Thomas Ryckman9780195177176, 0195177177
Universally recognized as bringing about a revolutionary transformation of the notions of space, time, and motion in physics, Einstein’s theory of gravitation, known as ”general relativity,” was also a defining event for 20th century philosophy of science. During the decisive first ten years of the theory’s existence, two main tendencies dominated its philosophical reception. This book is an extended argument that the path actually taken, which became logical empiricist philosophy of science, greatly contributed to the current impasse over realism, whereas new possibilities are opened in revisiting and reviving the spirit of the more sophisticated tendency, a cluster of viewpoints broadly termed transcendental idealism, and furthering its articulation. It also emerges that Einstein, while paying lip service to the emerging philosophy of logical empiricism, ended up siding de facto with the latter tendency. Ryckman’s work speaks to several groups, among them philosophers of science and historians of relativity. Equations are displayed as necessary, but Ryckman gives the non-mathematical reader enough background to understand their occurrence in the context of his wider philosophical project. |
Table of contents :
Contents……Page 12
1. Introduction……Page 16
2. General Covariance and the ‘‘Relativized A Priori’’: Two Roads from Kant……Page 26
3. 1921: ‘‘Critical or Empiricist Interpretation of the New Physics?’’……Page 60
4. Einstein Agonists: Weyl and Reichenbach……Page 90
5. Transcendental-Phenomenological Idealism: Husserl and Weyl……Page 121
6. Weyl’s ‘‘Purely Infinitesimal’’ Constitution of Field Physics……Page 158
7. ‘‘World Building’’: Structuralism and Transcendental Idealism in Eddington……Page 190
8. Geometrizing Physics: Eddington’s Theory of the Affine Field……Page 231
9. Epilogue: The ‘‘Geometrization of Physics’’ and Transcendental Idealism……Page 248
Appendix to Chapter 2: Michael Friedman and the ‘‘Relativized A Priori’’……Page 258
Notes……Page 264
References……Page 302
C……Page 324
E……Page 325
H……Page 326
K……Page 327
P……Page 328
S……Page 329
Y……Page 330 |
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