In hmolscience, Émile Meyerson (1859-1933) was a Polish-born French chemist and philosopher noted, in philosophical thermodynamics, for his 1908 Identity and Reality, a Heraclitus vs Parmenides reconciliation aiming work.
Overview
In 1908, Meyerson, in his Identity and Reality, penned chapters such as mechanism, conservation of energy, Carnot’s principle, etc., in which he attempted to show how science is the progressive rationalization of reality. [1]
The synopsis of Meyerson's Identity and Reality, according to American economics historian Philip Mirowski, is that he manages to update the age-old philosophical conflict between the sphere of Parmenides, representative of a search for identity and invariance, and the sphere of Heraclitus, representative of the flux, fire, diversity, and change philosophy.
Meyerson's thesis and book was an influential thematic springboard to Mirowski's 1989 book More Heat than Light. [2]
References
1. Meyerson, Émile. (1908). Identity and Reality (Identité et Réalite) (ch. 8: Carnot’s principle, pgs. 259-90). Routledge.
2. Mirowski, Philip. (1989). More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics. Cambridge University Press.
External links
● Émile Meyerson – Wikipedia.
● Identity and Reality (French → English) – Wikipedia.
