The contingency of the laws of nature
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| The contingency of the laws of nature |
Mr. Fred Rothwell, who has made a careful translation of several of my writings, now offers the English-speaking public a translation of the work entitled: De la Contingence des Lois de la Nature.
May I be permitted to say, without false modesty, that when in 1874 I presented this thesis at the Sorbonne for my doctor's degree, I had no conception that it would create attention after so long an interval, all the more so as the idea I set forth at that time seemed paradoxical and very unlikely to be taken into consideration?
As it happens, this idea is now attracting the attention of philosophers in various countries, and, in spite of the important development of scientific philosophy that has since come about, it is regarded by benevolent critics as a question of the day. It may, then, be interesting to state what are the two leading thoughts of this work.
The first is that philosophy should not confine itself to going over and over again the philosophical concepts offered us by the systems of our predecessors with the object of defining and combining them in a more or less novel fashion: a thing that happens too frequently in the case of German philosophers.
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