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What Is Newton's Law of Inertia About? Philosophical Reasoning and Explanation in Newton's Principia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Bernd Ludwig
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Abstract

In this paper it will be shown that Newton's Principia gives an explication of and an argument for the first Law of Motion, that seems to be outside the scope of today's philosophy of science but was familiar to seventeenth-century commentators: The foundation of classical mechanics is possible only by recurrence to results of a successful technical practice. Laws of classical mechanics gain their meaning as well as their claims to validity only when considered as statements about artifacts whose production belongs to the shared know-how of a scientific community.

Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , Spring 1992 , pp. 139 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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