KBRADING.ORG
Research
I am interested in theoretical physics read as a contribution to philosophy and am currently researching unsolved problems in natural philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, after Newton's Principia.
Areas of Research
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17th and 18th century physics (especially Descartes, Newton, Du Châtelet, d'Alembert and Euler)
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Structuralist approaches to physics
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Symmetries in physics
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Noether's theorems
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Hilbert, Einstein, Weyl and generally covariant physics
Books
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Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason (Oxford University Press, 2023), co-authored with Marius Stan
From pebbles to planets, tigers to tables, pine trees to people; animate and inanimate, natural and artificial; bodies are everywhere. But what is a body, and how can we know? Marius and I argue that the Enlightenment was a golden age for the philosophy of material bodies, and for efforts to integrate coherently a philosophical concept of body with a mathematized theory of mechanics. We articulate a new framing for the history of 18th-century philosophy and science. We explain why, more than a century after Newton, physics broke away from philosophy to become an autonomous domain. And, we cast fresh light on the structure and foundations of classical mechanics. Among the figures studied are Malebranche, Leibniz, Du Châtelet, Boscovich, and Kant, alongside d’Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace and Cauchy.
Available from OUP or via Amazon
​Get a preview. Read the Introduction and Conclusions here.
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Émilie Du Châtelet and the Foundations of Physical Science (Routledge, 2019)
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The centerpiece of Émilie Du Châtelet's philosophy of science is her Foundations of Physics. I argue that Du Châtelet put her finger on the most pressing problems at the intersection of physics and metaphysics in the 1730s, in the wake of Newton's Principia, and tackled them using the most up-to-date resources available.
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Now out in paperback. Available from Routledge or via Amazon​
Read a review by Alison Peterman here
Symmetries in Physics: Philosophical Reflections (Cambridge University Press, 2003), co-edited with Elena Castellani
Symmetry considerations dominate modern fundamental physics. This collection of papers presents the state-of-the-art in philosophy of physics as symmetry became a central topic of interest for philosophers in the early 2000s. It contains extracts from earlier seminal works by both philosophers and physicists, and many of the original papers in this volume have themselves become classics of the field.
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Available as hardback, paperback, or digital download from Cambridge University Press or via Amazon