Ernst Mach’s World Elements: A Study in Natural Philosophy

300 Pages·2003·8.665 MB·English

by  Erik C. Banks (auth.)

ERNST MACH'S WORLD ELEMENTS
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 1980--1997
ROBERT E. BUTTS
Late, Department of Philosophy, University ofWestem Ontario, Canada
Editorial Board
JOHN L. BELL, University ofW estern Ontario
JEFFREY BUB, University ofM aryland
ROBERT CLIFTON, University of Pittsburgh
ROBERT DiSALLE, University of Western Ontario
MICHAEL FRIEDMAN, Indiana University
WILLIAM HARPER, University ofW estern Ontario
CLIFFORD A. HOOKER, University ofN ewcastle
KEITH HUMPHREY, University ofW estern Ontario
AUSONIO MARRAS, University ofWestem Ontario
JORGEN MITTELSTRASS, Universitiit Konstanz
JOHN M. NICHOLAS, University ofW estern Ontario
ITAMARPITOWSKY, Hebrew University
GRAHAM SOLOMON, Wilfrid Laurier University
VOLUME68
ERNST MACH'S
WORLD ELEMENTS
A Study in Natural Philosophy
by
ERIK C. BANKS
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-6444-8 ISBN 978-94-017-0175-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-0175-4
Printed on acid-free paper
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Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2003
SoftcQver reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 2003
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For Michelle Wilson
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE ix
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: THEWA RMELEHRE 209
CHAPTER 14: MACH'S LATE VIEW OF SPACE AND NATURAL
PHILOSOPHY 225
NOTES 249
REFERENCES 279
NAME INDEX 287
SUBJECT INDEX 291
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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
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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
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, 1985.
(WK.) Thiele, Joachim, ed., Wissenschaftliche Kommunikation: Die Korrespondenz
Ernst Machs. Kastellaun: A. Henn, 1978.
WORKSBYERNSTMACH
(C) Compendium der Physik for Mediciner. Wien: Wilhelm Braumilller, 1863.
(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): 227-232.
(DM) "Ober die Definition der Masse" Carls Repertorium fiir Physik und physikalische
Technik, 4, 1868 355-359.
(CE) The History and Root of the Principle of the Conservation of Energy. Translated
by P.E.B. Jourdain, Chicago: Open Court, 1911. First Edition: 1872.
(M) The Science of Mechanics. Sixth English Edition. Translated by Thomas
McCormack, Chicago: Open Court, 1960. First Edition: 1883.
(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,
1959. First Edition: 1886.
(H) Principles of the Theory of Heat. Translated by Thomas McCormack, P.E.B.
Jourdain and A.E. Heath. Dordrecht: D.Reidel, 1986. First Edition: 1886.
(PSL) Popular Scientific Lectures. (1898) Third Edition, Translated by Thomas
McCormack. Chicago: Open Court, 1898.
Xl
(PWV) Popular-wissenschaftliche Vorlesungen Fifth Edition Wien: Bohlau, 1987.
(SG) Space and Geometry. Translated by Thomas McCormack. La Salle, IL: Open
Court, 1906.
(KE) Knowledge and Error. Translated by Thomas McCormack and Paul Foulkes,
Dordrecht D. Reidel, 1976. First Edition: 1905.
(SW) Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien,
naturwissenschaftliche-mathematische Klasse.
SECONDARY LITERATURE
(DL) Blackmore, John, ed., Ernst Mach: A Deeper Look: Documents and New
Perspectives. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992.
(MB) Ratliff, Floyd. Mach Bands. San Francisco: Holden Day, 1965.
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