Recently, the dominant philosophical paradigm in Western social and political sciences has been criticized by a number of researchers and the necessity of transition to a new – quantum – transdisciplinary paradigm using ideas, concepts and formalism of quantum mechanics has been justified. The author argues that the need for such a transition is due to the fact that the dominant paradigm is based on outdated assumptions and premises of Modern philosophy, which really should be abandoned. It is quantum mechanics that contains the potential for a new philosophy. Classical mechanics had a significant impact on the development of philosophy, particularly on Kant’s critical philosophy, for which it served as the ideal of scientific knowledge. Today, a similar influence is exerted by quantum mechanics. Quantum ideas have also begun to be applied in the field of socio-political thought, particularly in the study of international relations, global politics, and global security. At the same time, the author argues that what many researchers take to be the “quantum paradigm” in the social and political sciences is in fact in many ways not so much an overcoming of the Modern paradigm as a postmodernist radicalization of it. In other words, the alternative they propose turns out to be a pseudo-quantum alternative. It is proposed the conceptual scheme of a contextual quantum realism as a genuine quantum alternative.
Recently, the dominant philosophical paradigm in Western social and political sciences has been criticized by a number of researchers and the necessity of transition to a new – quantum – transdisciplinary paradigm using ideas, concepts and formalism of quantum mechanics has been justified. The author argues that the need for such a transition is due to the fact that the dominant paradigm is based on outdated assumptions and premises of Modern philosophy, which really should be abandoned. It is quantum mechanics that contains the potential for a new philosophy. Classical mechanics had a significant impact on the development of philosophy, particularly on Kant’s critical philosophy, for which it served as the ideal of scientific knowledge. Today, a similar influence is exerted by quantum mechanics. Quantum ideas have also begun to be applied in the field of socio-political thought, particularly in the study of international relations, global politics, and global security. At the same time, the author argues that what many researchers take to be the “quantum paradigm” in the social and political sciences is in fact in many ways not so much an overcoming of the Modern paradigm as a postmodernist radicalization of it. In other words, the alternative they propose turns out to be a pseudo-quantum alternative. It is proposed the conceptual scheme of a contextual quantum realism as a genuine quantum alternative.
Abstract We present the current state of quantum mechanics, the prospects for its development, and the strengthening of its influence on scientific and technological progress. We look at quantum mechanics from four perspectives. The first perspective astonished physicists already with the advent of quantum mechanics—it is (1) a new way of looking at the world. Over the course of a hundred years of development, quantum mechanics has acquired three more perspectives: (2) an independent field of knowledge, (3) a new physical theory, and (4) a radical change in paradigm in the history of human thought. We have named the new paradigm “neo-Copenhagen” to emphasize both its development from and its continuity with the Copenhagen interpretation. We review the problems of quantum mechanics: how experimental research progresses, how basic concepts develop, how practical applications of paradoxical ideas expand. We indicate ways to solve three Ginzburg’s “great” problems. We formulate the features of the neo-Copenhagen paradigm that have already emerged. We present a look at the future of science and technology on the three time scales.
Abstract Quantum physics is being positioned as a new archive for addressing major theoretical problems in the field of international relations. Two of the major proponents of engaging quantum thinking within international relations, James Der Derian and Alexander Wendt, have argued that quantum thinking offers the possibility of a major paradigm shift in the field. Before we determine quantum’s revolutionary potential, the persistent and most pressing question for me is how to position quantum thinking among other kinds of and claims to knowledge. I want to horizontalize where different kinds of knowledge sit within the renewed attention to quantum theory. Rather than just horizontalize or flatten ontology, I want to see what happens when we place scientific and philosophical inquiry in dialogue, and what that conversation does to the authority and value of quantum thinking for the social sciences. The article reconstructs the dialogue between the first generation of quantum physicists and the philosophers who informed them. Rather than make an explicit argument about the philosophical debt of physics, I argue that a broad and highly interdisciplinary set of questions drove both fields well beyond the specific areas of expertise of any of these thinkers. I believe this adventure of ideas followed by physicists, philosophers, and social theorists alike offers us a way forward as the complexity of our contemporary global challenges confront us now with the necessity to think well beyond our disciplinary expertise.
