Although the scientific milieu of the first part of the 20th century is marked by the strong influence of neopositivism, prominent physicists such as Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr stressed the necessity to transcend human sensorial cognition in quest for the ultimate sense of things and the source of the ethical values of human conduct. In particular, this comes to the fore in the context of the relations between science and religion. The stance of Werner Heisenberg in regards to this issue reveals his deep philosophical insight with emphasis on the role of the common sense language in the symbolic discourse of the traditional religions. The advent of the new scientific method in the 17th, that revolutionized the antique picture of the world, led to the final breakdown of the adequacy of the common sense language in the scientific description of the physical reality. According to Heisenberg, the relations between science and religion become most visible with the resulting loss of the symbolic religious discourse whereby access to the ethical values is hindered.
Although the scientific milieu of the first part of the 20th century is marked by the strong influence of neopositivism, prominent physicists such as Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr stressed the necessity to transcend human sensorial cognition in quest for the ultimate sense of things and the source of the ethical values of human conduct. In particular, this comes to the fore in the context of the relations between science and religion. The stance of Werner Heisenberg in regards to this issue reveals his deep philosophical insight with emphasis on the role of the common sense language in the symbolic discourse of the traditional religions. The advent of the new scientific method in the 17th, that revolutionized the antique picture of the world, led to the final breakdown of the adequacy of the common sense language in the scientific description of the physical reality. According to Heisenberg, the relations between science and religion become most visible with the resulting loss of the symbolic religious discourse whereby access to the ethical values is hindered.
The article aims at presenting the relationship between science and philosophy based on the works of Werner Heisenberg. It deals with the infl uence of the scientifi c breakthrough on the understanding of physical concepts such as matter, time and causality. It also contains a discussion on the process of creating a new branch of science – quantum mechanics, and shows how the work and views of Heisenberg contributedto it. The relationship between physics and philosophy is presented here with particular emphasis on showing the results of research and philosophical refl ections on the concepts of matter, the philosophy of the language of science, the theory of unifi cation and the fl agship work of Heisenberg: the principle of uncertainty.
The article is devoted to the analysis of the concept of “reality” in the philosophical and scientific works of the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg. It analyzes the Heisenberg’s works on the philosophy of natural science, a significant part of which is devoted to quantum theory and its basic concepts. The author shows that Heisenberg’s thought was formed in parallel with the development of relevant problems among neo-Kantian philosophers (N. Hartmann, B. Nicolescu, etc.) throughout the 20th century. According to the author, many European researchers focus their attention on the scientific side of Heisenberg’s work, that is, on the analysis of his physical argumentation. The philosophical aspects of Heisenberg’s works are mostly studied by Russian philosophers of science. The intellectual vector of Heisenberg’s work was the idea of the need for a new philosophical thinking that goes beyond the scope of rational activity and requires a reconception of the gnoseological categories used as an instrument for the cognition of the reality. It relies on the phenomenological tradition, as well as on the arguments of J.W. von Goethe that theory cannot “capture” reality; it requires a synthesis of “trust in experience” and “intelligent observation” (discretion) to understand it. It is also demonstrated in the article the Heisenberg's attitude to the formation of the language of science and to the comparative studies of the philosophical systems of such thinkers as Plato, Democritus, Aristotle.
Far from regarding physical science as a universal model of human knowledge, Werner Heisenberg relativized the scientificity of natural science, situating this domain of knowledge in a wide range of our modes of experiencing the world. In this paper, with a focus on his critical analysis of the notion of objectivity in quantum theory and other fields, I survey Heisenberg’s view of the world as divided into six distinct areas of reality, including – but not centered on – physical science. I also seek to show how this conception of the structure of reality, specifically of the relation between different areas of reality, is mediated by his mis- or reinterpretation of Bohr’s idea of complementarity.
