Abstract
In continuing the preceding discussion, reference is made here to a passage from Schrödinger that describes the underlying presupposition of the whole scientific enterprise as traditionally conceived — his account of what he calls, the ‘principle of objectivation’ as set out in his Tamer Lectures for 1956:
By this I mean the thing that is also frequently called the ‘hypothesis of the real world’ around us. I maintain that it amounts to a certain simplification which we adopt in order to master the infinitely intricate problem of nature. Without being aware of it and without being rigorously systematic about it, we exclude the Subject of Cognizance from the domain of nature that we endeavour to understand. We step with our own person back into the part of an onlooker who does not belong to the world, which by this very procedure becomes an objective world.1
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Notes
Schrödinger, Mind and Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958) pp. 37–8.
Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1946) p. 673.
Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können (1783), Schriften (Ak. Ed.) IV, pp. 253–383; trans. Lewis White Beck, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951) p. 6. See below.
Leibniz, Essais de Théodicée sur la Bonté de Dieu, la Liberté de l’Homme et l’Origine du Mal (Amsterdam, 1710). The work, of course, is that which, in a later context, was so remorselessly lampooned by Voltaire in his Candide.
Alexander, H. G. - editor, The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956) Preface, p. vii.
Leibniz, ‘Monadologie’, Opera Philosophica, ed J. E. Erdmann, (Berlin, 1840).
Broad, Leibniz: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), ed. C. Lewy, p. 88.
Cf. in particular, A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Gollancz, 1936). See below.
Whyte, Roger Joseph Boscovich, S.J., F.R.S. (1711–1787): Studies of His Life and Work on the 250th Anniversary of his Birth -ed Whyte, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961) pp. 106, 118, 119.
Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud ( New York: Basic Books, 1960 ) p. 8.
Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht abgefasst (1798), Schriften (Ak. Ed.) VII, pp. 117–333; trans. M. J. Gregor, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Hague: Nijhoff, 1974) p. 135. The work itself is to be seen as Kant’s manual for a highly popular course of lectures which, starting in the mid-1960s, he gave at Königsberg for some thirty years.
Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais sur l’Entendement humain (Amsterdam/ Leipzig, 1765).
F. McEachran, The Life and Philosophy of J. G. Herder (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939) p. 23.
Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais; translated and edited by P. Remnant and J. Bennett, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) p. 54.
Kant, De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis (1770), Schriften (Ak. Ed.) II, pp. 385, 419; translated and introduced by G. B. Kerford and D. E. Walford, Kant: Selected Pre-Critical Writings and Correspondence with Beck ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968 ) pp. 47–92.
Beattie, Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770). Cf. Kant’s castigation of this writer, as an adherent of the Scottish school of ‘Common-sense’ Philosophy. Thus, in the Prolegomena: ‘I should think that Hume might fairly have laid as much claim to common sense as Beattie, and, in addition, to a critical reason (such as the latter did not possess)’. Trans. Beck, op. cit., p. 7.
Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (London: Macmillan, 1923) p. xxix.
Schrödinger, What is Life? The Physical Aspects of the Living Cell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945) p. 31.
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Williams, T.C. (1990). Physical Reality and Philosophical Ideality. In: The Idea of the Miraculous. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20848-7_11
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