ERNST MACH'S WORLD ELEMENTS

Transcription

1 ERNST MACH'S WORLD ELEMENTS

2 THE WESTERN ONTARIO SERIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE A SERIES OF BOOKS IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, METHODOLOGY, EPISTEMOLOGY, LOGIC, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, AND RELATED FIELDS Managing Editor WILLIAM DEMOPOULOS Department of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario, Canada Managing Editor ROBERT E. BUTTS Late, Department of Philosophy, University ofwestem Ontario, Canada Editorial Board JOHN L. BELL, University of Western Ontario JEFFREY BUB, University of Maryland ROBERT CLIFTON, University of Pittsburgh ROBERT DiSALLE, University of Western Ontario MICHAEL FRIEDMAN, Indiana University WILLIAM HARPER, University of Western Ontario CLIFFORD A. HOOKER, University of Newcastle KEITH HUMPHREY, University of Western Ontario AUSONIO MARRAS, University ofwestem Ontario JORGEN MITTELSTRASS, Universitiit Konstanz JOHN M. NICHOLAS, University of Western Ontario ITAMARPITOWSKY, Hebrew University GRAHAM SOLOMON, Wilfrid Laurier University VOLUME68

3 ERNST MACH'S WORLD ELEMENTS A Study in Natural Philosophy by ERIK C. BANKS SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA B.V.

4 A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN DOI / ISBN (ebook) Printed on acid-free paper AII Rights Reserved 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dord.recht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2003 SoftcQver reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 2003 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

5 For Michelle Wilson

6 TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 1: THE VIENNESE BACKGROUND 17 CHAPTER 2: A NEW THEORY OF MATTER 27 CHAPTER 3: HERBART'S METAPHYSICS 47 CHAPTER 4: MACH ON SPACE SENSATIONS 71 CHAPTER 5: MACH AND RIEMANN 77 CHAPTER 6: FECHNER AND THE INNER SIDE OF NATURE 91 CHAPTER 7: FROM SENSATIONS TO WORLD ELEMENTS: NEUTRAL MONISM 103 CHAPTER 8: THE ECONOMY OF THOUGHT 123 CHAPTER 9: NEUTRAL MONISM FROM MACH TO RUSSELL 136 CHAPTER 10: POLITICS (AND PHYSICS) IN PRAGUE 162 CHAPTER 11: THE PERPETUAL MOTION PRINCIPLE IN MECHANICS 180 CHAPTER 12: MACH'S DEFINITIONS OF MASS AND INERTIA 193 CHAPTER 13: THEW ARMELEHRE 209 CHAPTER 14: MACH'S LATE VIEW OF SPACE AND NATURAL PHILOSOPHY 225 NOTES 249 REFERENCES 279 NAME INDEX 287 SUBJECT INDEX 291 ix Vll

7 PREFACE Ernst Mach was a physicist, sense-physiologist, and philosopher and, after the death of Helmholtz, probably the last individual to make significant professional contributions to all three areas. Because of his broad training, Mach was also one of the first scientists to suggest that the results of these special disciplines ought to harmonize with one another in a metascientific natural philosophy, in which, for example, the data of psychology would be valued equally with the data of physics. In particular, Mach believed there should not be a gulf between a physical science of objects and motions and the psychological science of sensations and thoughts. In the seventeenth century, dualism had been proposed as a way out of the dilemma, making sensations into subjective, secondary qualities which were caused by interaction with a sensationless world of matter and motion, like that proposed by Galileo and Descartes. Henceforth, the scientist could ignore the quality of experience as such and concentrate on mathematical models of the primary qualities of nature: bulk, number, shape, and motion. By Mach's time, dualism had broken down and led either to idealism or materialism. Berkeley's idealism, for example, proposed that the entire world consisted of sense qualities, either ofhuman beings or of God, who has sensations of objects even when human beings do not. By comparison, in materialism, sensations and mental phenomena had no reality and it was hoped that particles and forces would eventually explain them away. At the beginning of the nineteenth century in Vienna, materialism was at its height. But Mach rejected both of these alternatives. His goal was a natural philosophy that could bring the abstractness and idealization of physics into harmony with the concreteness of sensations. This alternative conception was later called "neutral monism" by Bertrand Russell. Philosophers are familiar with Mach as a forerunner of the Vienna Circle, that group of mid-twentieth century scientist-philosophers that included Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, and others loosely called logical positivists. Positivists were thought to hold to a "verification principle" according to which statements unverifiable in principle were branded "metaphysical" and removed from scientific discussion. It can easily be shown that Mach neither believed in this principle nor did his own physical and philosophical speculations measure up to it. So if the verification principle were the measuring stick, Mach was not a positivist, at least not a logical positivist. I became acquainted with Mach's writings while I was extremely hostile to positivism of any sort, and I read his Analysis of Sensations several times before I could think seriously about it. Indeed, it was really only after considering Mach's lx

