History of Philosophy Commons^™

Patrick Aidan Heelan’S The Observable: Heisenberg’S Philosophy Of Quantum Mechanics, Paul Downes

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The publication of Patrick Aidan Heelan’s The Observable, with forewords from Michel Bitbol, editor Babette Babich and the author himself, offers a timely invitation to reconsider the relation between quantum physics and continental philosophy.

Patrick Heelan does so, as a contemporary of and interlocutor with Werner Heisenberg on these issues, as a physicist himself who trained with leading figures of quantum mechanics (QM), Erwin Schrödinger and Eugene Wigner. Moreover, Heelan highlights Heisenberg’s interest in phenomenology as ‘a friend and frequent visitor of Martin Heidegger’ (55). Written originally in 1970 and unpublished then for reasons Babich explicates in her foreword, …

The Multidimensionality Of Hermeneutic Phenomenology: From Philology Through Science And Technology To Theology, Babette Babich

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Studies of hermeneutics have historically invoked and even enumerated dimensions and hermeneutic phenomenology is inherently multidimensional. In part this is due to the essential connection between hermeneutics and philology, which one cannot overlook. But it is also the legacy of Wilhelm Dilthey in particular. Hence Joseph J. Kockelman’s 2003 *Ideas for a Hermeneutic Phenomenology of the Natural Sciences* invokes “The Importance of Methodical Hermeneutics.” With this description, echoing the contributions of his friend and long-time colleague, Thomas Seebohm, Kockelmans relates Dilthey to Boeckh and thus to the classic tradition of hermeneutics including but also well in advance of Gadamer. Hence …

Heidegger: Through Phenomenology To Thought, William J. Richardson

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No abstract provided.

Abstracting Aristotle’S Philosophy Of Mathematics, John J. Cleary

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In the history of science perhaps the most influential Aristotelian division was that

between mathematics and physics. From our modern perspective this seems like an unfortunate deviation from the Platonic unification of the two disciplines, which guided Kepler and Galileo towards the modern scientific revolution. By contrast, Aristotle’s sharp distinction between the disciplines seems to have led to a barren scholasticism in physics, together with an arid instrumentalism in Ptolemaic astronomy. On the positive side, however, astronomy was liberated from commonsense realism for the conceptual experiments of Aristarchus of Samos, whose heliocentric hypothesis was not adopted by later astronomers because …

The Meaning Of Resolution As A Reflective Method In The Philosophy Of Thomas Aquinas, Astrid M. O'Brien

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While the importance of resolution as a reflective method in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas is generally recognized, relatively little has been written about it, and the few articles devoted to it differ in their conclusions as to its nature and use. It is the aim of this dissertation to analyze the texts in which the term or its synonyms appear in order to discover its fundamental meaning and role as revealed by Thomas’s own statements and practices.

The first chapter notes the divergent meanings which the Latin term resolutio acquired through being used to translate several different Greek terms, …

Complementarity And The Scientific Method: A Criticism, Patrick A. Heelan

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In this chapter "Conplementarity and the Scientific Method" of his Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity, Heelan argues that the philosophy of complementarity, although successful in providing physicists with a common language with which to describe quantum phenomena, also contains a theory about scientific method and about human knowing which is open to criticism. Heelan here criticises the following points arising out of the philosophy of complementarity: psycho-physical parallelism; the view that quantum mechanical properties are to be defined classically; and the perturbation theory of measurement. In the course of the criticism, he elaborates the distinction between two types of concepts …

Reality In Heisenberg's Philosophy - Chapter Eight Of Heelan's Quantum Mechanics And Objectivity, Patrick Heelan

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This chapter contains a study of Heisenberg's views of the ontological content of quantum mechanics from I925 until the present day. During the quantum revolution of I925, he began by accepting a Berkeley-type empiricism in which the reality of a quantum mechanical system was reduced to that of a set of observation events, which were, however, acausally connected and in consequence did not constitute a stable phenomenal object of experimental knowledge. After 1955, he professed a modified form of Kantian philosophy whose starting point was the existence of universal and necessary scientific laws. Those universal and necessary scientific laws from …