Blog Ekkehard Friebe

Nachstehend bringe ich eine weitere Studie von Mogens True Wegener (Dänemark):
Quelle: RELATIVITY & COSMOLOGY 
Kommentar:
“These papers contain the reflections of a Danish philosopher of science on basic issues of physics. They represent the British Tradition in relativity and relativistic cosmology as opposed to that of Einstein.”

Zitat:

„A-PRIORISM“ IN POINCARÉ, EDDINGTON & MILNE
Presented at the 1st Internat. Poincaré Conf., 1994, International Academy for the Philosophy of Science.Rev. Version (2010) of Paper Publ. by ACERHP 1996, ‚Philosophia Scientia‘, cahiers special.
Mogens True Wegener, emeritus professor of philosophy, Aarhus University, Danmark

SUMMARY
The merits of Poincaré as one of the greatest mathematicians of all times are globally acknowledged, but the value of his conventionalist theory of science is still greatly underestimated, and his contributions to physics and its philosophy have unjustly fallen into oblivion.

The aim of the present paper is to stress the importance of Poincaré to physical theory and the theory of physics by hailing him as the principal figure in the interplay between classical philosophy and modern cosmology.
= // =
„Nothing of all that which has been set forth about the universe could ever have been said if we had never seen the sun or the starry heavens; but observation of day and night, of months and seasons of the year, of equinox and solstice, has produced our knowledge of numbers, which has conferred on us the notion of time and inspired us to investigate the universe; whence we have derived philosophy, which is the greatest boon ever bestowed on mortal man by the heavens ..

But, in my opinion, the cause and purpose of vision is this: God invented it and entrusted it to us in order that we should observe the orbits of reason in the heavens and use them to correct the circuits of our own thought which are akin to them, though ours be troubled and they unperturbed, so that – when we learned to know them and to compute them rightly according to nature – we could bring order to our own errant circles by imitating those of God which are perfectly regular.“
Plato [22]  

„Reason does not extract its laws from nature, it prescribes them to nature …
In this way, by subsuming all phenomena under its own laws, reason is the source and origin of the general order of nature …“
„Simple, as is the origin of this law (of reciprocal attraction), which relies only on the relationships between spherical surfaces of different radii, nevertheless its consequences are so rich, as regards the variety of their mutual consistencies and uniformities, that not only does it describe all possible trajectories of heavenly bodies by conical sections, but it does also imply relations of such a kind to obtain between these sections, that no other law of gravitation than that depending on the inverse square of the distance can be considered appropriate to a world system.“
Kant [10]  

„Does the harmony the human intelligence thinks it discovers in nature exist outside of this intelligence? No, beyond doubt, a reality completely independent of the mind which conceives it, sees or feels it, is impossible. A world as exterior as that – even if it existed – would for us be forever inaccessible. But what we call objective reality is, in the last analysis, what is common to many thinking beings, and could be common to all. That common part can only be a harmony expressed by mathematical laws. It is this harmony, then, which is the sole objective reality, the only truth we can attain. When I add that the universal harmony of the world is the source of all beauty, it will be understood what prize we should attach to the slow and difficult progress which little by little enables us to know it better.“
Poincaré [24] 

 FROM KANT TO PLATO
The merits of Jules Henri Poincaré as one of the greatest mathematicians of all times are globally acknowledged. But the value of his conventionalist theory of science is still seriously underestimated, partly due to misrepresentation by leading historians, partly due to unfair criticism propagated by important philosophers, and his great contributions to physics as well as to its philosophy have unjustly fallen into oblivion as compared to the overwhelming fame of Albert Einstein.  

In the present paper it is my intention to stress the importance of Poincaré to physical theory and the theory of physics by hailing him as the principal figure in the traditional interplay between classical philosophy and modern cosmology. As an example, I want to install him as the central link in a line of development connecting the main stream of European thought, as represented by the Kantian Critique of Pure Reason, to two seemingly incompatible non-standard cosmologies: viz. that of Arthur Stanley Eddington, and that of Edward Arthur Milne. 

Within the restricted frame of time/space allowed to me at this very special occasion it is of course not advisable for me to dwell at length on historical detail, neither do I feel able to do so without further study. What I want to do is to draw, with coloured brush and sweeping gesture, some very broad lines in the history of scientific ideas. These, as I see it, opens some exciting philosophical perspectives which might in the end help to throw light on the present impasse of cosmology. But in order not to pretend too much I shall close these introductory remarks by reminding you of the obvious fact, that science is always in need of bold new ideas. This is one of the reasons why we should not forget about its history. –  

The story of how Immanuel Kant was disturbed in his dogmatic slumber by the doubts of an eloquent Scotchman is well-known: finally he was forced to confront the scandal of contemporary philosophy. A century earlier, Isaac Newton had won for physics its most brilliant triumph in history; yet philosophy had been unable to account for this unique achievement, let alone to disclose its legitimacy. In spite of Descartes, the ghost of Aristotelianism was still haunting philosophy. But to Kant, at least, it had become clear that the way of abstraction is blocked: true knowledge can never be obtained by the process of successive approximation. Inspired by the feat of Nikolas Koppernigk, the great innovator of medieval astronomy, Kant now set himself the task to effect a Copernican revolution in philosophy.  

In order to further „the safe progress of science“, Kant proposed a distinction between reality-to-us and reality-in-itself, between plain phenomena and true noumena. Of noumena which remain hidden we can know nothing. Of phenomena belonging to the realm of experience, which originate from the joint venture of observation and speculation, or the teamwork of sensation and reflection, we can know everything. The inner nature of reality transcends our inborn intellectual capabilities forever; but apparent nature – the plain surface of reality – remains transparent to our reason. What we must do, in order to obtain absolute and indubitable knowledge, is only to apply those conceptions which distinguish our inborn nature as thinking beings to the manifold of those sensations which are continuously caught in the network which defines the structure of our natural intuition: viz. the framework of time and space. True knowledge of apparent nature, reality-for-us, is then bound to emerge.  

Knowledge of this kind, albeit occasioned by experience, gets its validity and legitimacy from another source, viz. the collaboration of reason and intuition. According to Kant, pure reason can collaborate with pure intuition ahead of any mediation of experience, and the result of this activity is pure knowledge á priori. Knowledge is á priori if it can be constructed by strictly transcendental arguments, i.e., formal arguments which hold good independently of any concrete experience. As regards the á priori argument, given by Kant, to prove the inverse square law of gravitation, it is clear that his claim – astounding as it is – can be sustained on the assumption that gravitational forces can be described in flat vectorial 3-space: his argument is then on a par with that leading to the so-called Olbers‘ paradox. Although, of course, we always have to wait for such arguments to be invented, it is nevertheless interesting to speculate how Kantianism might have been received if – per impossibile – the Euclidean parallel axiom had eventually been proven.  

To Poincaré, the failure of all proofs given hitherto was decisive evidence against the claim of Kant that the structure of space can be demonstrated a priori. Although accepting the possibility of a pure intuition of space, he insisted that such space is devoid of any formal structure, hence definable in negative terms only. This brought him close to the position of Plato who frankly admitted that space – „the uterus of becoming“ – is nothing but an imaginary container, whose dreamlike existence is hard to believe in: formless, and causally neutral, it is next to nothing. According to Descartes, extension is a substantial property, and space is material; but Poincaré rejected the Cartesian aether-hypothesis, just as it had been rejected by Leibniz, and for the very same reason: abstract space is relational, not substantial.

(Zitatende)

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Beste Grüße Ekkehard Friebe