AP David: The Metaphysics of Michael Faraday
Faraday is best known as one of the great experimentalists. Although he corresponded lucidly with James Clerk Maxwell, he was notoriously suspicious of the use of mathematics in physics. But in a couple of brief papers, Faraday took on what could be called ‘metaphysics’. The term, which came from a title given to a series of lectures by Aristotle, meant ‘the things that come after physics’ — the things presupposed by physics, but inevitably, the invisible things that could not be measured or tested. Hence, ‘metaphysics’ became metaphysical, a thing disdained by physicists, and perhaps especially disdained by experimentalists like Faraday, and his successors, the students of plasma. So David will ask: what would drive someone like Faraday to metaphysics? What needs to be going on ‘behind the scenes’ to allow for the phenomena of electromagnetism and plasma? Are there any checks on the reasoning about these invisible things? Does the EU engage in metaphysics, and should it?
Dr. A.P. David is a classical scholar (Hellenist), who has published two academic works including The Dance of the Muses: Choral Theory and Ancient Greek Poetics, Plato’s New Measure: The ‘Indeterminate Dyad’ and self-published several works of fiction and poetry.
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