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- Title
Physics and the Intelligibility of Nature. A Critique of Meyerson's Scepticism.
- Authors
Espinoza, Miguel
- Abstract
What can be interpreted as scepticism here is Meyerson's twofold observation that many natural phenomena resist physics' reductive identification of phenomena to space and to reversible time, and his important remark that, when reason explains, it does so only by reducing completely the diversity and the change it tried to explain. This amounts to saying, paradoxically, that for physics, in nature nothing actually happens. This is so because, for Meyerson, identity and unity exist only as a priori rational requirements: there is no real identity and unity in natural diversity. Then, in Meyerson's work, the epistemological realist leaning of physics is not based on a realist metaphysics, and this is why in the present essay the analysis of the ideas of the eminent French philosopher gives birth to the suggestion that at least some sceptical properties can be avoided by removing the dualistic metaphysical foundations of his epistemology and by placing it on a more naturalistic and realist metaphysical basis.
- Subjects
CAUSALITY (Physics); MEYERSON, Emile; PHILOSOPHY of physics; SKEPTICISM; IDENTITY (Philosophical concept); METAPHYSICS
- Publication
Teorema, 2012, Vol 31, Issue 1, p75
- ISSN
0210-1602
- Publication type
Article