9 Comments

Better than fantastic. Real. Amazing to have these writings and your interest. Wonderful to relive the discovery process.

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Excellent post! I'll be writing on Boscovich as I move into the action-at-a-distance theories, and you have some insightful thinking and references on the subject. I found Maxwell's thinking on the subject particularly interesting.

https://aetherczar.com/guest-post-by-james-clerk-maxwell-on-action-at-a-distance/

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Yes, understanding the debates of the 17th and 18th centuries is essential to understanding the development and the twists and turns of 19th and 20th century science.

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And I dare say religion. Reading this article was like a scientifically spoken version of sections of the Vedanta. The two subjects are absolutely entwined.

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Thank you, I did not know about the Vedānta.

Raj Vedam has done a number of videos about the influence over several millennia of different schools of Indian thought on other cultures, including on Western philosophy and science. CK Raju has written explicitly about the direct influence of Indian mathematics on the development of trigonometry and the infinitesimal calculus in the West. See his Cultural Foundations of Mathematics: The Nature of Mathematical Proof and the Transmission of the Calculus from India to Europe in the 16th c. CE (Pearson Longman, 2007).

I hope to learn enough one day to be able to write about this very important subject.

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Mathematics makes my eyes glaze over, I've more of an artistic bent, but that is an interesting connection you're right; Guénon wrote The Metaphysical Principles of the Infinitesimal Calculus five years before his death. I've not read it yet, but I do know of the Plato/Pythagoras ancient Indian connection. I'll race you to the calculus connection. :)

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Best wishes for 2024! Very interesting read. I'm looking forward to future installments!

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To me, Boscovich seems to be a follower of Democritus. and Faraday seems to greatly over-value the force of gravity.

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Gerald, this is not correct. The atoms of Democritus and Leucippus were material, with extension, interacting through aggregation and collision to create the Universe that we can sense. These atoms became the background for the mechanical philosophy of the 17th century.

Boskovich's atoms, on the other hand, were immaterial, extensionless points, centers of the forces that were applicable thereto. Boskovich was trying to create something intermediary between Newton's bodies and Leibniz's monads.

These topics will be dealt with in depth in coming posts.

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