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

Research Resources

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 Written originally in 1970 and unpublished then for reasons Babich explicates in her foreword, …

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

Research Resources

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 …