8 development in the context of German philosophy and science from Kant, J.F. Herbart, G.T. Fechner, and Johannes Muller that I realized the usual positivist reading of Mach was in error, a result of emphasizing "Mach the positivist philosopher" over Mach the scientist and natural philosopher. Mach began his physics training as a straightforward realist: believing in a world really consisting of matter moving in space and time, independent of human sensory powers. Reading Kant as a fifteen-year-old forced Mach to doubt the application of spatial and temporal concepts to the world beyond the conditions of human perception, and Mach himself began to doubt the Ding an sich or a permanence behind the appearance of matter. In J.F. Herbart's Allgemeine Metaphysik, which he studied as a young man, Mach found an example of a philosophical construction of space and matter out of unextended elementary forces or energies. But it was Mach's own work in psychophysics and the influence of G.T. Fechner that convinced him the real constituents of the world were concrete qualities and functions. It was then but a short step from Fechner and Herbart to his own Elementenlehre. Such was the great axis on which Mach's thought moved: reconciling psychophysics with physics. But whereas Fechner and others had tried to make psychophysics look more like physics, Mach attempted a sense-physiological critique of physical concepts. Mach thought the spatial and temporal form of physical principles made concessions to the human need to visualize events in a kind of sensory continuum, like the visual or auditory fields, which later could be dropped in a more mature science. Mach's historico-conceptual studies of mechanics and thermodynamics were attempts to set the most general and abstract results free from their historical background as well as from visualizable picture-thinking. I would like to thank the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) for a grant that allowed me to work on the Mach Nachlass. I would also like to thank Arnold Koslow, Michael Levin, Joseph Dauben, Rob Deltete, and John Blackmore for comments on various sections, Alice Calaprice for her help copyediting, remaining errors being entirely mine, and Aris Noah, my undergraduate teacher, for sparking my interest in naturalistic philosophy in our discussions of W.V. Quine. I also want to thank my mother, Laurene Buckley, for her unstinting financial support toward my education in times of need. New York, 2002 X

9 FREQUENTLY CITED WORKS ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS AND CORRESPONDENCE (NL 174) Ernst Mach Nachlaft, Deutsches Museum, Munich (AU) Ernst Mach. Blackmore, John and Hentschel, Klaus, eds., Ernst Mach als Auftenseiter. Wien: Wilhelm Braumilller, (WK.) Thiele, Joachim, ed., Wissenschaftliche Kommunikation: Die Korrespondenz Ernst Machs. Kastellaun: A. Henn, WORKSBYERNSTMACH (C) Compendium der Physik for Mediciner. Wien: Wilhelm Braumilller, (V) "Vortriige iiber Psychophysik." Osterreichische Zeitschriftfor praktische Heilkunde 9(1863). (R) "Bemerkungen iiber die Entwicklung der Raumvorstellungen." Fichtes Zeitschrift for Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 49 (1866): (DM) "Ober die Definition der Masse" Carls Repertorium fiir Physik und physikalische Technik, 4, (CE) The History and Root of the Principle of the Conservation of Energy. Translated by P.E.B. Jourdain, Chicago: Open Court, First Edition: (M) The Science of Mechanics. Sixth English Edition. Translated by Thomas McCormack, Chicago: Open Court, First Edition: (AS) The Analysis of Sensations. Translated from the First German edition by C.M. Williams and from the Fifth German edition by Sidney Waterlow. New York: Dover, First Edition: (H) Principles of the Theory of Heat. Translated by Thomas McCormack, P.E.B. Jourdain and A.E. Heath. Dordrecht: D.Reidel, First Edition: (PSL) Popular Scientific Lectures. (1898) Third Edition, Translated by Thomas McCormack. Chicago: Open Court, Xl

10 (PWV) Popular- wissenschaftliche Vorlesungen Fifth Edition Wien: Bohlau, (SG) Space and Geometry. Translated by Thomas McCormack. La Salle, IL: Open Court, (KE) Knowledge and Error. Translated by Thomas McCormack and Paul Foulkes, Dordrecht D. Reidel, First Edition: (SW) Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, naturwissenschaftliche- mathematische Klasse. Wien, SECONDARY LITERATURE (DL) Blackmore, John, ed., Ernst Mach: A Deeper Look: Documents and New Perspectives. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, (MB) Ratliff, Floyd. Mach Bands. San Francisco: Holden Day, xii