Event Description

For the next Princeton-Bucharest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy, Carla-Rita Palmerino (Radboud Universiteit) will give a talk entitled “On the Heuristic and Polemical Function of Early Modern Thought Experiments”.

Can an experiment which is only performed in the laboratory of the mind generate new knowledge? And is there an essential difference between philosophical and scientific thought experiments? These two questions play a central role in most studies on thought experiments. In this lecture I will discuss the use of thought experiments in the early modern period, when no distinction was made between science and philosophy. I will argue that authors such as Galileo, Locke and Leibniz regarded thought experiments not so much as heuristic instruments, capable of generating new knowledge, but rather as rhetorical and polemical tools helpful to identify the breaking points between competing theoretical frameworks and rival theories.

Tuesday 23 June 2020, 12pm–2pm EST

Source: https://earlymodernseminar.wordpress.com

 

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