Instruments philosophical

The Voltaie battery eoneeived and built toward the end of 1799 in Como, was the first deviee to produee a steady flow of eleetrieity, or eleetrie eurrent. The instrument enabled other natural philosophers, notably Humphry Davy, to develop eleetroehemistry as a new braneh of seienee, and still others, notably Hans Christian Oersted and Georg Simon Ohm, to explore eleetromagnetism. Beeause of these later developments—showing that ehemieal, eleetrieal... 

As developed in the 1850s, positivism came to be understood as a philosophical belief which held that the methods of natural science offer the only viable way of thinking correctly about human affairs. Accordingly, empirical experience - processed with a self-conscious fear of subjective contamination - served as the basis of all knowledge. Facts, the products of sensory experience, and, by extrapolation, the data derived from machines and instruments built as extensions of that faculty, were first ascertained, and then classified. 

By my reckoning, the understood, larger context also includes strictly alchemical associations. For instance, Pernety mentions the importance of such a Thermometre Philosophique, which is, just as one expects, an instrument by which the Hermetic Philosophers register the chaleur naturelle des... 

Gahn was a man of broad interests who often laid aside the Philosophical Transactions or his blow-pipe to read aloud, near the sewing-table in the next room, now a poem by Kellgren, Fianzen, Fru Lenngren, Leopold, or Voltaire, now a comedy by Molibre or Holberg or to exhibit a litde mechanical or optical masterpiece or to study the instruments for some household art and present a method of improving diem (44). 

Before considering instrumentation in some detail in later chapters, it will be helpful to outline the kinds of experiments that we wish to implement electronically. It is useful to characterize electroanalytical techniques as either static or dynamic. Static methods are philosophically akin to the passive observation mentioned earlier. They entail measurements of potential difference at zero current such that the system defined by the solid-solution interphase is not disturbed and Nernstian equilibrium is maintained. Although such potentiometric measurements (e.g., pH, pM) are of great practical importance, our focus here will be on the dynamic techniques, in which a system is intentionally disturbed from equilibrium by excitation signals consisting of a wide variety of potential and current programs. 

Putrefaction is, we may say, the key of all the operations, although it is not, properly speaking, the first. It reveals to us the interior of the Mixt it is the instrument which breaks the bonds of the parts it renders, as Philosophers say, the occult manifest. It is the principle of the mutation of forms, the death of the accidentals, the first step to generation, the beginning and the end of life the mean between the existent and the non-existent. 

D. J. Bryden, Alva Mason, The Franklin Institute, and the origins of philosophical and chemical instrument manufacture in the United States, Proc. Am. Phil. Soc., 1988,132, 400-419. 

Although it may seem more like a problem for a linguistic philosopher it is necessary briefly to make quite clear what is meant by a spectroscopic constant . Unfortunately spectroscopic constants are not immutable quantities measured by spectroscopists to an accuracy solely dependent on the quality of his measuring instruments and the precision of wavelength standards. The measured quantities which are in this position are the spectroscopic lines and hence the term values. These may be measured and quoted in terms of wave numbers with statistical limits on their accuracy.2... 

It would be difficult to exaggerate the part which this simple little instrument has played in the evolution of the steam-engine. The eminently philosophic notion of an indicator diagram is fundamental in the theory of thermodynamics the instrument itself is to the steam-engineer what the stethoscope is to the physician, and more, for with it he not only diagnoses the ailments of a faulty machine, whether in one or another of its organs, but gauges its power in health.33... 

The philosopher Davis Baird has already noted the reason for this.40 Ultimately Baird has a very different purpose from mine for examining the Indicator Diagram, namely to demonstrate the supposed autonomy of the indicator as an instrument across transformations in the theoretical understanding of what it measures ... 

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