Abstract
The great influence exerted by Kantianism on 19th century physics can be firstly singled out in the process of mathematization which Kant fostered, in particular in Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (from now on MF) (1786),1 requiring, since its Preface, that chemistry assumed, as a special kind of physics, mathematical clothes in order to become a true science, a science of precision as general physics was already, thus evoking A.L. Lavoisier’s contemporary ‘Newtonian’ reform of chemistry. Secondly, Kant’s influence on physics can also be seen in the unification of physics Kant himself proposed in MF and physical science developed afterwards, that is, since the early forties of the 19th century, and which was dynamical in character. By stressing the role of movements and tensions in matter, Kant in fact paved the way to the affirmation of the energy concept in subsequent 19th century physics. In fact, in MF, he had even suggested to consider all physical matter as only consisting of elementary dynamical ‘Newtonian’ interactions, attractive and repulsive in character (essentially cohesion and impenetrability), among parts of a unique absolute physical space. Thus, he reduced the essence of material substances, deprived of the absolute impenetrability and bulk they were credited with by previous metaphysics, to their dynamical manifestations and their mutual equilibrium, according to mathematical laws expressing global processes rather than local sequences of physical actions as in previous physics of forces.2 In fact, in order to transform this Kantian philosophical intuition into a unitary physical science, just the concept of energy had to be developed, beyond the tendency, dominating in the four early decades of the 19th century, to accept only partial unifications of domains of experience by using mathematics and distinguishing among different forces referring to different forms of experience and experimental data (such as mechanical movements, chemical, optical, electrical, magnetic and heat phenomena).
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Notes
Engl.transl. by J. Ellington (Indianapolis & New York, Library of Liberal Arts, Bobs Merri11,1970).
Cp. L. Pearce Williams, The Origins of Field Theory (Lanham, N. York, London, University Press of America, 1980), ch. 2, pp. 32–43.
Of course, in the negative sense of the First Critique, as unknowable, not in the positive sense of the Second Critique, as supra-sensorial object of our free will, that is as value. See G. Buchdahl, Kant and the Dynamics of Reason (Oxford & Cambridge, Mass., Blackwell, 1992), p. 43.
Cp. L. Pearce Williams,Michael Faraday (London, Chapman & Hall, 1965). But C. Truesdell, in Essays in the History of Mechanics (Berlin, Heidelberg, N. York, Springer Verlag, 1968), pp. 180182, stresses the fact that Faraday, though mathematically illitterate, had a certain mathematical instinct in treating field phenomena as sets and structures, only not yet formalized in algebraic and topological terms, as the appropriate mathematical language had not been yet discovered.
Cp. R.B. Lindsay, Julius Robert Mayer Prophet of Energy (Oxford, New York, Toronto, Pergamon Press, 1973).
Cp. H. von Helmholtz, ‘On the Conservation of Energy: a Physical Memoir’(1847), in Taylor, Scientific Memoirs, (Nat. Phil.), 1853.
Maybe the best exposition of Helmholtz’s physiological translation of Kant’s `transzendentale’ on Lockian lines is `The Facts in Perception’(1878), in R.S.Cohen, Y. Elkana, eds., H. von Helmholtz, Epistemological Writings, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. XXXVII (Dordrecht and Boston, Reidel, 1977), pp. 115–85.
Cp. H. Helmholtz, ‘On Integrals of the Hydrodynamic Equations which express Vortex-Motions’, Phil. Mag. [4], XXXIII (1858).
Cp. H. Helmholtz, ‘Ueber den Ursprung und die Bedeutung der geometrischen Axiome’, in Populaere wissenschaftliche Vortraege, 2 Heft (Braunschweig, 1870).
Cp. especially The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical (New York, 1959).
Cp. especially The Science of Mechanics: a Critical and Historical Account of Its Development (La Salle, Ill., Open Court 1960).
Cp. ibidem, ch. 2, par. 8.
Helmholtz highly praised his former pupil Hertz in his preface to Hertz’s postumous Principles of Mechanics (Engl. ed. New York, Dover, 1956), even appreciating his a priori Kantian ortodox treatment of phenomena, in terms of absolute space and time, continuity of matter and hidden masses, but underlining its lack of precise constructive explanatory hypotheses of detail, that were especially developed by British physicists as Kelvin and Maxwell.
