Scientific world conception on stage

the Prague meeting of the German physicists and mathematicians

Michael Stöltzner

pp. 73-95

in: Radek Schuster (ed), The Vienna circle in Czechoslovakia, Berlin, Springer, 2020

Abstract

In September 1929, the biennial meeting of German-speaking physicists and mathematicians took place at the German University of Prague. Its opening session featured papers by Philipp Frank, Richard von Mises, and Arnold Sommerfeld that centered on the consequences of the new quantum mechanics for causality and on the role of statistical laws within contemporary physics. Frank and von Mises advocated, more broadly, for a new philosophy that applied scientific methods to philosophical problems and was based on the same empiricist outlook as the sciences themselves. Sommerfeld, instead, rejected any concessions to positivism or pragmatism that implied a less demanding notion of natural law. In contrast to Frank and von Mises, he did not reject traditional metaphysical problems, among them teleology or dualism, as unanswerable pseudo-questions. Looking at the background of the 1929 opening session and some reactions to it, I argue that it provides important insights into how the quest for a scientific world conception fared within the German-speaking scientific community and how it was related to the traditional debates among physicist-philosophers that had found their expression in a plethora of academic addresses.

Cited authors

Frank Philipp

von Mises Richard