Following the first and second quantum revolutions, quantum information theory has expanded beyond the field of physics into numerous other interdisciplinary areas. This book provides a comprehensive philosophical exploration of quantum mechanics and quantum information. The author examines key concepts such as quantum reality, quantum entanglement, quantum information, the quantum world, quantum computing, and quantum matter, while also extending quantum mechanical theory to encompass phenomenology, hermeneutics, and trans- empirical philosophy. Drawing on Kant’s transcendental idealism and neo- Kantianism, the author introduces the concept of “trans-empirical”— that which transcends experience without abandoning it and which, in fact, enables it. The book skillfully demonstrates how trans- empirical reality and cognition offer valuable analytical frameworks for contemporary quantum philosophy. This work will appeal to scholars and graduate students in various disciplines, including the philosophy of science and technology, analytical philosophy, the philosophy of language, phenomenology, and hermeneutics.
Quantum physics can be understood as an epistemological rupture that transforms the foundations of modern scientific rationality. In contrast to the Newtonian mechanistic worldview that underpinned universalist notions of progress, objectivity, and control, quantum mechanics introduces uncertainty, contextuality, non-locality, and the constitutive role of observation into scientific knowledge. These features destabilize the image of reality as a unified, hierarchically structured, and fully transparent domain, thereby challenging the epistemic premises of Western universalism. At the cultural level, this rupture finds expression in forms of scientific magical realism, where the quantum world appears as strange, paradoxical, elusive and fundamentally ungraspable. Such representations allow the quantum revolution to be interpreted not only as a theoretical breakthrough in physics but as an internal epistemological transformation of modern rationality itself. The issue is not the abandonment of rationality, but the reconfiguration of its foundations: the acknowledgment of uncertainty, contextuality, and the participatory role of the observer as structural features of knowledge. This shift is comparable to the epistemological tensions identified by postcolonial theory in situations where hegemonic discourses encounter forms of knowledge that cannot be reduced to their universalist logic. In this sense, quantum physics emerges as a form of internal epistemological alterity within Western science: while remaining part of its canon, it simultaneously rearticulates its ontological assumptions and limits its claim to constitute the sole normative regime of rationality. Extending quantum logic into social theory enables a shift from mechanistic social ontology toward a quantum social ontology, in which relationality, co-constitution, and process take precedence over fixed entities and linear causality. This transformation unfolds as a form of passive revolution, in the Gramscian sense: a profound ontological reorientation achieved not through the destruction of disciplinary institutions, but through their gradual conceptual reconfiguration. The epistemological outcome of this shift is the pluralization of knowledge and the emergence of a pluriversal onto-epistemological horizon, where scientific rationality becomes compatible with multiple cosmologies and situated ways of knowing. In this sense, the quantum turn opens a pathway toward the decolonization of knowledge and the rethinking of global order beyond universalist epistemic hierarchies.
The present study is concerned with the problem of realism in quantum mechanics. Contrary to the prevailing view that quantum mechanics forces us to abandon the concept of realism and reality, the author attempts to substantiate another standpoint. Quantum objects indeed exist in a different way from classical bodies. Before the act of measurement begins, one cannot attribute any specific properties to the quantum object observed, as they only occur in the course observation. The concept of observation, however, should not be interpreted as the inclusion of subjective traits in the description of nature. Observation records processes in space and time and establishes the fact of transition from the potential to the reality. The potential is described by a wave function, which in its meaning does not fall in the habitual space and time, whereas the actual is described in terms of a reduction of the wave function, i.e. the transition from a range of possible states to the single one, the observed. Whatever has been observed, in contrast, already belongs to ordinary space and time and can be detected. What follows is that, in quantum mechanics, it is the notion of reality which needs to be reconsidered, not the realism as such rejected. A reconsideration of this sort is conducted here within the framework of a double-modus picture of reality including both potential and actual being, where the quantum level of existence is distinguished from the observed modi of being as described by means of classical concepts. Such a scheme can be described in terms of Aristotelian metaphysics (the fact first pointed out by Heisenberg). The act of transition from potential to actual can be accounted for both in the language of Aristotle’s metaphysics and the language of modern science. In traditional metaphysics it is called the 'principle of individuation', while in modern science it is known as the extended Mach principle. It is argued that the development of these ideas leads to the rejection of Cartesian paradigm in which the existence of a material object always means an existence in space and time.