"To witness facts with the eyes of reason": Herschel on physical astronomy and the method of residual phenomena

• Main Author: Miyake, Teru
• Other Authors: M. Stan
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Springer 2023
• Subjects: Humanities::Philosophy; Residual Phenomena; Physical Astronomy
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/169847; https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-41041-3
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The aim of this chapter is to argue for the following claim. In the “Physical Astronomy”, Herschel takes the whole difficulty of physical astronomy to be dealing with the complexity of the planetary motions, and describes a method for dealing with these complexities that is neither inductive nor hyp...