Does our present-day knowledge allow us to exorcize those philosophical demons?

In recent times physicists and philosophers of physics have tended to tread very different paths, and they have generally been a little suspicious of one another. As Michael Redhead points out in the first of his Tarner Lectures, “many physicists would dismiss the sort of question that philosophers of physics tackle as irrelevant to what they see themselves as doing” while “philosophers general...

Recent work in quantum information science has produced a revolution in our understanding of quantum entanglement. Scientists now view entanglement as a physical resource with many important applications. These range from quantum computers, which would be able to compute exponentially faster than classical computers, to quantum cryptographic techniques, which could provide unbreakable codes for...

Analysis of music for its consonant and dissonant properties has been performed by philosophers, musicians, physicists, and mathematicians for centuries. Analysis of powerful models developed by these researchers can be simplified and strengthened using basic physical concepts. By observing standard musical waveforms on an oscilloscope and comparing them to standard mathematical models a new un...