This book offers an up-to-date insight into the early philosophical debate on Einsteinian relativity. The essays explore the reception and interpretation of Einstein’s ideas by some of the most important philosophical schools of the time, such as logical positivism (Reichenbach), neo-Kantianism (Cassirer, Natorp), critical realism (Sellars), and radical empiricism (Mach). The book is aimed at physicists and historians of science researching the epistemological implications of the theory of relativity, as well as to scholars in philosophy interested in understanding how leading (...) philosophical figures of the early twentieth century reacted to the relativistic revolution. (shrink)

In this paper, I will survey the “received view” of the interpretation of relativity theory in Natorp and Cassirer. Neo-Kantian and non-neo-Kantian scholars (such as Hentschel or Ferrari) usually distinguish Natorp’s reading from Cassirer’s by virtue of “immunising” and “revising” strategies. “Immunisation” consists of a strict defence of Kantian philosophy, while “revision” pertains to the modification of Kantianism depending on relativity theory. In this respect, I will suggest some arguments that will put things in perspective. In particular, I will show (...) that Natorp’s interpretation is justified considering the state of physical research in 1910. By the same token, I will highlight where Cassirer leverages immunising strategies. However, I will demonstrate that, in contrast to Natorp, the influence of general relativity (GR) is pivotal to Cassirer and it does have an impact on his whole epistemology (and philosophy), implying a highly radical reform of pure intuition in light of general covariance. I will also add that Cassirer may have a bearing on Einstein as to the possibility of reconsidering his former censure of Kantian philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I will deal with the analogy between Cassirer’s interpretation of relativity and his philosophy of culture. As to the structure of the paper, it will be divided into six parts. I will start with a brief introduction, after which I will succinctly outline Cassirer’s reading of Einstein’s theory, and in particular of general covariance. I will then focus on the presentation of his project for a “systematic philosophy” in the last chapter of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and (...) subsequently delve into the lexical references to relativity made in Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. After this, I will tackle Cassirer’s rectorship speech, where relativity and the philosophy of culture are explicitly interwoven, but with the important clarification (already provided in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Philosophy of Symbolic Forms) that not all kinds of knowledge align with de-anthropomorphized objectivity. The final section contains the concluding remarks. (shrink)

_Abstract_: In this paper, I will examine the Goldstein-Cassirer approach to neuropathology to determine its current potential for yielding valuable insights. To this end, I will reconstruct the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of such a standpoint in the first four sections. What will emerge is that it entails a definition of pathology as the loss of balance in the adaption of human beings to the environment, leading to a lack of proclivity to categorical behaviour and symbolic performances. Furthermore, we will (...) see that there are behavioural alterations which are not related to the locus of lesions. In the fifth section, I will compare and contrast the holistic stances with current research in neuropsychology. The sixth section is dedicated to conclusive remarks. _Keywords_: Psychopathology; Neuropathology; Ernst Cassirer; Kurt Goldstein; Holism _ La mente ordinatrice. La concezione di Goldstein e Cassirer della neuropatologia e la sua rilevanza oggi _ _Riassunto_: In questo articolo intendo analizzare l’approccio Goldstein-Cassirer alla neuropatologia per comprendere se esso può rivelarsi ancora utile alla luce delle ricerche attuali. A tal fine, ne ricostruirò le basi filosofiche e teoriche nei primi tre paragrafi. Scopriremo che esso implica una definizione di patologia come perdita di equilibrio nell’adattamento degli esseri umani all’ambiente, a seguito della quale viene a mancare la naturale tendenza verso il “comportamento categoriale” e le prestazioni simboliche. Vedremo, inoltre, che vi sono alterazioni del comportamento non collegabili al sito delle lesioni. Nel quinto paragrafo, metterò a confronto le istanze olistiche con le ricerche contemporanee nel campo della neuropsicologia. Il sesto paragrafo contiene le considerazioni conclusive. _Parole chiave_: Psicopatologia; Neuropatologia; Ernst Cassirer; Kurt Goldstein; Olismo. (shrink)

ERNST CASSIRER AND BIOLOGY: FROM EVOLUTIONISM TO PALEOANTHROPOLOGY AS HUMAN TRANSCENDENTAL SCIENCE In the present paper I will deal with the special epistemological problem of setting the basic conditions of a transcendental science of man in the spirit of Cassirer’s critical philosophy. Bearing in mind this aim, I will particularly analyze the section Cassirer dedicated to the history and epistemology of biology in his Erkenntnisproblem IV, and I will focus, on the one hand, on the emergence of the theory of (...) types, and on the other hand, on the rise of the theory of evolution. In considering that the empirical data we now possess are pushing us towards the refutation of a too continuous concept of evolution, I will try to shed some light on how the modern palaeontology, and not properly the evolutionary theory, could represent the very basis of such a transcendental theory of man. (shrink)