In PHYSICS AND PHILOSOPHY: The Revolution Modern Science, (1) Werner Heisenberg aims, in not too technical language, to clarify change concept of reality manifesting itself quantum theory. He means to contribute to an articulation of the (not only epistemology) that underlies quantum theory's modified logical patterns. (2) To highly unusual degree, Heisenberg is gripped by sense of responsibility of modern quantum physicist to convey, language immediately intelligible to thinking public, his most serious and far-reaching reflections on metaphysical implications of his scientific work. One may go so far as to say that there is substantial evidence, partly within Physics and Philosophy, that Heisenberg regards such reflections and their public communication as his most important task. Heisenberg is especially apt for this intensely self-conscious contribution to humanity's historical-cultural development because his stature as principal originating architect of quantum at its most fundamental level is complemented by his deployment of an unusually broad and deep erudition and lifelong preoccupation with philosophic and artistic ontology from Anaximander through Kant and Goethe to Heidegger. No thinker has yet appeared who possesses such an authoritative combination of decisively necessary learning quantum physics and historical development of philosophic ontology. Despite flurry of renewed scholarly interest development of Heisenberg's scientific work, (3) and his complex relation to dramatic unfolding of German cultural his time, (4) there has yet to be executed sustained and philosophically critical interpretative commentary on this book that is his crucial philosophical-ontological legacy. Given profound ontological puzzles that continue to attend quantum physics and its implications for humanity's past as well as present and future conception of reality, such critical exegesis of this text is overdue. In what follows I try to extricate central nerve of Heisenberg's sinuously unfolding, dialectical exposition, and process to elucidate its strengths but also its deep ambiguities and perplexities--which express, I believe, fundamental dilemmas that pervade contemporary ontology. I Heisenberg makes inviolability of principle of noncontradiction cornerstone of his discussion. Unlike Aristotle (5) Heisenberg does not wrestle with challenge posed by possible denial of principle. He understands nonmathematical articulation of quantum to escape what would otherwise be devastating contradictions--most obviously contradiction wave/particle character of basic entities described by theory--through Bohr's famous principle of complementarity (which Heisenberg closely associates with von Weizsacker's notion of coexistent states), combined with Heisenberg's own principle of potentia, potentiality, potentialities. (6) II After brief introduction, Heisenberg his second chapter sketches history of quantum theory and process begins to explain what he means by potentia. In 1924 Bohr and his colleagues tried to solve apparent contradiction between picture and particle picture by concept of wave. The electromagnetic were treated not as 'real' waves but as mathematical descriptions of probabilities, every point relevant space, for the absorption (or induced emission) of light quantum by an atom at this point. Later this idea of was applied more effectively to much more abstract mathematical in many-dimensional configuration space that was discovered through researches of Schrodinger. Heisenberg reinterprets this mathematical probability wave ontological tenus, as signaling tendency [Tendenz] for a definite happening [einem bestimmten Geschehen], thus introducing remarkable kind of physical reality, standing middle between possibility and actuality: a quantitative version of old concept of 'dunamis' or 'potentia' philosophy of Aristotle. …
‘Sprache und Wirklichkeit in der modernen Physik’ is the title of a lecture Heisenberg gave in 1960 at the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste. The polemics that had accompanied the establishment of quantum mechanics were over by then and the so-called problems of its foundations had lost much of their initial interest. Einstein had been dead for some years. Right up to the end he had expressed his profound dissatisfaction with a theory which, in his opinion, had something unreasonable about it. With the volume dedicated to him by the community of physicists and philosophers, the long debate between Bohr and Einstein had come to an end. It had been a disappointing conclusion, marked by the reaffirmation of the respective viewpoints of two scientists who by now found great difficulty even in defining a common code of communication. As though seeking to narrow the gap between them, Heisenberg took the opportunity to underline the existence of a common feature in their contributions to 20th century physics. Their discoveries had in fact made it possible to recognize that ‘even the fundamental and most elementary concepts of science, such as space, time, place, velocity, have become problematic and must be re-examined’. The conceptual and cognitive implications of relativity and of quantum mechanics were obviously different but Heisenberg maintained that both theories asked the same question: ‘Does the language we use when we speak of experiments correspond to the artificial language of mathematics which, as we know, describes real relationships correctly; or has it become separated from it so that we must be content with imprecise linguistic formulations and only return to the artificial language of mathematics when we are forced to express ourselves with precision?’.
The innovations to physics introduced by Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr via quantum mechanics presented them with epistemological and metaphysical challenges with which they were perpetually engaged. Among Heisenberg’s innovations are the complex-valued quantum state-transition probability amplitudes, and among Bohr’s the non- trivial role of the measuring environment in the procurement of data. In his article, Arkady Plotnitsky examines the responses of these two natural philosophers to these challenges through the lens of Pythagoreanism in terms of the rational and the irrational. He argues that Bohr’s philosophical stance is of the Reality-without-Realism sort in that Bohr holds quantum reality to be unrepresentable, and that Heisenberg’s is of the Pythagorean-realist sort in that Heisenberg comes to hold reality to be representable, but only by mathematics. Here, I argue that Heisenberg’s later representation of reality can be characterized as neo- Aristotelian because, among other relevant things, he intentionally develops quantum potentiality, which is essential to his late interpretation of the quantum formalism, as a quantification of Aristotle’s potentia.