WITTGENSTEIN’S BEETLE AND OTHER CLASSIC THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS
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loginThis book is a collection of the 26 most interesting, if not the mostuseful, thought experiments (although some have indeed been veryuseful). It is no exaggeration to say that the whole of modern scienceis built upon the surprisingly modest foundations of half a dozen ofthe thought experiments included here. They are no more element-ary, say, than Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, or more complicatedthan, say, Sherlock Holmes at his most lucid. And in fact, in thiscollection, science, or natural philosophy, features more prominentlythan other sorts of philosophy. I make no apologies for that. ( Well,maybe a small one.) But too often people have been turned awayfrom science and mathematics and left to pursue interests in otherareas denied, as it were, the appropriate equipment for their study.And equally, too many scientists – cosmologists, biologists, theoret-ical physicists – attempt to make sense of their hard data without thesoft tools of philosophy: reflection and imagination. In the languageof the writer and scientist, C. P. Snow, the two tribes need to sharethe same hut, otherwise one lot will get fat and lazy, and the otherswill freeze to death in the cold. ( Which group will suffer which fatehe does not say, but I like to think it is the philosophers who aregetting fat and lazy.) Certainly blind science is merely technicalhappenstance, and ungrounded philosophy becomes another reli-gion, something that speaks only of personal belief.
