This session of the seminar featured:

15:00 - 15:40
Anita Välikangas (University of Helsinki), Two invisible hands: What made Anders Chydenius’s hand so invisible, and Adam Smith’s hand so visible?

15:40 - 15:50
Break

15:50 - 16:30
Ievgeniia Ivanova (University of Stirling & University of Aberdeen), Odesa School of System Studies: History of Parametric General System Theory

This session of the seminar will feature:

15:00 - 15:40
Brigitte Falkenburg (Technical University Dortmund), From Heisenberg to Mittelstaedt and Scheibe: Kant’s Impact on 20th Century German Philosophy of Physics

15:40 - 15:50
Break

15:50 - 16:30
Marco Giovanelli (University of Turin), ‘The Tensor Calculus Knows Physics Better Than the Physicist’: Bachelard on the Role of ‘Covariant Differentiation’ in Relativity Theory

PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS

From Heisenberg to Mittelstaedt and Scheibe: Kant’s Impact on 20th Century German Philosophy of Physics

Brigitte Falkenburg (Technical University Dortmund)

The group of physicists and philosophers around Werner Heisenberg may be called the German Copenhagen School. Heisenberg developed his epistemic interpretation of quantum mechanics under the influence of Niels Bohr. Later, his philosophical views shifted to a Neo-Kantian relative a priori. These views and the related approach of Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker are the common background of the philosophy of physics developed by Erhard Scheibe and Peter Mittelstaedt, who dominated German philosophy of physics in the second half of the 20th century. Partly due to a lack of translations, partly due to a mainly historical significance attributed to Kant’s theory of nature, Mittelstaedt’s and Scheibe’s work received relatively little attention in the international philosophy of science.

Scheibe and Mittelstaedt took distinct routes into the philosophy of physics. Their approaches to physics substantially differ, but there are also important parallels. Mittelstaedt elaborated a Kantian approach from the beginnings, making use of Kant’s conditions of possible experience to investigate the semantics and ontology of modern physics and to understand conceptual change in physics. Scheibe primarily analysed the axiomatic structure of quantum theory, the problem of its incommensurability with the theories of classical physics, and the consequences for a philosophical theory of reduction. His Kantianism showed up late, in a talk Between Rationalism and Empiricism: The Path of Physics that later gave title to the collection of his papers. Scheibe claimed that the epistemological attitudes of prominent physicists had much in common with Kant’s views about the relation between theory and experience, a topic he investigated further in his last book.  From a systematic point of view, it is particularly interesting to compare Scheibe’s many-faceted theory of reduction and Mittelstaedt's rational reconstruction of physics.

‘The Tensor Calculus Knows Physics Better Than the Physicist’: Bachelard on the Role of ‘Covariant Differentiation’ in Relativity Theory

Marco Giovanelli (University of Turin)

Gaston Bachelard’s 1929 La valeur inductive de la relativité remains the least cited of all his works and is scarcely known beyond Bachelard scholarship. This paper argues that, nevertheless, it represents a noteworthy contribution to the early history of the philosophical interpretation of general relativity. In particular, Bachelard deserves credit for recognizing the central role played by the heuristic procedure that modern textbooks call the comma-goes-to-semicolon rule: The principle of general relativity demands that all fundamental laws of nature be expressed by tensor equations, requiring the substitution of ordinary derivatives (‘commas’) with covariant derivatives (‘semicolons’). The equivalence principle might be seen as the claim that this formal change in the formulation of known special-relativistic non-gravitational laws directly leads to the discovery of new gravitational laws. The paper concludes that, among early professional philosophers working on relativity, Bachelard was the only one to grasp the ‘inductive value’ of this methodological device. As Bachelard loved to put it, quoting Paul Langevin: “tensor calculus knows physics better than the physicist does”. Unfortunately, Bachelard’s result remained obscured by the dense prose that characterizes La valeur inductive. In 1929, when Bachelard’s book was published, the Vienna Circle manifesto advocated for “neatness and clarity” in German-speaking philosophy of science. One might say that Bachelard’s work offers an example of the growing fascination of French-speaking philosophy of science with the “dark distances and unfathomable depths” that the Viennese rejected. The main objective of this paper is to appreciate the ‘depth’ of Bachelard’s result by attempting to present it with some of the ‘clarity’ the logical empiricists aspired to.

To be announced.