The Reign of Relativity: Philosophy in Physics 1915-1925

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Oxford University Press, Jan 13, 2005 - Philosophy - 330 pages
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.
 

Contents

1 Introduction
3
Two Roads from Kant
13
Critical or Empiricist Interpretation of the New Physics?
47
Weyl and Reichenbach
77
Husserl and Weyl
108
6 Weyls Purely Infinitesimal Constitution of Field Physics
145
Structuralism and Transcendental Idealism in Eddington
177
Eddingtons Theory of the Affine Field
218
The Geometrization of Physics and Transcendental Idealism
235
Michael Friedman and the Relativized A Priori
245
Notes
251
References
289
Index
311
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About the author (2005)

Thomas Ryckman received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University in 1986. He has taught philosophy of science at Wesleyan University, The University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. He lives in San Francisco.

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