Planck, Max Karl Ernst Ludwig (1858–1947)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Howard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Albert Einstein ◽  
Quantum Hypothesis ◽  
Ernst Mach ◽  
Physics Community ◽  
Theoretical Physicist ◽  
Realist Conception

Planck was a German theoretical physicist and leader of the German physics community in the first half of the twentieth century. Famous for his introduction of the quantum hypothesis in physics, Planck was also a prolific writer on popular-scientific and philosophical topics. Even more so than his younger contemporary Albert Einstein, Planck was well-known in his day for his defence of a realist conception of science and his explicit criticism of the positivism of Ernst Mach and the Vienna Circle.

Related to Relativity

2019 ◽  
pp. 265-284
Author(s):  
Steven J. Osterlind
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
General Relativity ◽  
Special Relativity ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Albert Einstein ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
Scientific Exploration ◽  
Richard Burton ◽  
Time Continuum

This chapter provides the context for the early twentieth-century events contributing to quantification. It was the golden age of scientific exploration, with explorers like David Livingstone, Sir Richard Burton, and Sir Ernest Shackleton, and intellectual pursuits, such as Hilbert’s set of unsolved problems in mathematics. However, most of the chapter is devoted to discussing the last major influencer of quantification: Albert Einstein. His life and accomplishments, including his theory of relativity, make up the final milestone on our road to quantification. The chapter describes his time in Bern, especially in 1905, when he published several famous papers, most particularly his law of special relativity, and later, in 1915, when he expanded it to his theory of general relativity. The chapter also provides a layperson’s description of the space–time continuum. Women of major scientific accomplishments are mentioned, including Madame Currie and the mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani.

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.

Alfred Jules Ayer

1986 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 259-259
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
Logical Positivist ◽  
University College ◽  
Christ Church ◽  
University College London

Alfred Jules Ayer (1910– ) was born in London and educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. He attended sessions of the logical positivist ‘Vienna Circle’ in 1932, and taught at Oxford from 1933 until joining the Army in 1940. His Language, Truth and Logic was published in 1936, and The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge in 1940. After war service he returned to Oxford in 1945, and became Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College, London, the following year. The Problem of Knowledge was published in 1956. In 1959 he returned to Oxord as Wykeham Professor of Logic, a post he held until his retirement in 1977. He had been made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1952, and was knighted in 1970. Among his publications after he returned to Oxford are The Concept of a Person (1963), Philosophical Essays (1965), The Origins of Pragmatism (1968), Metaphysics and Common Sense (1969), Russell and Moore: the Analytical Heritage (1971), Probability and Evidence (1972), The Central Questions of Philosophy (1973), and Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1982).

The Vienna Circle and the Ernst Mach Society

2021 ◽  
pp. 109-117
Author(s):  
Friedrich Stadler
Keyword(s):  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Ernst Mach

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.

Albert Einstein on Writing

1984 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis E. Minor
Keyword(s):  
Albert Einstein ◽  
Thought Processes ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Mental Images ◽  
Great Scientist ◽  
Ernst Mach ◽  
Moving Bodies ◽  
Free Variation

While a great scientist such as Albert Einstein may seem to work in another dimension of thought, Einstein struggled with converting that thought into words. He found a “model for scientific historical writing” in the work of Ernst Mach, an Austrian physicist. Mach's model, as modified by Einstein, takes the reader through the writer's thought processes—discovery of an anomaly, free variation of mental images, finding the invariant in those images, and the communication in words of the new concept. Einstein followed this model in his famous 1905 relativity paper, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies [1].

Therapy and Ideology: Psychoanalysis and Its Vicissitudes in Pre-state Israel (Including Some Hitherto Unpublished Letters by Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein)

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eran J. Rolnik
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Albert Einstein ◽  
German History ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
New Beginning ◽  
Formative Years

ArgumentFew chapters in the historiography of psychoanalysis are as densely packed with trans-cultural, ideological, institutional, and moral issues as the coming of psychoanalysis to Jewish Palestine – a geopolitical space which bears some of the deepest scars of twentieth-century European, and in particular German, history. From the historical as well as the critical perspective, this article reconstructs the intricate connections between migration, separation and loss, continuity and new beginning which resonate in the formative years of psychoanalysis in pre-state Israel.

‘No More Unexplored Countries’: The Early Promise and Disappointing Career of Time-Lapse Photography

Film Studies ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lavery
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Time Lapse ◽  
Ernst Mach ◽  
Use Of Time ◽  
Extended Duration ◽  
Time Lapse Photography

Time-lapse photography—the extremely accelerated recording and projection of an event taking place over an extended duration of time—is almost as old as the movies themselves. (The first known use of time-lapse dates from 1898.) In the early decades of the twentieth century, cineastes, not to mention scientists, artists, and poets, waxed eloquently on the promise of time-lapse photography as a means for revealing “things we cannot see,” and expanding human perception. This essay examines time-lapses tremendous initial imaginative appeal for such figures as Ernst Mach, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Rudolf Arnheim, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Collette, and speculates about the possible reasons for its diminution over the course of the century.

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