CEFISES Seminar: Brigitte Falkenbourg, « The German Copenhagen School: From Heisenberg to Mittelstaedt and Scheibe »

Livestream https://youtu.be/TES_fBD7OLQ

Series: MEPHISTO (MEtaphysics and PHIlosophy of Science: Transcendental Orientations)

Speaker: Brigitte Falkenbourg (TU Dortmund)

Title: « The German Copenhagen School: From Heisenberg to Mittelstaedt and Scheibe »

Abstract

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 (Mittelstaedt 1964, 1968, 2009, 2013). 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 (1964, 1973, 1997/99). 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 1994, 2001). 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 (2007). From a systematic point of view, it is particularly interesting to compare Scheibe’s many-faceted theory of reduction (1997/99) and Mittelstaedt’s rational reconstruction of physics (2013).