In the following paper, the author will try to test the meaning of the transcendental approach in respect of the inner changes implied by the idea of quantum gravity. He will firstly describe the basic methodological Kant’s aim, viz. the grounding of a meta-science of physics as the a priori corpus of physical knowledge. After that, he will take into account the problematic physical and philosophical relationship between the theory of relativity and the quantum mechanics; in showing how the elementary (...) ontological and epistemological assumptions of experience result to be changed within them, he will also show the further modifications occurred in the development of the loop quantum gravity. He will particularly focus on the tough problem of the relationship space-matter, in order to settle the decisive question about the possibility of keeping a transcendental approach in the light of quantum gravity. He will positively answer by recalling Cassirer’s theory of the invariants of experience, although he will also add some problematic issues arising from the new physical context. (shrink)

Into the Others’ mind. Remarks on the philosophy of geometry from Kant onwards The post-Kantian debate on the philosophy of geometry prevalently revolved around the question whether axioms are synthetic or analytic. In my view, this suggests that even though Kant’s philosophy often appeared as a critical target, it nonetheless provided a general frame of discussion. In this paper, I aim to expand on this and to show that along with this frame, Kant’s agonists inherited the structure of his transcendental (...) argument for the foundation of spatial cognition. After a short introduction, in the second section, I will thus reconstruct Kant’s transcendental claim, by highlighting that the supposition of the existence of extra-terrestrial minds is pivotal to ground the ‘infra-subjective’ character of the intuition of space. In this respect, I will also show that this hypothesis allows us, at least to a certain degree, to lower the importance of the unicity of intuition and thus the apodicticity of Euclidean geometry. In the third section, I will deal with von Helmholtz’s revision of Kantianism and explain that the endorsement of empiricism is nevertheless coupled with an example whose structure is undoubtedly Kantian. In the fourth section, I will dwell upon Poincaré’s reflection on similar examples and present the idea that conventionalism is in resonance with Kant’s infra-subjectivity. The final section contains concluding remarks. (shrink)

The paper surveys the possibility of keeping a neo-Kantian approach in the face of Loop Quantum Gravity. Together with a preliminary analysis of Cassirer’s re-interpretation of Kantian philosophy that allowed him to harmonize the a priori cognitions with the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, it will focus on the distinction between constitutive and regulativea priori. In this way, the paper will suggest that despite Rovelli’s refutation of Kant’s interpretation of space and time, he seems, at least implicitly, to hold (...) to a couple of neo-Kantian assumptions: the usage of constitutivea priori principlessuch as granularity, indeterminism and partially relation, and the claim for functionalism as a rule in ordering the ‘appearances’. (shrink)

In the present paper, the author aims at laying the foundations of a symbolics of technical gesture, according to the thesis that symbolic faculty is another face of the technological one, and that they are both in truth two sides of the same coin. Accordingly, the author suggests to rename the whole dimen-sion as “meta-environmentality”. The analysis is carried out on the basis of a specific comparison between Cassirer’s definition of “animal symbolicum” and its scientific consistence in the light of (...) modern palaeontology. “Animal symbol-icum” is here compared with Leroi-Gourhan’s homo technologicus, and Cassi-rer’s ideas on human identity tested starting from paleoanthropological data. The result of the inquiry lead us to recognize the urgency of integrating Cassi-rer’s argument with the primacy of the technological capacity, but a deep anal-ysis of the characterizing attributes of the latter compels us to uphold the symbolic attitude of the technological dimension. The author then sketches a basic description of the guidelines of a symbolic theory of technology, and tries to show how the basic elements of such an approach were familiar both to Cassirer and Leroi-Gourhan. As a consequence of the whole theory, the author elaborates a chronological analysis of human identity, whose basic result is the determination of the future as main temporal dimen-sion of human acting. (shrink)

This paper examines the deeper philosophical core of Heisenberg’s thought. This core is regarded as a part of the reflection on the ontological problem raised by the modern physics, and, in particular, by the quantum mechanics. Two main aspects of it have been detected: an early representation of the theory-reality problem and the ontological question about the essence and the nature of mathematical knowledge. By highlighting two important and very different Heisenberg’s positions about the latter topic, a general point of (...) view on the whole argument is made clear. (shrink)