10 quotes
The only way to avoid becoming a metaphysician is to say nothing.
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1925)
The motions of the heavenly bodies could be charted according to Ptolemy just as correctly as according to Copernicus.
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1924)
A student of the history of physical science will assign to Newton a further importance which the average man can hardly appreciate. ...the separation … of positive scientific inquiries from questions of ultimate causation.
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1925)
Just when did teleological explanations, accounts in terms of use and the Good, become definitely abandoned in favour of the notion that true explanations, of man and his mind as well as of other things, must be in terms of their simplest parts?
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science; a Historical and Critical Essay (1925)
Founder of exact modern science though he was, Kepler combined with his exact methods and indeed found his motivation for them in certain long discredited superstitions, including what it is not unfair to describe as sunworship.
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1925)
For the Middle Ages man was in every sense the centre of the universe. The whole world of nature was believed to be teleologically subordinate to him and his eternal destiny. Toward this conviction the two great movements which had become united in the medieval synthesis, Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian theology, had irresistibly led.
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science; a Historical and Critical Essay (1925)
Newton... not only found a precise mathematical use for concepts like force, mass, inertia; he gave new meanings to the old terms space, time, and motion, which had hitherto been unimportant but were now becoming the fundamental categories of men's thinking.
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1924)
The central place of epistemology in modern philosophy is no accident... Knowledge was not a problem for the ruling philosophy of the Middle Ages; that the whole world which man's mind seeks to understand is intelligible to it was explicitly taken for granted. That people subsequently came to consider knowledge a problem implies that they had been led to accept certain different beliefs about the nature of man and about the things which he tries to understand.
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1925)
How curious, after all, is the way in which we moderns think about our world! And it is all so novel, too. The cosmology underlying our mental processes is but three centuries old—a mere infant in the history of thought—and yet we cling to it with the same embarrassed zeal with which a young father fondles his new-born baby.
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science; a Historical and Critical Essay (1925)
Knowledge was not a problem for the ruling philosophy of the Middle Ages; that the whole world which man's mind seeks to understand is intelligible to it was explicitly taken for granted. That, people subsequently came to consider knowledge a problem implies that they had been led to accept certain different beliefs about the nature of man and about the things he tries to understand.