It happened on JULY 1

1646

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz was born in Leipzig. A German philosopher, logician, mathematician, and physicist, he was also a lawyer and diplomat. He was one of the most cultured and multifaceted figures in the 17th century. Independently from Isaac Newton, he arrived at the notion of infinitesimal calculus. He placed the relationship between faith and reason at the center of his reflections, particularly in his works Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil (1710) and Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason(1714). A passionate supporter of the unity of knowledge, for his entire life he cultivated the dream of reducing the multiplicity of human knowledge to a logical, metaphysical, and pedagogical unity, centered on the key teachings of Christian theology. From the time he was a young man, he had conceived of a work that would encompass this aim, the Éléments de la philosophie générale et de la théologie naturelle, which he was not able to complete.

1855

Antonio Rosmini Serbati died in Stresa (Italy). Among the greatest thinkers of the 19th century, he was an attentive follower of the science of his time, employing it his philosophical and theological reflections. In his works, Rosmini explicitly took account of the writings and experiments of more than a hundred scientific specialists. He relied on contributions from the most qualified authors in their respective fields, competently assessing hypotheses and experiments, including the most up-to-date research, and discussing it all in an anti-materialistic and anti-positivistic way, without being naively spiritualistic (that is, without denying the positive role of the sciences when they are “rigorously such”).

INTERS.org

On the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology


Readings on Quantum Mechanics: An Introduction, by Gabiele Coci

Matter and Light. The New Physics (1937), by Louis de Broglie

The Meaning of Beauty in Exact Natural Science (1970), by Werner Heisenberg

Quantum Mechanics (2002), by John Polkinghorne, from INTERS 

Faith and Quantum Theory (2007), by Stephen Barr

Quantum Mechanics. Philosophical and Theological Implications (2019), by Javier Sánchez Cañizares, from INTERS


Articles of Historical Interest

Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete? (1935), by A. Einstein, B. Podolski, N. Rosen

On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox (1964), by J.S. Bell

Experimental Realization of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm Gedankenexperiment: A New Violation of Bell's Inequalities (1982), by A. Aspect, P. Grangier and G. Roger

Moreover…

Pursuing Scientific Humanism. Letters Between Werner Heisenberg and Enrico Cantore, 1967-1976, a forthcoming book edited by Claudio Tagliapietra, INTERS staff

    

Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science

The Encyclopedia, published by the Centro di Documentazione Interdisciplinare di Scienza e Fede operating at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, provides new, scholarly articles in the rapidly growing international field of Religion and Science (ISSN: 2037-2329). INTERS is a free online encyclopedia.

Anthology and Documents

To emphasize and spread relevant documents within the scientific community, this section provides key materials concerning the dialogue among science, philosophy and theology.

   

Special Issues

We offer here a selection of comments and documents on special issues in Religion and Science, collected for anniversaries and/or for the relevance of the topics.