Degree of Contribution

Lead

Document Type

Book Review

Keywords

Patrick Aidan Heelan, quantum mechanics, Heisenberg, philosophy of perception, observation

Disciplines

History of Philosophy | Logic and Foundations of Mathematics | Philosophy of Science | Quantum Physics

Abstract

The publication of Patrick Aidan Heelan’s The Observable, with forewords from Michel Bitbol, editor Babette Babich and the author himself, offers a timely invitation to reconsider the relation between quantum physics and continental philosophy.

Patrick Heelan does so, as a contemporary of and interlocutor with Werner Heisenberg on these issues, as a physicist himself who trained with leading figures of quantum mechanics (QM), Erwin Schrödinger and Eugene Wigner. Moreover, Heelan highlights Heisenberg’s interest in phenomenology as ‘a friend and frequent visitor of Martin Heidegger’ (55). Written originally in 1970 and unpublished then for reasons Babich explicates in her foreword, the various nuanced layers of this book offer a rich tapestry of interwoven arguments with multifarious appeal. It is stamped with the imprimatur of Heisenberg as an accurate account of his understanding of QM, including his philosophy of science—and as a socio-historical account of the unfolding of the QM debate in terms of the mutually interacting positions of the key historical players, for example, Bohr, Schrödinger, Einstein, Planck, Pauli, Wigner, as well as, most centrally, Heisenberg. The book also serves as a beautifully lucid, yet nuanced, account of quantum theory for the non-specialist reader.

Publication Title

AI & SOCIETY

Article Number

1051

Publication Date

3-3-2021

First Page

1

Last Page

5

ISSN

1435-5655

DOI of Published Version

10.1007/s00146-021-01157-5

Language

English

Version

Published

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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