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Quotes from The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science — Edwin Arthur Burtt

d. 1989 United States

← All quotes by Edwin Arthur Burtt

6 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)

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)

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)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Edwin Arthur Burtt (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.