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I believe I should start with a kind of opening statement which will make the purpose of this paper clear and its presentation easier to follow. In the first place, it is not going to be a paper on philosophy or methodology of science — at least not in its usual, orthodox sense — but rather a philosophical comment on one particularly significant trend in twentieth-century physics. You may call it an essay in "philosophy of nature", if we understand the term properly. I am fully aware of how unpopular and discredited this term has become; it is now rare to find institutions which still offer courses in "philosophy of nature". It really takes courage to do so and I commend my colleague Robert Cohen for having introduced courses of this kind in the Boston University curriculum. It is not difficult to trace the causes of this unpopularity and I have analyzed them in some of my previous writings. In the first place, the term itself is a translation of the German Naturphilosophie coined by the German idealists in the post-Kantian period, and a lingering disappointment with their speculative and arbitrary constructions comes immediately to mind as soon as the word is mentioned. In truth, we could hardly find another period in which the contrast between sterile and a priori speculations such as those of Schelling and Hegel and the genuine progress in the empirical sciences were more striking; we have only to consider the development of geology, biology, chemistry and of the physics of electricity and magnetism during the same period.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-2123-8_11

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