Reichenbach, Hans (1891–1953)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wesley C. Salmon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Philosophy Of Physics ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
Sense Experience ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The World ◽  
Synthetic A Priori ◽  
And Mathematics

Philosophy of science flourished in the twentieth century, partly as a result of extraordinary progress in the sciences themselves, but mainly because of the efforts of philosophers who were scientifically knowledgeable and who remained abreast of new scientific achievements. Hans Reichenbach was a pioneer in this philosophical development; he studied physics and mathematics in several of the great German scientific centres and later spent a number of years as a colleague of Einstein in Berlin. Early in his career he followed Kant, but later reacted against his philosophy, arguing that it was inconsistent with twentieth-century physics. Reichenbach was not only a philosopher of science, but also a scientific philosopher. He insisted that philosophy should adhere to the same standards of precision and rigour as the natural sciences. He unconditionally rejected speculative metaphysics and theology because their claims could not be substantiated either a priori, on the basis of logic and mathematics, or a posteriori, on the basis of sense-experience. In this respect he agreed with the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, but because of other profound disagreements he was never actually a positivist. He was, instead, the leading member of the group of logical empiricists centred in Berlin. Although his writings span many subjects Reichenbach is best known for his work in two main areas: induction and probability, and the philosophy of space and time. In the former he developed a theory of probability and induction that contained his answer to Hume’s problem of the justification of induction. Because of his view that all our knowledge of the world is probabilistic, this work had fundamental epistemological significance. In philosophy of physics he offered epoch-making contributions to the foundations of the theory of relativity, undermining space and time as Kantian synthetic a priori categories.

Coincidences and Konstatierungen. Aspects of Methodological Creativity in Schlick's Science-Oriented Philosophizing

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Ingolf Max
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
General Theory Of Relativity ◽  
Rudolf Carnap ◽  
Relativity And Gravitation ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Synthetic A Priori

Moritz Schlick (1882–1936)—the integrating figure of the Vienna Circle—is an inspiring thinker who philosophizes in the immediate vicinity of contemporary physics in particular and other empirical sciences including psychology as well as ethics. In the context of interpreting Einstein’s (general) theory of relativity he wrote his „Space and time in contemporary physics, an introduction to the theory of relativity and gravitation“ [“Raum und Zeit in der gegenwärtigen Physik: zur Einführung in das Verständnis der Relativitäts- und Gravitations­theorie”]—first published in 1917. Schlick developed his conception of space-time coincidences of events. For the second edition he added the new chapter “X. Relations to Philosophy” using coincidences methodologically to connect terms which belong to different spaces of meaning. Starting in 1934—in the context of the debate on protocol sentences mainly with Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap—he offered his approach of Konstatierungen[1] to answer the question: “What is to be regarded as our fundament of knowledge?” I will shortly discuss Schlick’s term coincidence, move on to Konstatierungen and show some interrelations between them. I will argue for the methodological creativity in Schlick’s science-oriented philosophizing by explicating the inner structure of Konstatierungen within my 2-dimensional language of analysis. Finally, I will compare Schlick’s Konstatierungen with Kant’s synthetic a priori judgments and Frege’s thoughts as interrelated cases of two-dimensionally structured intermediate cases.

Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Creath
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Correct Choice ◽  
Logical Empiricism ◽  
Modal Theory ◽  
Pure Logic ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Working Out

Carnap was one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century, and made important contributions to logic, philosophy of science, semantics, modal theory and probability. Viewed as an enfant terrible when he achieved fame in the Vienna Circle in the 1930s, Carnap is more accurately seen as one who held together its widely varying viewpoints as a coherent movement. In the 1930s he developed a daring pragmatic conventionalism according to which many traditional philosophical disputes are viewed as the expression of different linguistic frameworks, not genuine disagreements. This distinction between a language (framework) and what can be said within it was central to Carnap’s philosophy, reconciling the apparently a priori domains such as logic and mathematics with a thoroughgoing empiricism: basic logical and mathematical commitments partially constitute the choice of language. There is no uniquely correct choice among alternative logics or foundations for mathematics; it is a question of practical expedience, not truth. Thereafter, the logic and mathematics may be taken as true in virtue of that language. The remaining substantive questions, those not settled by the language alone, should be addressed only by empirical means. There is no other source of news. Beyond pure logic and mathematics, Carnap’s approach recognized within the sciences commitments aptly called a priori – those not tested straightforwardly by observable evidence, but, rather, presupposed in the gathering and manipulation of evidence. This a priori, too, is relativized to a framework and thus comports well with empiricism. The appropriate attitude towards alternative frameworks would be tolerance, and the appropriate mode of philosophizing the patient task of explicating and working out in detail the consequences of adopting this or that framework. While Carnap worked at this tirelessly and remained tolerant of alternative frameworks, his tolerance was not much imitated nor were his principles well understood and adopted. By the time of his death, philosophers were widely rejecting what they saw as logical empiricism, though often both their arguments and the views offered as improvements had been pioneered by Carnap and his associates. By his centenary, however, there emerged a new and fuller understanding of his ideas and of their importance for twentieth-century philosophy.

4. Energy, mass, and light

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-51
Author(s):  
Geoff Cottrell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
General Theory ◽  
Special Theory ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
General Theory Of Relativity ◽  
Special Theory Of Relativity ◽  
Speed Of Light ◽  
Space And Time

By the beginning of the twentieth century, our understanding of matter was completely transformed by the great discoveries of electromagnetism and relativity. ‘Energy, mass, and light’ outlines Einstein’s special theory of relativity of 1905, which describes what happens when objects move at speeds close to the speed of light. The theory transformed our understanding of the nature of space and time, and matter through the equivalence of mass and energy. In 1916, Einstein extended the theory to include gravity in the general theory of relativity, which revealed that matter affects space by curving space around it.

