Physics versus Philosophy

Modern physics has raised philosophical questions which will scarcely find a complete answer in the framework of the known philosophical systems of the past and present. This essay hopes to serve as preparation for an appropriate answer, by examining some already known philosophical theses which have to do with the questions of physics. It has therefore not a historical but a preparatory-systematic purpose. The physics we shall consider has been limited to quantum mechanics only in order to draw the circle of questions not too broadly in advance; since quantum mechanics is at once the empirically most fully confirmed and the most radical of modern theories, it can also, at the present, teach us most about philosophical problems. The limitation of the philosophical doctrines to be considered, to the system of Kant, is not exclusive. But the inadequacy of the naïve realistic and positivistic views competing with Kant to-day automatically forces the manner of putting the question in the direction in which Kant had started. The answers which Kant gave to his basic questions appear in the light of modern physics neither as true nor false but as ambiguous.

In trying to distinguish by means of our present knowledge between a correct and an incorrect interpretation of the Kantian theses, we acquire a principle for a critique of the Kantian philosophy and at the ame time a point of departure for the further philosophical elaboration of modern physics. It is necessary first of all to summarize briefly the assertions of quantum mechanics. What interests us primarily in this is the question whether quantum mechanics has, as has often been said, given up the perceptibility of the description of nature, and the causal principle. We shall see that both assertions are inexact, and that the decisive point of quantum mechanics consists in the fact that it gives up the 'objectifiability' of natural processes. Finally, we shall consider to what extent final validity can be attributed to the assertions of quantum mechanics from the point of view of physics.

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