Commentary to Part 3: The Space of Sciences

Abstract

It is always exciting to note that one of Gaston Bachelard’s most famous and most surprising slogans, enunciated in 1934, is still followed by researchers today: “science indeed creates philosophy”. In spite of decades of phenomenological, existentialist, sociological, or neo-logical denigration on what is brought to human thought by the scientific genre. An incantatory admiration for science is often heard, in order to better assert its blindness. The four undeniably philosophical articles here united all adopt the same attitude of inquiry, and this might suffice to bring them together. Whether it is to revise the old paradoxes of Zeno on divisibility to which already Aristotle opposed, by trying various hypotheses derived from methods in mathematical measure theory as established in the 20th century beginning with Henri Lebesgue. Or to explore the double meaning of the word “topology” when applied to epistemological problems. And this time making uses of the tools of Einstein’s two theories of relativity , and of course quantum mechanics and Heisenberg’s relations, in order to rethink the relationship between experiment and theory, following Ernst Cassirer’ criticism. Or to reformulate the notion of space.