Algebra As Thought Experiment

1998 ◽  
pp. 106-111
Author(s):  
Jagdish Hattiangadi
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Investigation ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Algebraic Method ◽  
Mathematical Physics ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Empirical Science ◽  
The World ◽  
Synthetic A Priori

This paper addresses the problem of understanding what mathematics contributes to the exceptional success of modern mathematical physics. I urge that we give up the Kantian construal of the division between mathematics (synthetic a priori) and physics (experimental), and that we ask instead how algebra helps synthetic a posteriori mathematics improve our ability to study the world. The theses suggested are: 1) Mathematical theories are about the empirical world, and are true or false just like other theories of empirical science. 2) The air of artificiality in mathematics lies exclusively in the use of algebraic method. 3) This method is constructive much like all fiction is, but this construction is for the purpose of experimental investigation of the physical world to the extent that anything in the world has objects like those in the fictional world of a particular algebra. 4) This is why algebraic techniques are successful even when the assumptions of the system are false: they may still be applicable to some things considered from some perspective. 5) The success of mathematical physics is also due to Descartes' discovery of a remarkable truth: we live in space and time which can be described as a whole. 6) Therefore, what distinguishes modern science from earlier and later philosophy is not a general method of science, but the fact that it happened to find a truth, and a particular way of studying reality which bore fruit.

Later Empiricism and Logical Positivism

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Skorupski
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Logical Empiricism ◽  
Logical Positivism ◽  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Late Modern

The empiricist approaches to mathematics discussed in this article belong to an era of philosophy which we can begin to see as a whole. It stretches from Kant's Critiques of the 1780s to the twentieth-century analytic movements which ended, broadly speaking, in the 1950s—in and largely as a result of the work of Quine. Seeing this period historically is by no means saying that its ideas are dead; it just helps in understanding the ideas. That applies to the two versions of empiricism that were most prominent in this late modern period: the radical empiricism of Mill and the “logical” empiricism associated with the Vienna Circle positivism of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Mill and the logical positivists shared the empiricist doctrine that no informative proposition is a priori.

Kreines on the Problem of Metaphysics in Kant and Hegel

2016 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-120
Author(s):  
Robert Stern
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Synthetic A Priori ◽  
Priori Knowledge

AbstractThis article offers a discussion of James Kreines’s book Reason in the World: Hegel’s Metaphysics and Its Philosophical Appeal. While broadly sympathetic to Kreines’s ‘concept thesis’ as a conceptual realist account of Hegel, the article contrasts two Kantian arguments for transcendental idealism to which Hegel’s position may be seen as a response—the argument from synthetic a priori knowledge and the argument from the dialectic of reason—and explores the implications of Kreines’s commitment to the latter over the former.

scholarly journals Truth and justification for deductive systems: on the primary postulates and analyticity of justification

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 26-40
Author(s):  
Valentin N. Karpovich
Keyword(s):  
Existence And Uniqueness ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Definite Descriptions ◽  
Modern Logic ◽  
Traditional Logic ◽  
Deductive Systems ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Synthetic A Priori

The concept of analyticity plays an important role in establishing truths. Both in the traditional logic of terms and modern logic of predicates, similar approaches are used to reconstruct the idea of reliable substantiation. Kant used the categories of synthetic a priori, Frege relied on the features of terms (individual constants and functions) to formulate the conditions for the application of definitions. As a result, primary statements as the beginning for substantiation presuppose the existence and uniqueness of a defined subject (definite descriptions), similar to the localization of objects in space and time by Kant’s synthetic apriori judgments.

scholarly journals ¿Por qué la arquitectura es música congelada? Schelling, Le Corbusier y Xenakis

2016 ◽  
pp. 39-60
Author(s):  
Virginia López-Domínguez
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Le Corbusier ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
Architecture And Music ◽  
The Ideal

Architecture is frozen music is a phrase which has been transformed by use, but it has also been taken away the importance it has for an esthetic ontology and a different conception of the world, and that is why its deepness and meaning are analyzed through Schelling, Le Corbusier and Xenakis in order to show why architecture is frozen music. Here architecture and music have a correlation that cannot be perceived at first, which places architecture itself in a quest for beauty, when in the past it only used to be taken into account in the criteria of the useful. The narrow connection between architecture and music dwells on the level of a priori regarding structure and mathematics, but also shows the relation with the sensitive, the real and the ideal, which means that it involves the fluctuation between the objective and the subjective that can be shown regarding the execution of the work.

Newton To Maxwell: The Principia and British Physics

1988 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-96 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Absolute Space ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
Quantum Theories ◽  
Classical Physics ◽  
Newtonian Physics ◽  
World Picture ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Physics

It is conventional to denote the physics of the period 1700-1900, from A the Principia to the advent of the relativity and quantum theories, as ‘classical’ or ‘Newtonian’ physics. These terms are not, however, very satisfactory as historical categories. The contrast between classical and ‘modern’ physics is perceived in terms that highlight the innovatory features of physics after 1900: the abandonment of the concepts of absolute space and time in Einstein’s theory of relativity, and of causality and determinism in quantum mechanics. ‘ Classical ’ physics is thus defined by ‘non-classical’ physics. The definitions and axioms of Principia , Newton’s exposition of the concepts of absolute space and time, and his statement of the Newtonian laws of motion, are rightly seen as fundamental to the 17th-century mechanization of the world picture.

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