The beauty of Bruce's thought is that it is derived from first principles.
If it was to be taken seriously, it had to be derived somehow from first principles.
To Planck, however, it was simply a guess, a "lucky intuition". If it was to be taken seriously, it had to be derived somehow from first principles.
However, it is easier to derive an expression for it from first principles.
But the ideal gas law can also be derived mathematically, from first principles, by imagining particles bouncing around a box.
Scientists as illustrious as John von Neumann, Edward Teller, Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli fell on their pens trying to derive alpha from first principles.
Very often, hyperbolic PDE can be derived directly from first principles in physics, such as the conservation of mass, momentum and energy.
For some multi-ports, the transfer matrix can be derived analytically from first principles: i.e., the equations of fluid motions and suitable approximations.
But though there are a few passages in which Aquinas himself speaks in that way, they can be read down so as to make them consistent with the more strategic passages in which he speaks of such moral principles or norms as "derived" conclusions from first principles.
In contrast, the adaptive dynamics school tends to derive fitness from first principles; fitness "emerges" from mechanistic and population dynamical considerations (Metz 2008).
This framework not only provides a conceptually simple means to call genotypes derived directly from first principles and easily verified properties of the data, but also provides an easily understood quality metric for each call.
