Description and Deconstruction

Abstract

Questions about Niels Bohr and philosophy quickly — perhaps too quickly — turn into questions about whether or not Bohr was an idealist, a positivist, a transcendentalist, a realist, an anti-realist, an objective anti-realist, an instrumentalist, a phenomenalist and so on. But are these the right quest ions to ask? Such questions arise out of a western philosophical tradition shaped by the deceptively simple verb ‘is’ (or equivalent copulas), a verb which ‘lies’ at the heart of all our propositions, separating and joining subject and object, posing distinction and equivalence at one and the same time. The copula suggests a correspondence between words and world, between subject and object, and the consequent possibility of truth and control, of capturing the present eternally.