Notwithstanding his formal agreement with Hertz’s elimination of the concept of force as a great simplification in physical explanation, also Mach in The Science of Mechanics quoted, ch.2, par. 9, as Helmholtz already did in his preface to Hertz’s postumous Principles of Mechanics quoted above, holds that the main defect of Hertz’s treatment of particular, gravitational as electromagnetic phenomena, is the excess of apriorism, leading him to apply without reservation and specification an absolute image of physics, in terms of pure masses, to phenomena, at the cost of artifices and exaggerations, which do not duly consider data of fact, as empirical dynamical accelerations, and their most direct confrontation.
Cp. H. Hertz, Electric Waves (N. York, Dover, 1962).
Cp. J.C. Maxwell, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, ch. V (N. York, Dover, 1954).
Cp. S.D’ Agostino, ‘The Physics of the ‘Effects’: a Gate to Atomism’, in D. Hoffmann, F. Bevilacqua and R. H. Stuewer (eds.), The Emergence of Modern Physics (Pavia, 1996), pp. 27–43.
Cp. J.H. Poincaré, The Value of Science (N. York, Dover, 1958), ch. VII—IX.
Cp. J.H. Poincaré, ‘On the Foundations of Geometry’, The Monist, 9 (1898), pp. 1–43.
Cp. J.H. Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis (N. York, Dover, 1952), ch. VI, where he stresses the difference between Hertz’s doubtless logical derivation of hypotheses from principles and their confirmation by facts, and his own only fiduciary, revisible and tentative acceptation of them.
Cp. A. I. Miller, Imagery in Scientific Thought(Cambridge Mass. and London, MIT Press, 1986), ch. 1, ‘Poincaré and Einstein’, which insists on Poincaré’s continuity through local changes in his faith on ether (and electrons).
Cp. A. Einstein, ‘Physics and Reality’(1936), in Essays in Physics (N. York, Philosophical Library, 1936), p. 18.
In the last instance, Einstein refuses to start from particular intuitions and models because he searches for the most general structures of objective reality inside and outside ourselves, in Spinozian sense, not identifiable with peculiar images, but only with the most highly invariantive characters of the whole, conceived in deterministic, symmetric, complete and unitary terms, so enlarging and purifying Kantian heritage in neo-Kantian sense. Cp. ‘Physics and Reality’ quoted above.
The distinction between ‘constructive physics’ and ‘physics of principles’, that is his own, is clearly outlined by Einstein in ‘Time, Space and Gravitation’ (1948), in Out of My Later Years (Phil. Libr. Repr., N. York, 1950).
Cp. S. D’ Agostino, ‘Einstein’s Lifelong Doubts on the Physical Foundations of the General Relativity and Unified Field Theories’, in C. Garola, A. Rossi (eds.), The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. Historical Analysis and Open Questions (Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1995), pp.167–78.
Cp. D. Howard, ‘Nicht Sein Kann Was Nicht Sein Darf’, in A. Miller (ed.), Sixty-Two Years of Uncertainty: Historical, Philosophical and Physical Inquires into the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (N. York, Plenum Press, 1990), pp. 61–112.
Cp. C. Chevalley, ‘Niels Bohr’s words and the Atlantis of Kantianism’, in J. Faye and H.J. Folse (eds.), Niels Bohr and contemporary philosophy (Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1994), pp. 33–55. But, at variance with our interpretation, Chevalley traces back her view of Bohr’s positions to 19th century physicists, such as Helmholtz, Hertz, etc., already attributing them a linguistic conception of principles as metaphors, inspired by Kant’s Critique of Judgement and Goethe, which is indeed incoherent with Helmholtz’s physiological view of a priori and Hertz’s absolute logico-transcendental view of it.
It is just the permanence in Bohr of non-empirical elements in terms of complementary linguistic images of quantum phenomena, contradicting each other according to principles meant as their application rules and in contrast with a purely phenomenistic unification of physics, which made P.K. Feyerabend speak of a ‘positivism of a higher order’ with regard to Bohr’s view in ‘Complementarity’, Supplementary Volume 23 of The Proceedings of Aristotelian Society (1958), pp. 75–104, as still maintaining the necessity of a sort of a priori, though no longer in Kantian terms.
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Rossi, A. (1999). Kantianism and Physics from the 19th to the 20th Century. In: Chiara, M.L.D., Giuntini, R., Laudisa, F. (eds) Language, Quantum, Music. Synthese Library, vol 281. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2043-4_27
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