Friedman M., Nordmann A. (Eds.) The Kantian Legacy in Nineteenth-Century Science

The MIT Press, 2006. — vi, 370 p. — (Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology). — ISBN: 0-262-06254-2.The papers in this volume originated at an international conference devoted to Kant’s influence on nineteenth-century science and scientific philosophy held at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT in November of 2000. Many of the papers represent substantially revised versions of what was presented there; some of them are entirely new.
The conference was originally conceived as organized around five main focal points of nineteenth-century scientific thought: Naturphilosophie, Fries, Helmholtz, neo-Kantianism, and Poincaré, and the papers published here broadly reflect this organization. Moreover, both the conference and the volume reflect the conviction that the time is ripe for a fruitful collaboration among historians of philosophy, historians of science, and historians of mathematics in developing a richer and more nuanced picture of the Kantian legacy in the nineteenth century and beyond. It is now a commonplace, for example, that the development of modern mathematics, mathematical logic, and the foundations of mathematics can be profitably seen as an evolution “from Kant to Hilbert” (see, e.g., Ewald 1996). It is our conviction, in addition, that the development of modern scientific thought more generally — including the physical sciences, the life sciences, and the relationships between both of these and the mathematical sciences — can also be greatly illuminated when viewed as an evolution from Kant, through Poincaré, to Einstein and the logical empiricists and beyond. Concentrating on the nineteenth century in particular allows us to put aside the seductive, but in the end much too crude, question of whether Kantian philosophical ideas still have relevance in the context of the great conceptual revolutions wrought by twentieth-century science. Our project, rather, is the more complex and subtle tracing of the multiple intellectual transformations that have actually led, step by step, from Kant’s original scientific situation to the new scientific problems of the twentieth century.Editors’ IntroductionKant and Naturphilosophie
Frederick Beiser
Nature Is the Poetry of Mind, or How Schelling Solved Goethe’s Kantian Problems
Robert J. Richards
Kant-Naturphilosophie-Electromagnetism
Michael Friedman
Extending Kant: The Origins and Nature of Jakob Friedrich Fries’s Philosophy of Science
Frederick Gregory
Kant, Fries, and the Expanding Universe of Science
Helmut Pulte
Kant, Helmholtz, and the Meaning of Empiricism
Robert DiSalle
Operationalizing Kant: Manifolds, Models, and Mathematics in Helmholtz’s Theories of Perception
Timothy Lenoir
“The Fact of Science” and Critique of Knowledge: Exact Science as Problem and Resource in Marburg Neo-Kantianism
Alan Richardson
Kantianism and Realism:Alois Riehl (and Moritz Schlick)
Michael Heidelberger
Critical Realism, Critical Idealism, and Critical Common-Sensism: The School and World Philosophies of Riehl, Cohen, and Peirce
Alfred Nordmann
Poincaré’s Circularity Arguments for Mathematical Intuition
Janet Folina
Poincaré-Between Physics and Philosophy
Jeremy Gray
Images and Conventions: Kantianism, Empiricism, and Conventionalism in Hertz’s and Poincaré’s Philosophies of Space and Mechanics
Jesper LützenTrue PDF