Intentionality and Symbolic Construction. The Phenomenological Background of Weyl's Philosophy of Physics

Project manager: Wiltsche, Harald

Duration: 01.03.2019 - 31.08.2024

Funded by: FWF (Fund for the Promotion of Scientific Research)

Third-party funded project (§§ 26-28 UG) (ongoing)

 

Project description:

A remarkable characteristic of the history of philosophy in the 20th century is the rupture between analytic and continental philosophy. Although there are increasing voices doubting its philosophical significance, the distinction between "analytic" and "continental" continues to characterize academic philosophy. This is particularly evident in modern philosophy of science: philosophers who do not fit into the established canon of analytic philosophy are even less likely to be considered in philosophy of science than in other philosophical sub-disciplines such as ethics or philosophy of mind.

A basic assumption of the planned research project is that the niche existence of continental philosophy in philosophy of science is not due to its supposed meta-philosophical shortcomings. The absence of continental influences can rather be explained by external factors such as the catastrophic political developments in the first half of the 20th century. In order to confirm this thesis, the planned research project will present a critical reconstruction of a philosophy of science that is at odds with a number of basic assumptions of analytical philosophy and which, for this very reason, has not been able to establish itself as a determining factor in modern philosophy of science. The theory of science in question was developed in the first third of the 20th century by Hermann Weyl (1885-1955).

Although he has gone down in history primarily as one of the most important mathematicians and theoretical physicists of the 20th century, Hermann Weyl deserves increased philosophical attention for several reasons. On the one hand, it is almost impossible to find a thinker of Weyl's stature who has dealt more thoroughly with genuine questions of scientific theory. On the other hand, a closer look at his philosophical work shows that Weyl's thinking corresponds to what, from today's perspective, could be described as a continental alternative to the still dominant analytical philosophy of science.

The planned research project assumes that Weyl's writings contain a number of more or less elaborated ideas on a theory of science that finds its background in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. Accordingly, the main aim of the research project is to identify these ideas, critically evaluate them and develop them into a systematic whole. Ideally, the end result of the project will be to present a genuine phenomenological theory of science that sheds new light on the nature of scientific knowledge.