Abstract
I discuss Seebohm’s fundamental tenet regarding the scope and form of a phenomenological epistemology of natural sciences, particularly physics. I stress, first of all, that the issue is deeper than a simple epistemological approach, taking modern physics simply as a fact. I point out that contemporary physics, particularly quantum mechanics, does not deliver a unified, coherent, and uncontroversial view of Nature. Taking this into account, I argue than the task will be to return to the project of a philosophy of nature, by means of a phenomenological critique of the sense institutions that, in modern times, opened the field of physics and of a mathematical approach to nature. I claim that these original institutions are coming to a point of rupture with quantum physics, given the trend to absorb nature in the mathematical apparatus that is put forth to account for it. At the end, I stress the possibility within the contemporary debates about quantum physics of a realist account of quantum entities that restores the classical sense of nature as a morphological realm that is suited for linear approaches by means of exact essences, but which is not reducible to them.
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Notes
- 1.
This article is an attempt to appraise and develop the theses put forward by Thomas Seebohm in his last, stimulating book titled History as a Science and the System of the Sciences. Particularly, this article deals with chapters 7 and 8 of Seebohm’s book (pages 141–254), which are a discussion of the generative origins of modern natural sciences, especially quantum physics.
- 2.
The interpretation of Husserl’s philosophy of natural sciences as a kind of positivism and instrumentalism was recently submitted to a severe criticism (convincingly, I believe) by Lee Hardy (see Hardy 2013).
- 3.
“Die Naturforscher wuchern mit einem ererbten philosophischen Pfund gewissermaßen als Techniker, sie sind gleichsam zu Ingenieuren der Wissenschaft geworden … Aber als Denker sind sie auf das Stadium der Naivität zurückgefallen.”
- 4.
“Quantum logic is, hence, nothing more and nothing less than a re-formulation of the ontological problems in the level of a formalized modal logic, and not a solution for the problems” (Seebohm 2015, 227).
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Alves, P.M.S. (2020). From the Epistemology of Physics to the Phenomenology of Nature: Some Reflections in the Wake of Seebohm’s Theses. In: Nenon, T. (eds) Thomas Seebohm on the Foundations of the Sciences. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 105. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23661-8_9
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